A “woke” bureaucracy runs Israel’s Education Ministry, and even a right-wing Likud minister hasn’t succeeded in shaking its grip, observers tell JNS. The issue surfaced during a meeting of the Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee on May 12.
At the meeting, Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch presented his plan to counter years of decline in Israel’s science and math scores. After Kisch spoke, several speakers cautioned that the Education Ministry was steeped in progressivism, and warned that unless rooted out, this worldview would constitute an impediment to the minister’s goals.
A key concern, according to these critics, is what they say is the ministry’s failure to teach Jewish history and identity, particularly in secular state schools, which account for 56%, or 833,881, of Israel’s Jewish students.
In the United States, progressive ideology focuses on issues of race and gender. In Israel, its most worrying aspect is the way it erodes national identity.
Tal Greenfield, who heads the education department at the Yachin Center, a Jerusalem-based NGO advancing policies rooted in Jewish values and identity, told JNS that Moledet (“Homeland”) studies have undergone a post-Zionist transformation in Israeli schools over the last few decades.
“[A] subject that was at the heart of state-Zionist education and focused on strengthening the historical and emotional connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, while emphasizing values such as settlement, pioneering and national solidarity, has become a subject that teaches exactly the opposite,” said Greenfield.
Schools today adopt a “multi-narrative” approach about “a state of all its citizens” striving for national “neutrality,” she said. This, she said, is a far cry from the state’s first decades when the education system sought “to plant in [children’s] hearts a love for the homeland.”
The multicultural, postmodernist view holds that there is no objective truth, and no culture should be seen as being beneath another, said Greenfield. As a result, teaching Zionism isn’t even a goal.
Zvi Shalem, an independent researcher who addressed the committee, told JNS that radicals are firmly in control of the teacher training colleges and the Education Ministry.
“We’re worried. Israel does not have the margin of error to cope with what we already see in the United States. We cannot afford to trade intellectual rigor and moral coherence for Marxist ideology,” he said.
Shalem said that the “indoctrination” was “coming from the top down. It’s slow. It’s gradual. But it’s just going to increase unless there is more awareness, unless Kisch really changes course.”
Although Kisch has stressed Jewish studies since starting his tenure in January 2023, (At the committee meeting, Kisch said the “two pillars” for the coming year will be scientific education and “strengthening Jewish identity”), observers say the necessary change hasn’t happened.
Yachin Center researcher Yuval Gat stressed to JNS that the issue isn’t the education minister, but the education system. Still, he couldn’t dismiss the minister’s responsibility for allowing Zipora Libman, former president and currently rector of the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts, to be selected as head of a new teacher training committee.
“It’s like putting the cat in charge of the cream,” said Gat. “The minister is putting in charge of teacher training the very person responsible in a very significant way for its degeneration and decline. She pushed to make critical pedagogy and cultural Marxism mandatory courses.”
Critical pedagogy, founded by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, seeks to transform students into “agents of social change.”
Gat also recalled that under Libman’s leadership, in late 2023 the Kibbutzim College refused to eject four female Arab students who identified as Palestinian and expressed online support for Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. The school instead ejected an Israeli student who attempted to have them expelled. (Knesset and public pressure prompted the college to allow him to return after a year and a half. The Arab students continued studying without interference.) There were calls for Libman to resign at the time.
Gat is still optimistic, saying, “There is still time to repair: restore public oversight, demand pedagogical transparency for parents, bring national content back to the center, and free the education system from foreign ideological influences—which do not serve the best interests of our children and work against the values of the people dwelling in Zion.”
According to Shalem, it will be an uphill battle. Aside from ideology, the ministry is simply dysfunctional, he said.
Avrum Tomer, an education researcher at the Kohelet Policy Forum, revealed at the meeting that the only reason it had become known that Israeli science and math scores were in decline was international testing; the Education Ministry hasn’t done internal testing for more than a decade.
“Just so you know, the last test given in science in Israel, an internal test, was in 2014,” he said. “And then suddenly we get reports that the situation is bad. There is no measurement or evaluation here.”
