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The Knesset’s Education, Culture, and Sports Committee last week debated a bill that would grant the Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, intrusive powers in the country’s education system. If passed, the law would authorize the Shin Bet to conduct a background check on every new hired school teacher, monitor their statements in classrooms and on social media, and even fire them and revoke their teaching certificates.
The bill, which unifies several versions put forth by far-right Knesset members, was framed as a means of “prohibiting the employment of convicted terrorists,” creating the impression that the law would only target a very specific and dangerous group of people. But that is not the case at all. According to the current text, the prohibition of employment does not refer only to those allegedly involved in “terrorism,” but also those who allegedly “support” or “identify with” with a “terrorist organization.”
Who is considered a terrorist organization? We don’t really know. In Israel, the Minister of Defense has the authority to declare any and all groups as terrorist organizations, with the entire procedure shrouded in great secrecy. Take, for example, the six Palestinian human rights groups that were outlawed as “terrorist organizations” by then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz in November 2021, despite failing to provide any serious evidence.
The term is bandied about so loosely that, according to the current Education Minister Yoav Kisch, the mass protests that have been taking place against the government for the past half year amount to acts of “terror.” Thus, under the terms of the new bill a teacher need not even participate in the Israeli protests to be guilty of wrongful activity — it is enough for them to simply express sympathy with the anti-government movement for the Shin Bet to deem them a “terrorist sympathizer,” and fire them.
As of this week, officials from the Shin Bet, police, Justice Ministry, and Finance Ministry have confronted the Knesset committee with the many legal failings in the bill, and have demanded revisions. However, power-drunk parliamentarians sounded determined to simply make adjustments and return the proposal to the legislative track.
Neither the Education Minister nor the heads of various teachers’ organizations were present at last week’s committee meeting, despite the fact that the law deals directly with the conditions for hiring and firing teachers. Parents’ and students’ organizations did not raise their voice either. Not a single Jewish member of the opposition took the time to come out and defend free, state-sponsored education in Israel. Only the Palestinian Knesset members found the time to come and protest the law in the meeting.
The Shin Bet’s ‘open secret’
Suffice it to say, the idea that the government should have control over teachers through the state’s security apparatus has wide support in the Knesset. And it’s not just Netanyahu and his fascist friends.
From the establishment of the state in 1948 up until 2009, Israel granted the Shin Bet the full authority to oversee teachers in the country’s Arab schools, who were monitored, hired, and fired at the behest of the agency. This was done through an “open secret” that was practically known to everyone: the deputy director of the Arab Education Division, which falls under the Education Minister, was always a member of the Shin Bet. He and his staff were present at hiring committees, and he had the right to veto any decision.
These things are described in detail in historian Hillel Cohen’s 2010 book, “Good Arabs.” Using unearthed state archives, which firmly corroborated the public narrative of Palestinian citizens, Cohen described how the Shin Bet compiled a file of every Palestinian principal or teacher, which included all of their public statements over the years. It did not take much to do this work. To control a population, it is not necessary for everyone to be a collaborator and informer — it is enough for everyone to think that everyone else is a collaborator and informer.
For example, Cohen writes how in 1952, when Palestinian citizens’ were ruled by a military government, 42 teachers — who at the time made up six percent of all teachers in Arab schools in Israel — were fired because “they misused the opportunity given to them to be the educators of the next generation and shapers of its image.” Of course, they were not convicted in any court; an arbitrary decision by a military commander was enough.
The jobs that became vacant were then given, as a token of appreciation, to Palestinians who collaborated with the Shin Bet, and who excelled in passing on information to the Israeli authorities. They didn’t have to be qualified to teach. The words were explicitly stated at the officers’ conference of the department in charge of Arab affairs: “Favors that we can give, thanks to our connections with the Education Ministry, is the employment of teachers and the admission of teaching candidates to [education] courses.”
This psychological terrorism was also applied to students. In 1958, Arab students in Nazareth marked the Nakba, the dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, by holding a silent vigil for five minutes. Jewish teachers who worked at the school passed the information on to the Shin Bet. The principal of the school was asked to hand over the names of the students, and was even told to inform the students that ” it is possible that in two years, when they finish school and apply for jobs, the government officials who have the authority to decide on giving jobs to the graduates, will stand for five minutes in silence in memory of the students’ careers that were lost.”
It goes without saying that the selection of teachers based on their opinions rather than skills, and the instillment of fear among principals, teachers, and students, severely damaged the Arab education system in Israel for decades. It suffered from a lack of professional personnel, crippling mutual suspicion, and the undermining of the very concept of education.
It was only in September 2004 that the Palestinian legal center Adalah petitioned the High Court to end the Shin Bet’s involvement in the Arab education system. It became clear that all the trampling and degradation of the education system was done without any legal basis, and was carried out only because the Israeli government had the power to do so. The petition was not even discussed in court, as the Education Ministry announced the cancellation of the Shin Bet officer’s position in the Arab Education Division.
‘A terrible monster that harms the Jewish people’
With its new law in 2023, the Israeli government wants to go back to the old reality. Yet far-right politicians have explicitly said that the bill’s intention is not only to police Palestinian society, but Jewish-Israeli teachers as well.
During the first debate of the bill on July 4, Knesset members competed to see who was a bigger fascist. MK Amit Halevi of Likud said, for example, that in order to fire a teacher, one should not wait for them to be convicted of terrorism, nor even for criminal proceedings to be opened. It is enough for the Shin Bet to find out that the teacher “identifies with terrorism,” and already “the mere fact that he is in a school, is in itself a violation.”
Fellow Likud MK Avihai Boaron took it a step further. In his eyes, there is no need to even wait for intelligence from the Shin Bet: “The director general of the Education Minister can get an impression by what he sees on social media,” he said. In other words, it is enough for the director general to browse through a teacher’s Facebook page, for example, in order to be able to fire them and revoke their certificate.
MK Limor Son Har-Malech from the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party, accused the targeted teachers of “presenting values in a beautiful way that sounds good, but that underneath all these values hides a terrible monster that harms and undermines the existence of the Jewish people.”
During the second discussion on July 18, professionals from the various government ministries explained how unnecessary the proposed law is. Representatives from the Justice Ministry argued that it is not possible to demand a comprehensive Shin Bet inspection of all teachers; such a move, they said, would have a chilling effect that could stop many from entering the profession. Furthermore, it is impossible to exclude employees of the education system from already-existing disciplinary laws, which include sufficient grounds for termination of employment, such as “behavior that may harm the name of the state service.”
An Israeli police representative explained that there is already an automated system in place, through which all government ministries, including the Education Ministry, receive information about state employees who are suspected of committing a crime, as well as those under investigation. With the help of this information, the relevant ministries can decide whether the reason for the investigation justifies a suspension or termination of employment.
A representative from the Finance Ministry, meanwhile, explained that the law would require tens of millions of shekels for the establishment and management of a brand new database, as well as for background checks for 300,000 employees.
An Education Ministry representative further explained that there is no problem with how the system currently works, since those convicted of terrorism are not employed, and that the ministry already has the necessary tools to obtain information to deal with the issue.
The Shin Bet’s legal advisor also deemed the law completely unnecessary, saying the agency already has a functioning interface through which it can transfer information that it finds relevant to the Education Ministry. “What you are proposing here,” the advisor said, “is far-reaching. No party has ever received open information from the Shin Bet.” Woe to us if the rights of teachers in Israel are being “protected” by the Shin Bet.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.