Last Tuesday, when the pullout from Gaza was more or less complete, I was in the Salt Lake City airport, musing about that couple in Kerem Atzmona and their manipulation of their children's images. Gaza was full of protesting kids, young Jews from the West Bank who had smuggled themselves in to make a stand against their oppressors. And who were those oppressors? Other young Jews, in khaki instead of the modest hippie mufti preferred by the protesters.

I was thinking about the way the settlers indoctrinated their children in this permanent political firestorm, and how it wasn't so different from the way my own father had indoctrinated me into Zionism. Just as these thoughts were going through my mind, I found out that because of President Bush's impromptu visit to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, the Salt Lake City airport would be shut down for four hours. The resulting delays meant that my husband, my kids and I were stuck overnight in an Airport Inn. I cursed Bush and his cowardice, raving that if he'd just met with Cindy Sheehan for 15 goddamn minutes he wouldn't have had to schlep all the way to Salt Lake City to prove that he cares about the thousands of American soldiers who have died in Iraq, and we and the rest of vacationing America could have made it home without incident.

In the middle of my selfish, only half-serious tirade, I glanced over at my kids. They were nodding along, their faces twisted in rage. They hate George Bush, loathe him with a passion that would make Michael Moore proud. When my then 3-year-old was learning about Purim last year she very seriously announced, "There are two bad men in the world, Haman and George Bush." (The next month she added King Pharaoh and Donald Rumsfeld to her panoply of evil.) Looking at my children, all of whom spent last fall decked out like miniature John Kerry advance men, I realized that there is a fine line between education and indoctrination. And just like the Gaza and West Bank settlers, just like my father, I have long since leapt across that line.

It is, obviously, a matter of degree. The Gaza family's indoctrination is much more intense than the casual Bush-bashing that goes on in my house. But then, right now the sanctity of my home isn't directly at stake. As angry as I am at those settlers, as disgusted by their use of their children as pawns, listening to my own kids parrot back their disgust for all things Republican, I realized that we are not so different after all. The settlers enlisted their children in the battle for Gaza because they are certain they are right. They feel their children deserve to learn the truth. My children have learned as many adamant truths at my knee. They have learned to blame George Bush and the Republican Party for everything from the war in Iraq to global warming to the vilification of their favorite television shows.

I have no idea what causes a child to rebel, to reject her parents' beliefs as I've come to reject my father's. I don't know why some become, like the teenagers who barricaded themselves behind concertina wire in the West Bank town of Homesh, even more fanatical soldiers in their parents' self-same army of ideology. Perhaps my children will one day pledge their loyalty to the Republican Party. Or perhaps they'll dismiss my liberalism as mild pap, and become anarchists. Either way may well be a reaction to my manipulation, my values. We are all the product of the indoctrination we received at the hands of our parents, even when we are repudiating that ideology. What is certain, however, is that like the Gaza settlers, like my father, like me, my children will do their best to indoctrinate the next generation with their particular dogma. And so it goes.

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