‘Israel’s educators have failed to combat racism’

Comptroller Report is a ‘warning sign,’ says MK Elharar

“The State of Israel is not doing enough to uproot the grave phenomena of racism and hate” in society, State Comptroller Joseph Shapira wrote on Thursday in his report on the issue.

Shapira said the Education Ministry must give far more attention to the issue, in particular to combat racism among the country’s “youth and in order to promote coexistence.

“The history of the Jewish nation commands us to remember each day the terrible results of racism and of hating the other,” he explained.

The report said that the nation must learn the lessons of the past to prevent “wild devastation” from consuming “all that is good,” since “there is no guarantee that the bushes of racism will not turn” a society which once emphasized its humanity and compassion into a “forest of chaos.”

President Reuven Rivlin and MK Karin Elharar (Yesh Atid), chairwoman of the Knesset State Control Committee, were presented with the report in a ceremony at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem earlier on Thursday.

Until now, said Rivlin, Israel’s greatest challenge had been security. But the prevention of racism and hatred has become one of the country’s most acute and strategic problems.

Rivlin expressed the hope that the government will make this a top priority. Almost 400 schools have already held joint meetings, where students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds come together, he said.

What concerned him most was this: “If Jews are taught that Arabs are evil, and Arabs are taught that Jews are evil, we will never be able to live together.”

Elharar said, “The eradication of racism is one of the significant challenges facing the State of Israel as of 2016. We have witnessed too many instances of violence on the backdrop of racism, disparities and discrimination that stem from a feeling of

alienation among many population groups in the country.”

The Comptroller’s Report presented a “significant warning sign” for the Education Ministry and should serve as a guiding light for other ministries to follow suit and address the issue of racism, she said.

We cannot not neglect the issue, because if we wait until it becomes too late, “the erosion of the already delicate fabric of Israeli society will be irreversible,” Elharar said.

Shapira warned that in recent years, extreme racist statements that were once relegated to the outer regions of public discourse have become more common, empowered by social media’s ability to give extremists a platform for quickly and widely disseminating their ideas.

The state has many tools for fighting racism, the first of which is education, the comptroller said.

His report reviews the Education Ministry’s actions in combating racism from March to August 2015, and finds that it has failed to use education as a forum for building bridges between the disparate sectors of society.

The report outlined six main fault lines of intolerance: relations between Jews and Arabs; between religious and secular Jews; between immigrants and veteran citizens; between those living in the center of the country and those living in the periphery; relating to the disabled; and relating to gays and lesbians. The report also gave examples of racism against Ethiopian Israelis.

The report recognizes that the Education Ministry set fighting racism as a primary goal in summer 2014, after various racist incidents in connection with the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip (Operation Protective Edge), but says that these steps fell far short of the pedagogical, organizational, budgetary and operational steps necessary to have a real impact.

In its section on recommendations for change, the report notes that the Education Ministry adopted the recommendations of a special task force (the Kremnitzer Report), but did not implement its central aspects, nor did it set up a system for evaluating whether it has reached benchmarks on the issue.

Curricula related to coexistence and tolerance either have not been used at all by teachers, or have been used half-heartedly and without integrating the ideas with the immediate local racist phenomena present in the particular classes where the curriculum is presented.

Where coexistence and tolerance are taught, they are not integrated into the civics and history studies where they would be most relevant and are not part of any of standard informal school programming. Also, the absence of a high school exit exam on the issue marks it as less important for both teachers and students.

NGOs which the Education Ministry has employed to deal with some of these issues are not being overseen to chart their progress or to ensure they are working on the issue with consistency.

The Education Ministry responded to the report in a statement: “The Education Ministry considers education for democracy, coexistence and the fight against racism as a central value, and special emphasis is placed on this issue as part of the strategic plan of the ministry.

“As part of this framework a comprehensive work plan was defined that will require all divisions to incorporate assignments and performance measures. The ministry operates a civics education headquarters that coordinates education toward tolerance and coexistence, as well as education against racism.”

The ministry said that promoting tolerance and preventing racism was chosen as one of its central strategic goals for 2016-2019. These goals include holding meetings between pupils from different sectors, and in the 2015/16 academic year some 35,000 pupils took part in activities promoting coexistence.

Eliyahu Kamisher contributed to this report. because the plaque stated how he devoted his life to promoting kindness and compassion and understanding and peace, but because they put a wall up next to it where children post reports about acts of kindness they have done,” he said.

“I was standing there crying with the principal, and it was a tribute in that we left Glastonbury 32 years ago, and there were still teachers, parents and former students who made this happen because they remembered how he affected them, and they loved him.”

The school also built a section in its library devoted to books on kindness, and instituted a reading program about kindness to honor Lakin’s memory, which Avni said his father would have been deeply moved by.

“It’s imperative that terrorism victims speak about the legacies of those killed, so others can learn about it,” he said.

“And a couple things that I think we can learn from the attack in which my father was murdered, and his legacy, is that terrorism affects everybody, and by promoting his image, people who have not been directly impacted by terror can understand the pain and scope of the problem.”

To that end, Avni – who has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, and several other publications about the devastating impact of incitement and terrorism – said he is now dedicated to addressing “the juxtaposition of educating toward love, or educating toward hate.”

“My father educated toward love and understanding, and education has a ripple effect – he affected thousands of people, and they in turn, affected thousands of people,” he said. “But the opposite is also true, and this is critical to understanding that incitement to hatred and violence creates a motivation toward terrorism.”

Lamenting that his father’s killer, who was shot dead by police, has been elevated to hero status in Palestinian society – which has named schools, sporting events, book-reading programs, and summer camps after him – Avni said the ongoing glorification campaigns of terrorists promoted by the PA must be addressed through countermeasures.

“There is a whole generation of Palestinian children being educated to hate and carry out terrorism,” he said. “In order to deal with the root causes of terrorism, we need to promote education toward love and coexistence, and how we can stop education toward violence and hate.”

While conceding that changing Palestinian schools’ curricula and its society’s ethos will take many years of intervention and reform, Avni said that an immediate measure that can be taken is preventing incitement on the Internet.

“Terrorism is growing exponentially around the world, and is not just an Israeli phenomenon anymore,” he said. “And it’s only going to grow if we don’t slow it down.”

Noting that radical Islamist incitement is routinely broadcast across the globe to millions of impressionable youth via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and innumerable other social media platforms, Avni presented a bill to the Knesset in July to outlaw such incitement.

“These ideas are being spread in a massive way, and the only way to stop this is at the source,” he said, adding that a reenactment video glorifying his father’s murder uploaded by Hamas has been viewed millions of times.

“When people started complaining about [child] pornography on Facebook years ago, Facebook ignored them – until they got a call from Toys R Us saying they would stop advertising if they don’t deal with it. A couple days later, the board had a meeting about it and within a week there was no more pornography on Facebook.”

“Now,” he continued, “if you post a pornographic image of a child on Facebook, within a matter of minutes your account will be blocked forever, and within hours the information will be passed to the FBI, which will open an investigation.”

The same model, Anvi said, needs to be applied to deadly incitement.

Citing financial losses as the bottom line in affecting such change, Avni said he helped author the Lakin bill, awaiting Knesset approval, which would enact prohibitive fines against social media companies for every instance of incitement to terrorism on their sites, until they are removed.

“What we decided to do was create a pressure system to bring Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to a point where they have no choice to self-regulate,” he said.

Although it will take several more hearings to get the law passed, Avni is hoping that it will one day continue to make Israel an international leader in counterterrorism measures.

For now, asked what he would say to his father if he could see him one more time, Avni paused thoughtfully.

“In addition to the obvious, which is I love you and I miss you, I would say: Thank you for explaining to me the power of education,” he said. “He understood it his whole life, and I didn’t understand it until he was murdered.”

Avni added, “And when I saw the outpouring from his students who said he changed their lives, I understood the power of education, and that if you teach positive things like love and understanding as he did, you can have a large impact on the world.

“The decision to educate to love, or to hate, is critical,” he said. “And I’d say thank you to my father for teaching me that lesson.”