Israel’s Education System Teaches Jewish children to Hate Palestinians

What religious and nationalist indoctrination in schools means for Israel's future

It is a common myth assiduously propagated by Israel’s supporters that whereas Israel inculcates respect in its Education system for Arabs, the same is not true of the Palestinian education system.  A typical example is the article by neo-conservative Elliot Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations entitled Teaching Palestinian Children to Value Terrorism. 

Abrams writes that ‘A new study of Palestinian textbooks finds that Palestinian children are being taught to glorify and value terrorism and violence.’ The assumption behind this is that Palestinian resistance to the Occupation, classified as ‘terrorism’ would not occur but for Palestinians being taught to hate their occupier. Indeed over time Palestinians would come to love the Occupation and the continual theft of their land, the attacks by settlers, the military checkpoints etc.  This is part of the process of normalising the Occupation (which is never called that) and demonising the victims.  It is on a par with the Nial Fergusson/Andrew Roberts view of British history.

There are a few mixed private schools in Israel run by the Max Rayne Foundation.  Hand in Hand Schools can be found in the Galilee, Beer Sheva and Jerusalem.  The Jerusalem school was  the victim of an arson attack in November 2014 by members of the fascist Lehava group, which has not been proscribed or declared a terrorist organisation.  Two brothers received 32 and 38 months.  Sprayed on the walls were slogans such as “There is no coexistence with cancer” and “Kahane was right” 

But this doesn’t of course explain why Israel’s high school students are so racist and right-wing..  Nearly half of Israel's high school students do not believe that Israeli-Arabs are entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel, according to the results of a survey in 2010.  Poll: Half of Israeli High Schoolers Oppose Equal Rights for Arabs 11.3.10.

The same poll revealed that more than half the students would deny Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.  At the same time 48 percent said that they would refuse orders to evacuate outposts and settlements in the Palestinian territories although nearly one-third - 31 percent - said they would refuse military service beyond the Green Line.

Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal, of Tel Aviv’s School of Education was quoted as saying that "Jewish youth have not internalized basic democratic values,"

There was nothing abnormal or erratic about this poll.  Almost exactly the same conclusions were reached in another poll taken six years later which found that nearly half of Jewish Israeli high school students believed that Arabs should not have the right to vote.

The poll, conducted by New Wave Research for the Israel Hayom daily, asked Jewish Israeli high school students in grades 11-12 a variety of questions intended to probe their opinions on current affairs and political identity. Half of Jewish high schoolers say Arabs shouldn’t vote – poll 13.4.16.

Nearly half (48%) of those polled answered “no” to the question: “Do you think Arab Israelis should be represented in the Knesset?”  52% said yes

military values are instilled in Israeli Jewish children from an early age

According to Reuven Harari, the CEO of pollster New Wave, most of the figures in the poll “were not surprising,” as they matched numbers pollsters have found for Israeli adults. Hariri told Army Radio that the research had two important and interconnected findings. First, youths in Israel are more right-wing than their parents. Second, while “the trend around the world is for youth to be more left-wing than their parents, in Israel we are special in that our youth is more to the right of their parents.”

60% of those polled also said they believed medical treatment should not be given to an injured terrorist and 82% said there was no chance at all of achieving a peace deal, while just 18% said an agreement was possible.  In addition 59% of high school students considered themselves right-wing and only 13% identified as left-wing.

But then it’s not altogether surprising. Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset and Balad demanded an investigation into the training sponsored by the Israeli police and the education ministry, which he said “prepares students psychologically to kill Arabs.”

One photo shows a person – most of their body blurred with a black marker – using a paintball gun to fire at cutouts of men and women wearing checkered kuffiyeh headscarves that are associated with Palestinians. See Israeli police teach schoolchildren how to shoot Palestinians.

All this takes place within a segregated education system, one for Jews and another for Arabs.  Arab schools get a fraction, somewhere around a quarter per capita of the funds allocated for Jewish schools. 

Israel's warrior baby

Ha'aretz gave the example of two Jerusalem schools with nearly equal numbers of children, 782 pupils in the Beit Hinuch Jewish High School in western Jerusalem and 783 in the Ras al-Amud Arab boys’ high school in East Jerusalem. Both are municipal high schools, meaning that their budgets come from the municipality and the Education Ministry. The total budget allocated by the city for Beit Hinuch in 2016 is 16.3 million shekels ($4.3 million,) while the Arab school, with the same number of pupils, will be getting only 2.9 million shekels ($766,993).  In other word the Arab high school is receiving only 17%, one sixth, per pupil compared to the Jewish school. The number of teaching positions approved for Beit Hinuch is 70.8, while for Ras al-Amud it is only 21.7. 

There are those propagandists for Israel - the Joan Ryans, Margaret Hodges and Emily Thornberries - who still maintain that Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East'. Segregation and institutionalised discrimination is not, however, compatible with democracy. Except for a handful of mixed private schools Jews and Arab students go to separate schools. Arab Students in Jerusalem Get Less Than Half the Funding of Jewish Counterparts 

Israeli youth relive mock gunbattles

An important article Jewish and Arab pupils talk of unity, but Israel has never been so divided by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian (4.6.16) describes the introduction of a new civics textbook – To Be Citizens in Israel – produced by the Education Ministry, whose Minister is Naftali Bennett a member of the far-Right religious settlers party, Habayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home). Beaumont described how it had been accused of editing out Israeli Arabs and their experiences. He quoted an editorial in Ha’aretz Israel's New Civics Textbook Was Born in Sin and Must Be Opposed

“The book’s message is impossible to mistake: Jewish identity, as expressed in the state’s definition of itself and in the public sphere, takes priority over civic identity. This mainly reflects the views of an orthodox, conservative, rightwing strain of Judaism.

Beaumont wrote that ‘The furore over the book – which superseded one that rightwing parties such as Bennett’s complained was too critical of the state – has not been an isolated incident. In December, Bennett’s ministry removed a book, Dorit Rabinyan’s Borderlife, that depicted a love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, from the curriculum of Israeli secular state schools.

Not one Arab participated in the writing of the civics book.

“The text contains no model of shared life between Jews and Arabs. The Jews’ rights are clear; the Arabs’ place is restricted; and the walls separating them are only raised even higher. The racism that is ripping Israeli society apart receives almost no mention.”

But of course it suits the media here and in the United States to portray Israel’s education system as fostering mutual tolerance unlike the Palestinian education sector which is seen as responsible for ‘terrorism.’

Tony Greenstein

How fascism Is Creeping Into Israel's Education System

Shaul Arieli

Jun 20, 2018 7:40 PM

An Israeli classroom (illustrative). Tomer Appelbaum

If we look at Israel’s education system through the prism of PISA – the Program of International Student Assessment – the situation looks bleak. Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development conducts these exams to check the skills of 15-year-old students the world over in reading, mathematics and science. Consistently, the results for Israel suggest that the percentage of high-school graduates who will find it difficult to integrate into their society and economy is one of the highest among the more than 70 countries in which the PISA surveys are conducted. The achievements of Israel’s teachers, which the test also evaluates, also leave much to be desired.

The situation is even worse, considering that between 2006 and 2016, the local education budget actually grew by 30 billion shekels (about $7 billion) and has continued to increase apace since. But the investment of all those billions resulted in improvements of only another 13 points in the PISA science tests and another 28 points in math section.

The explanation for this is neither new nor surprising. “We need to understand that we are educating students for their future, and not for our past,” says Andreas Schleicher, coordinator of the PISA and in essence the OECD’s “minister of education,” in regard to the low achievements in Israel. As he told Haaretz (Hebrew edition) last month, “Pedagogy in Israel is very traditional and standard. It is not directed toward developing the student’s skills, it does not emphasize creative thinking and problem solving. There is too much rote learning It doesn’t work like that anymore. In the modern world you are not rewarded for what you know, but for what you can do with the knowledge you have accumulated.”

There is nothing new about all this. In 2005, I published an article in the wake of an announcement by a senior Education Ministry official, in which I wrote: “We have been informed that henceforth part of the matriculation grade in Bible will include memorization of verses and reciting them aloud. The goal underlying this decision by the coordinating supervisor of Bible studies is ‘to draw the students close to the Bible and to improve their ability to read texts aloud.’

“How lovely that in the age of information and technology, innovation in the Education Ministry takes the form of placing the emphasis not on the ability to understand a text, nor on critical thinking or even on the sheer ability to find one’s way through the recesses of the Bible, but on the ability of Israeli students to present an appropriate Zionist response to church choirs by chanting a number of selected verses according to biblical cantillation.”

And, continuing: “Judaism’s cultural richness was born from criticism and wonder, from disputes and from daring, and not from memorization and reading aloud It’s essential to create intellectual curiosity.”

We should not be surprised by the politicization of the education system. In September 2016, Education Minister Naftali Bennett chose to declare, at an event saluting the TALI (Hebrew acronym for “enriched Jewish studies”) education fund, that,

“The study of Judaism and excelling in it is more important to me than the study of mathematics and science.” Not for the first time, Bennett also rejected criticism that was leveled at this approach. One such critique was voiced at the time by Rachel Elior, professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “What is most important are studies about human dignity, according to which the sanctity of life is universal and is not conditional on religion and nationality.”

It’s worth recalling that the education clause in the platform of Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi party ignores societal diversity and advocates foisting a religious-Zionist (nationalist) education on all Jewish children. The love of homeland that the party seeks to teach involves annexation of the West Bank, continued rule over another people and the international isolation of Israel until “we accustom the world” to this policy. Its educational model ignores such biblical imperatives as “you shall love the stranger.” It evokes the educational approach about which Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote a searing warning: 

“A person who accepts the opinion that ‘the state,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘the homeland,’ ‘security’ and so forth are the supreme values, and that unconditional loyalty to those values is an absolute and sacred duty, will be capable of perpetrating every abomination for the sake of that sacred interest, without any pangs of conscience.”

Bennett’s approach is reflected in the allocation of resources to nationalist-religious-messianic education, in which, it must be said, the two previous education ministers, Gideon Sa’ar and Shai Piron, were also complicit. According to Education Ministry data, between 2012 and 2016, the ministry increased the per capita budget for students in state-religious high schools by the highest percentage of all the educational streams: Totalling 33,000 shekels (about $9,500) per student per year, the sum allotted was 22 percent higher than that for students in the secular state education system, and 67 percent higher than for students in Arab high schools.

Bennett knows that by shaping the political outlook of the country’s youth it will be possible to influence the political system, and with it Israel’s character and regime, in the years ahead. This insight is shared by all of those who wish to “settle in the hearts,”and promote nationalist and messianic ideas among the larger public.

But the educational disaster currently being experienced by Israeli society runs deeper: It is tainted by signs of fascism. “Anti-intellectualism” has always been a symptom of fascism. The persecution of liberal intellectuals for their supposed betrayal of tradition or of authoritarian ideology was an obligation for the thinkers of the elite in such places as fascist Italy. Discussing this, the poet and author Lea Goldberg noted that intellectuals and creative artists pose a threat to dictatorships and to worldviews that deny human liberty, when they (the artists) teach “humanity to say ‘no’ with bitter derision when the time demands it.”

This, too, was how many perceived the “code of ethics” for university lecturers drawn up last year by philosopher Asa Kasher at Bennett’s request. And MK Tzipi Hotovely, later to become Israel’s deputy foreign minister, wrote on her Facebook page in September 2014 in reference to the creative backbone of Israel’s high-tech industry, the engine of the growth of the country’s economy:

“The refusal of officers in [IDF intelligence unit] 8200 [to serve in the reserves] is a social explosive belt and reflects the moral bankruptcy of the education system in which they grew up. They are not worthy to serve in the world’s most moral army. The chief of staff must start the process of their dismissal immediately.”

Israel’s failure in the PISA literacy tests also attests to the “degeneration of language” that we see in many elected officials. Still, no one even comes close to the minister of culture in this regard. All fascistic textbooks used throughout history have made use of a minimal lexicon and the most basic grammar, with the aim of depleting the tools for critical and complex thinking. In a five-minute speech that then-Likud MK Miri Regev delivered to high-school students while appearing on a panel of politicians in 2012, she asserted that Labor MK Shelly Yacimovich voted for Hadash (the communist, Jewish-Arab party), and activist Stav Shafir (who later became an MK from Labor) was a communist.

In such a culture, we may find it difficult to follow and understand a process that unfolds across many years – until the moment when a particular slice of reality reflects the full force and implications of such a process. This is not the first time the naked truth about Israel’s teachers has been exposed. It happened two years ago, too, in the episode of the survey of teachers regarding the history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Suddenly we were confronted with the gloomy picture: A survey conducted in September 2015 by the newspaper Israel Hayom found that 69 percent of the country’s school teachers do not know what happened on November 29, 1947, and 57 percent do not know what the Green Line is or how it was determined. The material that must be memorized is chosen carefully – the prayer for rain, for example, because according to the Education Ministry this can influence rainfall – but it does not include formative events in the history of Zionism.

There’s nothing accidental about this ignorance concerning issues that determine our fate. It is the result of the fact that in recent years the Education Ministry has been led by figures from the nationalist and messianic-religious camp.

The process that is occurring in the state education system has become exacerbated mainly due to two important trends, which are instrumental in creating the political culture and the greater social culture that exists in the public domain.

The first, and more important, trend guarantees – in the absence of knowledge of Israel’s major milestones – that the school curriculum will not include certain concepts and facts, and outlines of historical processes, that could serve as the basis for a fuller understanding of the history of Zionism and the conflict with the Arabs. It is easier to introduce “historical truths” into this knowledge vacuum and to change them according to various political needs – as seen, for example, in the prime minister’s remarks about the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s supposed responsibility for proposing the Final Solution to Hitler.

The second trend involves the introduction of nationalist, religious and messianic content into the curriculum, which Bennett manages to do clandestinely; it’s easy and convenient when there is no other solid base of knowledge to be contended with. This is a manifestation of the education minister’s main mission, based on his statement that for the sake of the Land of Israel it is necessary to change the people of Israel and the State of Israel. He and his colleagues are now focusing on “settling in people’s hearts,” following a series of traumas deriving from the shattering of messianism on the rocks of reality: the Gaza withdrawal, the evacuation of the illegal Migron and Amona outposts, and the containment of the building momentum in the settlements as a result of international pressure.

This evil wind that is blowing through the country’s education system is in total contradiction to the spirit of the country’s founders. They sought to ensure the future more than to preserve the past – as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, wrote in their 1918 book, “Eretz Yisrael”: “If we wish to determine the borders of the Land of Israel of today, [it is] mainly if we see it not as the preserve of the Jewish past but as the land of the Jewish future.”

Indeed, if these trends are not halted and the process not reversed, Israel will end up realizing the warning of Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, who wrote to Theodor Herzl in August 1902,

“I tell you very frankly that I should view with horror the establishment of a Jewish colony pure and simple. it would be a Ghetto with the prejudices of a Ghetto; it would be a small petty Jewish state, orthodox and illiberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian.”

Rewriting History – First the Holocaust now the Nakba – Netanyahu style

It is illegal to teach about the Nakba in Israel today.  History is what the State says it is.  The word ‘Nakba’ is officially banned from Israeli, including Israeli Arab, textbooks.  By  banning a word, Israeli’s stupid leaders, led by Netanyahu, believe that they can rewrite history itself.  That Israel’s Palestinians will somehow forget about what happened in 1948.  What this is really about is removing knowledge of the Nakba from Israeli Jewish history.

However even the most stupid Police state doesn’t reclassify files that have already been declassified.  The secrets are already out.  They have already been studied.  What kind of mentality is it that believes that by reclosing the archives you can change or rewrite history?

I guess the mind of mentality that can rewrite the history of the holocaust and pretend that it was the Palestinians not Hitler who was responsible – step forward Netanyahu!

Tony Greenstein 

Classified: Politicizing the Nakba in Israel's state archives

Documents that have already been cited in history books are being re-classified in the State Archives.

Israeli troops in Gaza in 1957 when a number of massacres of civilians took place before Israel withdrew - all excised from official memory

Israeli state archive documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified in recent years, according to a recently hired assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Palestinian refugees fleeing to Lebanon in 1948

Shay Hazkani, who was Israel Channel 10′s military correspondent from 2004-8 and will soon complete his doctorate at New York University, discusses the background and politics of the state’s decision to re-classify various documents in an interview for the Ottoman History Podcast.

In the interview, which was recorded in July 2014 (I came across it recently by chance), Hazkani estimates that about one-third of documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified starting from the late 1990s, when the archives were digitized.

Embed from Getty Images

These reclassified documents were used extensively by prominent “new historians” like Benny Morris (“Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem”), Avi Shlaim (“The Iron Wall”), Hillel Cohen (“Good Arabs” and “1929″) and Ilan Pappe (“Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) and cited in their books.

But even though these books certainly exist in the public domain, and they do cite original documents in the Israeli state archives that note orders given to the nascent Israeli army to expel Palestinians during the 1948 war, the government of Israel continues to promote its official narrative — that the Palestinians left of their own accord. Hence the government and, more specifically, the security establishment attempts to control the discourse by re-classifying these documents.

The 25-minute interview is embedded below and well worth your time. Among other things, Hazkani explains that Israel adopted a law in 1955 that specified documents could be kept classified for a maximum of 50 years. But the Mossad, the army and the Shin Bet, which control very large archives, refused to comply with the law. Petitions to declassify specific documents have been brought before the higher courts, with some pending now.

Toward the end of the interview, Hazkani recounts a fascinating anecdote involving his own experience with re-classified documents, this time connected with an incident reported by Joe Sacco in his graphic novel “Footnotes in Gaza.” Sacco traveled to Gaza in 2002 and 2003 to research the book, which was published in 2009. The “footnote” refers to an incident that occurred during the Israeli army’s three-month occupation of Gaza during 1956-7, during the Suez War.

For the book, Sacco interviews several Palestinian eyewitnesses who describe having seen the Israeli army shoot and kill at least 100 civilians out of the hundreds that were rounded up and herded into a schoolyard in Rafah. According to the witnesses, the event took place on November 12, 1956. The details, as drawn and described in Sacco’s book, are quite harrowing, which explains why articles about the book published in Haaretz caused a furore. In the podcast, Hazkani recounts having followed the online discussions and debates about the claims in Sacco’s book.

One blogger, recounts Hazkani, writes in a post about having seen a specific document that confirms some of Sacco’s account. Hazkani happened to be on his way to the archive when he read that post; and since the blogger cited a specific file number, he asked to see it. But when he received the file, it contained a note that indicated the document had been reclassified the previous day — the same day the blogger had published his post.

There is obviously an inherent contradiction in Israeli authorities so clumsily trying to reclassify damning documents that have already been cited by well-known historians, even as it invests so much money and effort in promoting its image abroad as a transparent democracy. Israel is obviously not the only country that tries to shape its image by keeping documents classified for extended periods or even indefinitely. Hazkani mentions colonial archives recently uncovered in Britain, and Turkey’s still-classified archives from the Ottoman era. But Israel’s attempts to redact or classify documents after they have been extensively cited seems counter-productive at best.

1948 no catastrophe says Israel, as term nakba banned from Arab children's textbooks

Israel's education ministry has ordered the removal of the word nakba – Arabic for the "catastrophe" of the 1948 war – from a school textbook for young Arab children, it has been announced.

The decision – which will alter books aimed at eight- and nine-year-old Arab pupils – will be seen as a blunt assertion by Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud-led government of Israel's historical narrative over the Palestinian one.

The term nakba has a similar resonance for Palestinians as the Hebrew word shoah – normally used to describe the Nazi Holocaust – does for Israelis and Jews. Its inclusion in a book for the children of Arabs, who make up about a fifth of the Israeli population, drives at the heart of a polarised debate over what Israelis call their "war of independence": the 1948 conflict which secured the Jewish state after the British left Palestine, and led to the flight of 700,000 Palestinians, most of whom became refugees.

Netanyahu spoke for many Jewish Israelis two years ago when he argued that using the word nakba in Arab schools was tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel.

Palestinians have always maintained that the 1948 refugees were the victims of Israeli "ethnic cleansing". But in recent years a new generation of revisionist Israeli historians has rejected the old official narrative that the Palestinians, supported by the neighbouring Arab states, were responsible for their own misfortune.

Reflecting those changing perceptions, Ehud Olmert, Israel's last prime minister and leader of the centrist Kadima party, referred to Palestinian "suffering" at the Annapolis peace conference in 2007.
Netanyahu's Likud takes a different view. "There is no reason to present the creation of the Israeli state as a catastrophe in an official teaching programme," said the education minister, Gideon Saar.

"The objective of the education system is not to deny the legitimacy of our state, nor promote extremism among Arab-Israelis." There was bitter controversy in 2007 when nakba was introduced into a book for use in Arab schools only, by the then education minister, Yuli Tamir of the centre-left Labour party.

"In no country in the world does an educational curriculum refer to the creation of the country as a 'catastrophe'," Saar told MPs in the Knesset yesterday. "There is a difference between referring to specific tragedies that take place in a war – either against the Jewish or Arab population – as catastrophes, and referring to the creation of the state as a catastrophe."

Arab MP Hana Sweid accused the government of "nakba denial". The follow-up committee for Arab education said: "Palestinian-Arab society in Israel has every right to preserve its collective memory, including in its school curriculums."

Jafar Farrah, director of Mossawa (Equality), an Israeli-Arab advocacy group, told Reuters the decision to excise the term nakba only "complicated the conflict". He called it an attempt to distort the truth and seek confrontation with the country's Arab population.

Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said the decision showed insecurity. "Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident," he said. "We need not be afraid of a word."

Israeli Arab activists have also pledged to carry on marking Nakba Day in the face of planned legislation that would withhold government money from institutions that fund activity deemed detrimental to the state.

These include commemorating the nakba – on the same day as Independence Day – "rejecting Israel's existence as the state of the Jewish people" and supporting an "armed struggle or terrorist acts" against Israel. An initial version proposed by the far-right foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman would have banned all Nakba commemorations and carried sentences of up to three years in prison.

By the book

Japan has long been criticised for toning down aspects of its wartime atrocities in textbooks, particularly the Nanjing massacre and use of sex slaves. Russia has taken up Soviet techniques of airbrushing history, a book being banned two years ago for positing that Vladimir Putin had established an "authoritarian dictatorship". A decade after Nelson Mandela's release from prison, black schoolchildren in South Africa were still studying textbooks that extolled the voortrekkers and offered only minimal explanations of their own history. In Britain it was an exam paper that caused offence when a poem by Carol Ann Duffy containing referencing knife crime was removed from the GCSE syllabus. The Carol Ann Duffy poem began: "Today I am going to kill something. Anything./ I have had enough of being ignored and today/ I am going to play God."

In Israel - the Army has Full Access to Schools

Screaming: An Israeli officer drags five-year-old Wadi'a Maswadeh towards an army vehicle after he threw a stone at soldiers - Five-year-old Palestinian boy dragged away by Israeli soldiers who then bind and blindfold his father because the child threw stones at them 

Contrary to the myths of Israeli hasbara, it is in Israeli schools that the indoctrination of the settler young take place.  Arabs are the baddies in school books.  The terrorist is the Arab.  Army involvement in schools is from kindergarten upwards.  At the same time Israel is doing its best to prevent any independent Palestinian school network in Israel though it has suffered a setback with the attempt to cut the funds of the only independent group of schools, the Christian schools network mainly based around Nazareth.  
Tony Greenstein

Israel’s army and schools work hand in hand, say teachers

Zionist troops attacking Gaza

28 September 2015  Jonathan Cook

Close ties mean Israeli pupils are being raised to be ‘good soldiers’ rather than good citizens

Middle East Eye – 27 September 2015

The task for Israeli pupils: to foil an imminent terror attack on their school. But if they are to succeed, they must first find the clues using key words they have been learning in Arabic.

Arabic lesson plans for Israel’s Jewish schoolchildren have a strange focus.

Students and teachers create signs on June 30, 2015, to cover the racist graffiti spray painted on the walls of one of Israel's few mixed schools, the Hand in Hand in Jerusalem, the night before. (Courtesy: Hand in Hand)

Those matriculating in the language can rarely hold a conversation in Arabic. And almost none of the hundreds of teachers introducing Jewish children to Israel’s second language are native speakers, even though one in five of the population belong to the country’s Palestinian minority.

Israel's army and schools work hand in hand, say teachers

The reason, says Yonatan Mendel, a researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, is that the teaching of Arabic in Israel’s Jewish schools is determined almost exclusively by the needs of the Israeli army.

Mendel’s recent research shows that officers from a military intelligence unit called Telem design much of the Arabic language curriculum. “Its involvement is what might be termed an ‘open secret’ in Israel,” he told MEE.

“The military are part and parcel of the education system. The goal of Arabic teaching is to educate the children to be useful components in the military system, to train them to become intelligence officers.”

Article: Israel's army and schools work hand in hand, say teachers | OpEdNews

Telem is a branch of Unit 8200, dozens of whose officers signed a letter last year revealing that their job was to pry into Palestinians’ sex lives, money troubles and illnesses. The information helped with “political persecution”, “recruiting collaborators” and “driving parts of Palestinian society against itself”, the officers noted.

Israeli military personnel visit Israeli kindergarten. Israel's army and schools work hand ...

Mendel said Arabic was taught “without sentiment”, an aim established in the state’s earliest years.

“The fear was that, if students had a good relationship with the language and saw Arabs as potential friends, they might cross over to the other side and they would be of no use to the Israeli security system. That was the reason the field of Arabic studies was made free of Arabs.”

Officers in classroom

The teaching of Arabic is only one of the ways the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), as the Israeli military is known, reaches into Israeli classrooms, teachers and education experts have told MEE.

And many fear that the situation will only get worse under the new education minister, Naftali Bennett, who heads Jewish Home, the settler movement’s far-right party.

Most Jewish children in Israel are subject to a military draft when they matriculate from high school at the age of 17. Boys usually serve three years, and girls two.

However, the army and the recent rightwing governments of Benjamin Netanyahu have been concerned at the growing numbers who seek exemptions, usually on medical, psychological or religious grounds.

Israeli Defence Forces in schools

Nearly 300 schools have been encouraged to join an IDF-education ministry programme called “Path of Values”, whose official goal is to “strengthen the ties and cooperation between schools and the army”.

In practice, say teachers, it has led to regular visits to schools by army officers as well as reciprocal field trips to military bases for the children, as a way to encourage them to enlist when they finish school.

Although what takes place during visits is rarely publicised, the Israeli media reported in 2011 that on one simulated shooting exercise children had to fire their weapons at targets wearing a keffiyeh, or traditional Arab headdress.

“Militarism is in every aspect of our society, so it is not surprising it is prominent in schools too,” said Amit Shilo, an activist with New Profile, an organisation opposed to the influence of the army on Israeli public life.

“We are taught violence is the first and best solution to every problem, and that it is the way to solve our conflict with our neighbours.”

Fear of being sacked

MEE has had to conceal the identities of the teachers it spoke to, because the education ministry requires pre-approval of any interviews with the media.

Most of the teachers were concerned that they might be sacked if they were seen to be criticising official policy.

All the teachers noted that schools have come under mounting pressure to actively participate in the IDF programme.

Each school is now graded annually by the education ministry not only on its academic excellence but also on the draft rate among pupils and the percentages qualifying for elite units, especially in combat or intelligence roles.

Schools with a high draft rate can qualify for additional funding, said the teachers.

Ofer, a history teacher in the centre of the country, said: “When it comes to the older children, you have to accept as a teacher that the army is going to be inside the school and in your classroom. All the time the students are being prepared for conscription.

“The army is treated as something holy. There is no way to speak against the army at any point.”

Rachel Erhard, an education professor at Tel Aviv University, recently warned that Israel’s schools risked becoming like those of Sparta, the city in ancient Greece that famously trained its children from a young age to be warriors.

Public hounding

There are additional pressures on principals to participate, note teachers.

Zeev Dagani, head teacher of a leading Tel Aviv school who opted out of the programme at its launch in 2010, faced death threats and was called before a parliamentary committee to explain his actions.

The public hounding of teachers who oppose the militarisation of Israel’s education system, or are simply active outside the classroom in opposing the occupation, has continued.

Adam Verete, a Jewish philosophy teacher at a school in Tivon, near Haifa, was sacked last year after he hosted a class debate on whether the IDF could justifiably claim to be the world’s most moral army.

As the new school year started this month, parents and city mayors launched high-profile campaigns against two teachers for their anti-occupation views.

Avital Benshalom, who had just taken up her new post as head of the School of the Arts in Ashkelon, was forced to issue an apology for signing a petition 13 years ago supporting soldiers who refused to serve.

Herzl Schubert, a history teacher, similarly found himself facing a storm of protest after he was filmed taking part in a West Bank demonstration in support of the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh during the summer vacation.

Notably, neither Bennett nor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intervened to support the two teachers’ right to free speech.

Racist depictions

Teachers and education experts who spoke to MEE said such incidents had created a climate of fear that was intended to intimidate other teachers.

Neve, a history teacher at a school near Tel Aviv, said: “Teachers are afraid to speak out. The pressure comes not just from the education ministry but from pupils and parents too. The principals are terrified something bad will happen to the school’s reputation.”

The education ministry declined to respond to the accusations.

Teachers and education experts point to examples of collusion between schools and the IDF in all aspects of the education system.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said her studies of Israeli textbooks showed depictions of Arabs and Palestinians were “racist both verbally and visually”.

“They are necessary to legitimise a Jewish state, the history of massacres of Arabs, discrimination against Palestinian citizens and a lack of human rights in the occupation territories,” she told MEE.

“The aim is to create good soldiers, those who are prepared to torture and kill and still think they are doing the best for the nation.”

Separate studies of maps in textbooks have shown three-quarters do not indicate the Green Line separating Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories, suggesting the whole area accords with the right’s idea of Greater Israel.

Revital, an Arabic language teacher, said the army’s lesson plans were popular with pupils. “I don’t approve of them, but the students like them. They celebrate and laugh when they kill the terrorists.”

Revital said she had been disciplined for speaking her mind in class and was now much more cautious.

“You end up hesitating before saying anything that isn’t what everyone else is saying. I find myself hesitating a lot more than I did 20 years ago. There is a lot more fascism and racism around in the wider society,” she said.

Holocaust studies

Some of the close ties between the IDF and the education system are well known.

The education ministry funds several prestigious schools, such as the Reali in Haifa, whose students combine education with military training as cadets.

Ofer said many senior teachers and principals were recruited directly from the army, when they retired at 45. “They then go on to a second career instilling ‘Zionist values’ into the students,” he said.

But the examples of overtly militarised education tend to overshadow the more subtle engineering of the curriculum of ordinary schools, complain teachers.

There are particular concerns about the emphasis in the curriculum on the Holocaust, including a decision last year to extend mandatory Holocaust studies to all ages, including kindergartens.

Following objections from the small leftwing Mertz party, the then education minister, Shai Piron, instructed kindergartens that soldiers should not bring guns into the classroom to ensure children’s safety.

Meretz legislator Tamar Zandberg, however, observed that uniformed soldiers should not be in kindergartens in the first place.

“People see inserting the army into the educational system as something natural, and it’s time that the educational system internalized the fact that its place is to educate to civic values,” she said.

Neve said the students no longer learnt about human rights or universal values in history classes.

“Now it’s all about Jewish history – and the Holocaust is at the centre of it.

“When we take the children to the deaths camps in Poland, the message is that everyone is against the Jews and we have to fight for our survival. They are filled with fear.

“The conclusion most draw is that, if we had had an army then, the Holocaust could have been stopped and the Jewish people saved.”

Atmosphere of fear

The teachers said an atmosphere of fear and sense of victimhood dominated classrooms and translated into a young generation even more rightwing than their parents.

David, who teaches computer sciences in a Galilee school, said: “You have to watch yourself because the pupils are getting more nationalistic, more religious all the time. The society, the media and the education system are all moving to the right.”

A 2010 survey found that 56 per cent of Jewish pupils believed their fellow Palestinian citizens should be stripped of the vote, and 21 per cent thought it was legitimate to call out “Death to the Arabs”.

Subjects that have become particularly vulnerable to the promotion of military values, according to teachers, are Arabic, history and civics.

Naftali Bennett brought in a new head of civics in July. Asaf Malach is a political ally who believes the Palestinians should not be allowed a state.

A history lesson plan proposed last year, shortly after Israel’s 51-day attack on Gaza that left at least 500 Palestinian children dead, encouraged pupils to be “Jewish fighters”, modelling themselves on the Biblical figure of Joshua.

But Revital said most teachers were not concerned by these developments. “Out of the 100 teachers in my school, maybe two or three think like me. The rest think it’s important the army are in the school.”

Among those is Amit, who teaches Judaism in central Israel. He said: “Inviting soldiers into the classroom is not just about encouraging the students to enlist but for us to talk about the value of solidarity and the contribution every person can make to society.

“Our job is to prepare them for future challenges, and that includes the army. We can’t ignore the reality that we live in a country where there are soldiers everywhere.”

Neve, however, said hopes of ending Israel’s conflicts in the region depended on bringing a more civilian ethos back into schools.

“If our students don’t learn about others’ history, about the Palestinians, then how can they develop empathy for them? Without it, there can be no hope of peace.”