Israeli education officials as well as several municipal heads on Tuesday sounded alarm bells at what they said amounted to the effective collapse of the education system by the incoming government, days after prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu gave ultra-conservative, anti-LGBT MK Avi Maoz control over a key branch in the education ministry as part of a coalition agreement.
Outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar, mayors, and representatives from civil society groups participated on Tuesday afternoon in an emergency Knesset session called “Stopping the yard sale of the education system,” organized by outgoing Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton.
While the education minister is likely to be a Likud MK, Netanyahu appears to be hoping to delegate its various departments to coalition partners, in what Ganzt has slammed as a “chopping up” of the education ministry. Maoz will control the education ministry’s external programs while the Department of Jewish Culture will be handed over to MK Orit Strock of Religious Zionism. The religious Zionist school system will also be handed to that party.
Control of the Israel Association of Community Centers will be given to Shas head MK Aryeh Deri, which is being viewed by critics as a way for Shas to exert more influence in those towns. The ultra-Orthodox parties are also rumored to have struck a deal with Netanyahu to have control over the ultra-Orthodox education system.
Lapid called Netanyahu’s moves “extortion.”
The incoming coalition members “care so little that they’ve turned our children’s education into yet another shameful scene of insanely dividing the spoils,” he charged.
“Netanyahu is so weak, so dependent on [his negotiating partners], that whoever wanted something immediately received it. Nothing is untouchable in their eyes – not the army, not the rule of law and not the education of the children of Israel,” Lapid said.
Lapid warned “the most extreme and dangerous figures in Israeli society are going to be the most dominant in our children’s education.”
Gantz accused Maoz of being an “anti-educational figure” and lamented the “end of pluralism and the beginning of extremism.”
Michal Tabibian Mizrahi, the Education Ministry’s director of strategy and planning, said the ministry was being “emptied of content.”
Former ministry director-general Michal Cohen warned that “dismantling the Education Ministry means dismantling education.”
“You cannot handle education from seven different offices,” she told the Kan public broadcaster.
Another senior education official said it was like “removing the heart from a body and then keeping it alive on an external machine.”
Likud MK Shlomo Karhi slammed the critics, comparing them to Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Greek Hellenistic king who barred learning Torah or any observance of Judaism, whose defeat is commemorated by the festival of Hanukkah.
“Two thousand and two hundred years ago, Antiochus and his council of ministers sat and thought how to make Israel forget the Torah. They had enormous funding from foreign progressive funds and focused on a number of key issues,” he said. “Two thousand and two hundred years later, history repeats itself. Jewish identity is being wiped out. That’s the method of the left, which has nothing to offer.”
He went on to pledge that there would be more Bible and more Jewish identity in schools.
“The heroic spirit that defeated the progressive spirit 220 years ago, won this time also. More bible, more Jewish history, more Jewish identity. That is what the people choose, and with God’s help that is what will be,” Karhi said.
Netanyahu said it was “a lie” that Maoz would be handed significant authority over education.
“Avi Maoz will only deal with external programs used by the Education Ministry that constitute about one-thousandth of a percent of the overall education budget, and he will report to the prime minister,” Netanyahu said. “The Education Ministry will still determine the curriculum.”
Last week, Maoz said: “There are currently 3,000 educational programs written by progressive, far-left NGOs, funded by foreign foundations and the European Union. Are they there to strengthen the Jewish state? Of course not. They want to make Israel a state like all states. Who will make sure that Jewish identity programs be written instead of ‘state-of-all-its-citizens’ programs? That’s my job.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.