Why Every Young Republican Should Go to Israel

A Personal Journey Through the Jewish State

Benjamin Shrader, Chairman and President

Austin Young Republicans

Introduction

Israel is one of the most talked-about and most argued-over countries in the world. Millions of people have strong opinions about it who have never set foot there, never walked its streets, never heard its sirens, never stood in its churches, and never looked its people in the eye. I recently returned to the United States from Israel, and I came away more convinced than ever that this is not a country that can be honestly understood from headlines alone.

There are some places a person can study from a distance. Israel is not one of them. Israel has to be walked. It has to be smelled. It has to be heard. It has to be felt in the streets of Jerusalem, in the markets, in the sudden vibration of a phone alert, in conversations with soldiers, priests, officials, and ordinary people trying to live normal lives in a nation that has not had the luxury of normalcy for a very long time.

I believe every young Republican should go to Israel. I do not say that because I think travel automatically makes a person wise, and I do not say it because I expect everyone who goes there to come home with precisely my conclusions. I say it because Israel is one of those rare places where experience strips away illusion. It forces you to confront history, faith, danger, memory, nationhood, and the price of survival all at once. If you care about the West, if you care about religion, if you care about civilization, and if you care about who our friends really are, then you should see Israel with your own eyes.

The Holy Land

As a Roman Catholic, one of the greatest privileges of my life was to walk in Jerusalem and visit the holy places. That alone would have made the trip meaningful. There is something difficult to describe about standing where so much of sacred history unfolded, about seeing old stone, narrow streets, and ancient sanctuaries that you have contemplated all your life from thousands of miles away.

I remember the smell of incense. I remember speaking with clerical representatives connected to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I remember the strange and humbling sensation of knowing that what had long been abstract in my imagination had become physical before me. A place stops being merely symbolic when you are standing in it. The Holy Land stopped being an idea and became a reality.

That mattered to me not only as a Christian, but as an American who has watched too many people speak carelessly about the region as if it were just a chessboard. It is not. It is a land layered with memory, devotion, grief, victory, loss, and continuity. You can read about Jerusalem for years, and you should, but no amount of reading can replicate the force of actually being there.

And that is one of the central reasons I believe young Americans should go. Travel to Israel is not only political education. It is civilizational education. It is spiritual education. It is a reminder that the history we inherit is not imaginary. It happened somewhere, and those places still exist.

Life Under Siege

At the same time, Israel is not merely ancient. It is intensely, relentlessly present tense. It is a living country under pressure. It is a nation that conducts ordinary life under extraordinary conditions.

I remember my phone buzzing with Tzofar, the red-alert app used to receive real-time siren notifications in Israel. In the United States, a phone buzz is usually a nuisance. There, it can be a warning. That alone teaches you something that cannot be learned from a panel discussion or a social-media thread. Security in Israel is not an abstraction. It is daily life.

I remember walking from one area to another and feeling how quickly atmosphere and posture could change. I remember seeing what vigilance looks like when it has become habitual. I remember the visible security presence, the rifles carried not as theater but as part of a society that understands danger is real and that readiness is normal.

From what I have observed, that reality changes people. It makes them more serious without making them joyless. It can produce a kind of composure that Americans, who have been sheltered by geography and power for so long, often do not fully understand. Israelis laugh, work, worship, argue, build, and live, but they do so with the knowledge that history has not ended and that enemies still exist.

That is one reason Israel struck me as so different from much of the decadent West. It has not forgotten that survival is a precondition for everything else.

October 7

Then there is October 7. No serious discussion of modern Israel can evade it. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers crossed from Gaza into southern Israel, killed more than 1,200 people, and took 253 hostages. Those bare numbers tell you something, but not enough. They cannot convey the depravity of what happened, the shock of it, or the moral clarity it imposed on many people who had previously wanted to stay at a distance from the conflict.

When I visited the Nova festival site and a nearby kibbutz, I did not encounter October 7 as a slogan. I encountered it as memory, testimony, footage, and grief. I saw uncensored videos. I listened to uncensored audio. I came away convinced that many people speaking glibly about the war still do not grasp the evil of that day.

One image stayed with me in particular: a friendly dog running toward terrorists, tail wagging, as if still expecting human decency from human beings. Instead, it was shot. That moment did not matter because a dog is politically significant. It mattered because it captured something essential about barbarism. A civilization under attack is not always being attacked by a rational adversary acting within civilized moral boundaries. Sometimes it is being attacked by men who delight in desecration.

After what I saw, it became impossible for me to treat October 7 as one more data point in an endless cycle of commentary. From what I have observed, October 7 was not simply another eruption in a long conflict. It was a revelation. It showed what Israel is up against. It showed why Israelis think in terms of survival. And it showed why many of the moral lectures directed at Israel from abroad ring hollow to people who have actually had to bury the dead.

I understand that wars are tragic and that every war produces suffering. I understand that. But I also believe Israel had an unmistakable casus belli after October 7. I believe its right to fight was justified. And I believe that anyone who wants to understand Israeli public life after October 7 must begin by being honest about what happened on that day.

Israeli Society

What surprised me most in Israel was not only the danger. It was the people.

I found Israelis remarkably warm, open, and welcoming. My best friend and I leaned into our Texas identity while we were there, wearing cowboy hats and boots and walking around Tel Aviv as Texans unmistakably tend to do. People ran up to us, smiled, shouted “Texas,” and wanted pictures. There was affection there, not contempt. I have traveled widely, and from what I have observed, few countries are more welcoming to Americans than Israel.

But what impressed me even more than the friendliness was the bond inside the society itself. I saw children playing. I saw elderly people treated with respect. I saw wounded and disabled veterans regarded not as disposable embarrassments but as people who had sacrificed for the nation and therefore belonged fully to it. I saw soldiers in and out of uniform carrying themselves with quiet confidence and ordinary manners.

From what I have observed, military service and shared vulnerability have produced a social bond in Israel that much of the modern West has lost. I do not mean that Israelis are perfect. They are not. They argue, they disagree, and they are as human as anyone else. But I do mean that the country struck me as unusually bound together by sacrifice, memory, and mutual obligation.

That is one reason the usual lazy clichés about Israel so often miss the mark. Israelis did not strike me as decadent colonists or detached ideologues. They struck me as a people who know they could lose everything if they become careless, and who therefore understand citizenship in a way many Westerners no longer do.

In my view, that produces something close to egalitarianism in practice, not because everyone is the same, but because service and danger level distinctions. In a country where so many people have had to defend one another, the idea of who counts changes. That was one of the most powerful things I saw there.

Benjamin Shrader at the Israel Knesset.

The Knesset and Politics

I also had the opportunity to visit the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.[3] That mattered to me because it gave me a chance to see not just the society, but the state.

What struck me most was not that Israeli politicians disagree. Of course they do. Democracies argue. What impressed me was that, from what I observed, many of the disagreements I heard were arguments over means rather than over whether the country itself was worth defending. There was a seriousness to the conversation that I found refreshing.

In too much of the modern West, politics feels theatrical, narcissistic, and detached from national survival. In Israel, politics still feels attached to the existence of the nation. That does not make every politician noble or every decision wise. It does mean that politics operates under the pressure of reality.

That, too, is educational for young Americans. It is good to see what politics looks like in a country that knows history is not over.

Why I Support Israel

I am not Jewish. I do not pretend otherwise. My support for Israel is not a matter of ethnic loyalty. It is a matter of judgment.

From what I have observed, Israel is one of the clearest civilizational allies the United States has anywhere in the world. It is Western in the sense that matters most to me: not because it imitates Europe, but because it combines democracy, national seriousness, religious memory, innovation, military competence, and a determination to remain alive in a hostile region.

I support Israel because I believe it is the right thing to do. I support it because I believe the Jewish state has a right to exist and to defend itself. I support it because, from what I have observed, Israel wants to build, preserve, worship, argue, and live, while many of its enemies define themselves by negation, grievance, and destruction.

I also support Israel because travel there destroyed one of the great lies of modern political discourse: the lie that Israel can be understood as some cartoon villain state if only one strips away enough complexity. The opposite is true. The more I saw, the more convinced I became that Israel’s critics often survive rhetorically by suppressing context, suppressing history, and suppressing the practical meaning of being a small nation surrounded by forces that have repeatedly sought its elimination.

That does not mean Israel is beyond criticism. No state is. It does mean that criticism divorced from moral proportion is propaganda, not seriousness.

My Predictions for America

This is where the essay must move from observation to warning.

Young Americans are drifting away from Israel, and that is not merely my impression. It is visible in the numbers. Pew found in spring 2026 that 60% of U.S. adults held an unfavorable view of Israel and that, among Republicans ages 18 to 49, 57% now viewed Israel unfavorably. Gallup reported in February 2026 that among adults ages 18 to 34, 53% sympathized more with the Palestinians while only 23% sympathized more with the Israelis. Brookings, writing in 2025, likewise argued that support for Israel had continued to deteriorate, especially among young people.

Those are not trivial shifts. They are not passing mood swings. They suggest a generational realignment.

From what I have observed, if current trends continue, America in twenty years may not simply be cooler toward Israel. It may become openly hostile to Israel in major parts of its media, its universities, its corporate institutions, its activist infrastructure, and eventually its politics. I believe many older Americans still assume support for Israel is permanent because it has been normal for most of their lives. I do not think that assumption is safe anymore.

I also believe the battle over Israel’s future relationship with the United States will be fought less by generals than by teachers, journalists, influencers, filmmakers, donors, pastors, professors, and party operatives. This is a war of narrative as much as a war of arms. It is a war over moral framing, vocabulary, imagery, and legitimacy.

That is why I think so many people underestimate the problem. They are looking for tanks and not for algorithms. They are looking for armies and not for institutions. They are looking for one dramatic break when the real change may come gradually, through cultural conditioning and generational replacement.

If current trajectories hold, the danger is not merely that America becomes less enthusiastic about Israel. The danger is that younger Americans come to understand Israel not as an ally under siege, but as a symbol onto which every grievance of the age can be projected. Once that happens, policy follows culture.

A Message to the Jewish Community

To members of the Jewish community, I would say this as plainly as I can: things may be worse than many of you think, especially when it comes to younger generations.

Too many people still imagine that the old postwar consensus will save them, that the memory of the Holocaust by itself will hold the line, or that institutional respectability will be enough to maintain support. From what I have observed, that is not a safe assumption. The ground is shifting. The language is shifting. The instincts of the young are shifting.

I have seen antisemitism on the far left. I have seen it in segments of the populist and dissident right. I have seen people flirt with it as irony, as provocation, as status signaling, and eventually as conviction. That is one reason I believe organizations willing to confront it directly still matter.

The task now is not panic for its own sake. It is mobilization. It is seriousness. It is understanding which claims are jokes and which are not, which slogans are masks and which are declarations, which people can be persuaded and which people are telling you exactly what they mean. The battle for the future will not be won by pretending there are no enemies. It will be won by recognizing them clearly, persuading whom you can, isolating whom you must, and refusing to surrender the cultural field.

Conclusion

I came back from Israel more impressed than I expected to be: impressed by the people, impressed by the resilience, impressed by the seriousness, impressed by the faith, impressed by the social bonds, impressed by the visible love many Israelis have for America, and impressed by the fact that a nation under such pressure still remains so alive.

I believe every young Republican should go to Israel because it is one of the few places left where questions of faith, nationhood, loyalty, survival, memory, and civilization still feel undeniably real. Go walk Jerusalem. Go see the churches. Go speak with soldiers. Go visit the Knesset. Go through the markets. Go talk to people who disagree with one another politically but who still understand that their nation must survive.

Do not outsource your view of Israel to people who have never been there, who do not love it, who do not understand it, or who profit from distorting it. See it yourself. Judge it with your own eyes. And then, if you still have the courage to be honest about what you saw, say so plainly.

Thank you to Andrew and AIEF the American Israeli educational foundation, for this incredible opportunity.

Your friend,

Benjamin, P Shrader