Rafi Peretz, Israel’s new Education Minister, recently gave his first major television interview. Peretz, a former chief military rabbi and the founder of a military-preparatory academy in the Gaza Strip, belongs to a far-right alliance of parties and is a newcomer to politics. In the interview, Peretz was flushed and visibly nervous. He couldn’t stop smiling.
“Let’s talk about the L.G.B.T. community,” his interviewer, Dana Weiss, said at one point. Peretz was clearly caught off guard. He replied that he respected all people, but that “our Torah teaches us differently.” Weiss asked, “Do you support conversion therapy? Do you believe it’s possible to convert people’s sexual orientation?” By now Peretz’s smile had completely vanished. “I think it’s possible,” he said. “I can tell you I have a deep familiarity with this type of education, and I’ve also done it.” He went on to describe how he had counselled a student. “The objective is that, first of all, he should know himself well,” he said. “And then he will decide.”
Later in the interview, Peretz said that he wanted to “extend Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of Judea and Samaria”—to fully occupy the West Bank—without giving Palestinians any voting rights. It is saying something about how far to the right Israeli society has moved that this comment earned little notice. But Peretz’s embrace of conversion therapy proved too much for mainstream Israelis to stomach. After the interview aired, hundreds protested in front of the government’s Tel Aviv offices, holding signs with Biblical quotes about love and acceptance. Three thousand teachers threatened to strike. Thousands of parents around the country signed a petition stating that Peretz “shouldn’t be a minister of anything.” Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, moved quickly to disavow Peretz’s comments on conversion therapy, calling them “unacceptable.” But he didn’t fire the man he had entrusted with the education of Israel’s children.
Unlike the United States, which enshrined separation of church and state in its Constitution, Israel is defined, in its basic law, as a “Jewish and democratic state”—a muddled term that breeds near-constant battle over its meaning. Since its founding, Israel has had to rely on a series of fragile compromises between its secular leadership and its religious community. A letter known as the status-quo agreement, signed, in 1947, by David Ben-Gurion, who went on to become Israel’s first Prime Minister, guaranteed basic religious tenets, such as observance of Shabbat, while insuring that Israel would not become a Jewish theocracy. Marriage, divorce, and burial have, since the country’s founding, been under the auspices of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. But on matters relating to the work force, military, universities, or public schools, there has been a clear separation between religion and state.
In the past decade, since Netanyahu came into power, Israeli society has undergone a process so transformative that a new Hebrew word had to be brought into use for it: “hadata,” or “religionization.” Manifestations of hadata appear throughout civic life. On some public buses that pass through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, women have been forced to sit in the back, for reasons of “modesty.” In the military, female soldiers are officially given the same opportunities as males, but the presence of just one religious male soldier in a unit can prevent female soldiers from serving there. Such discrimination is often done in the name of supposed inclusiveness: in order to accommodate the strictures of observant Jews, certain adjustments have to be made. Yet those called on to “adjust” are almost always women or members of the L.G.B.T. community. Just this week, Israel's attorney general said that cities could enforce gender segregation at public events, adding that “the justification for the separation is greater if the events are attended by a public that desires to be separated.”
Nowhere have those changes been more pronounced or more influential than in the public-school system, where the values of the Jewish Home Party and its far-right allies have taken hold. The Education Minister controls funding to Israel’s two systems of public schools, a religious system and a non-religious one, as well as its ultra-Orthodox schools, Arab and Druze schools, universities, and colleges. According to a 2017 investigation by the liberal think tank Molad, classes in Jewish education received a hundred and nineteen times more funding than those having to do with democracy or coexistence. Whereas schools used to promote a pluralistic approach to Judaism, with weight given to the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements, much of the curriculum these days is being taught through the narrow prism of religious orthodoxy. And the emphasis on Jewish studies insures that other content is pushed out. Naftali Bennett, the former leader of the Jewish Home Party and the Education Minister before Peretz, said as much, in 2016: “Learning Judaism and excelling in it is more important, in my opinion, than learning math or science.”
Religious organizations have likewise mushroomed in the country in recent years, a result of generous state budgets that increased with time—more than doubling between 2007 and 2017. Representatives of these organizations have taken to teaching classes—often for free—in the school system, an offer that is too tempting for many administrators to pass up. “It started with, ‘Let us teach them the Jewish holidays, because you don’t know anything about it,’ ” Ram Vromen, a Tel Aviv businessman and the founder of a nonprofit group called Secular Forum, which tracks religious content in public schools, told me. “It quickly escalated to them teaching bar-mitzvah-preparation classes, classes in family values, and even leading discussions about the assassination of [the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin.”
Vromen started the secular forum in 2011, and focussed on the school system after he saw a handout that was given to his daughter in her third-grade reading-comprehension class. “It described a guy called Suleiman who is Jewish and living in some Arab city,” Vromen told me. A pogrom is about to take place just before Shabbat and everyone decides to flee. Nobody stops for Shabbat except for Suleiman and his family, “who are very observant and decide that honoring the Shabbat is more important.” Those who continue to flee are later massacred, and only Suleiman and his family are spared, because of their religious fervor. “Then there were questions like, ‘How do you observe the Shabbat in your own home?’ ” Vromen recalled. Among the accounts collected by Vromen’s group is a science textbook that includes a prayer for rain.
“You can’t examine these cases individually,” Vromen said. “You have to look at them as a whole. And when you do you see that there’s a clear attempt to change the face and character of Israeli society.” There was a father who reported that his six-year-old daughter’s preschool had taken a trip to a synagogue and received fliers that read, “the people of Israel must study the Torah or else they don’t feel truly alive.” There was a mother whose eighth-grade daughter’s homework included the imperative to “Spell out nineteen times ‘Baruch Ata Adonai’ ”—the beginning of a Jewish blessing. Religious content, it turned out, ran deeper than that. “Learning history now matters only inasmuch as it relates to Jewish history,” Vromen said. “So that, if the First World War has no real connection to the Jewish people, they barely teach it.”
In 2017, a video of a ninth-grade student named Hilli from Tel Aviv made headlines. In it, Hilli addresses the “Dear Education Minister,” Bennett, with a confidence that belies her age. She recounts sitting in a class on Israeli culture when the teacher began describing the life paths of Israeli men and women. “A man’s path begins with a bris, through school, bar mitzvah, Army, university, marriage, and children,” Hilli quotes her teacher as saying. And a woman’s? “School, Army, marriage and children,” she says. Women, Hilli is left to conclude, “apparently skip university, because it’s more important to change diapers and make lunch.” She says, “As a secular girl, the education system simply erases me.”
When I was a student in Jerusalem, in the late nineteen-eighties and nineties, we celebrated the Jewish holidays in school, but no teacher asked us how, or if, we observed them at home. We welcomed the Shabbat with song but not with prayer, and certainly not with the full ritual of candle-lighting, Kiddush, and head cover that has become the norm across (nonreligious) kindergartens all over the country. There was a sense that Jewish culture contained a multitude of interpretations, with no one inherently better than the other, and that schools were there to provide anchor, not judgment.
Yael (Yuli) Tamir, a former Labor Party lawmaker, was the last liberal Education Minister, serving between 2006 and 2009. She told me that during her term there had already been pressure from the religious right to have a greater say in the way that the nonreligious public-school system was run. “There isn’t a country in the world that doesn’t want to teach some kind of cultural heritage,” she said. “But the question is when that turns into indoctrination.”
Tamir said that she fought to preserve the nonreligious system as distinct from the religious one. It was important to her that students learn about the Palestinian nakba (“catastrophe”), for example, when reading about Israel’s War of Independence, and that they be able to grapple intellectually with different, and at times contradictory, narratives. “The nonreligious system takes as a paradigm Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic country, with all of the complexities involved,” she said. “The religious system, on the other hand, is faith-based, and argues that we’re in this country because of God. It’s seemingly semantic—they’re not throwing anyone in jail; they’re not enforcing burkas on anyone—but the distance between that and theocracy is small, and getting smaller.”
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