The following is Dana Mills’ translation of Zehava Galon’s Facebook post:
This morning the Ministry for Education froze the Ministry’s support for pluralist Jewish education. In the last budget only 16.5 million NIS out of 290 Million NIS were allocated for organizations which offer a pluralistic alternative. The rest went mostly to Orthodox organizations. Today Naftali Bennett killed this orphaned lamb, too.
In the eight months that Bennett has been Minister of Education: did you think he would invest in improving teachers training? Did you think he would invest in fighting violence in schools? In the quality of contents children get in their English, Science, or history lessons? You must be kidding. Our educational system is doing so well, that the only thing Bennet is preoccupied with is removing from the system the only organizations that present different trends in Judaism and provide an alternative to the tens of Orthodox and Nationalistic organizations that operate within the Education System.
Other top issues on Bennett’s list: censoring artworks chosen by professional culture committee in his office; demanding from artists performing in schools to swear allegiance to the state and the national anthem and commit to performing beyond the Green Line; censoring Dorit Rebiniyan’s novel “Living Fence” out of fear that youth perceive Arabs as human think it possible to fall in love with them; rewriting the civics textbook and turning it into a religious-nationalistic manifest; expanding orthodox religious organizations’ work in schools and discriminating in budgets and resources in favor of the religious-nationalistic educational system.
Lets be clear – the orthodox-religious agenda that Bennett inserts into the system is not the goal, but rather the means. The goal is to make the educational system enclosed and paranoid. The goal is to educate a more nationalistic – racist generation. A generation less capable of criticizing, that today would be told what to read and tomorrow how to think. A generation that won’t be asking questions when serving in the IDF and facing complex issues. A brainwashed generation that will open the door to appropriation and apartheid vision Bennett is advocating and will have no tools to understand what is rotten about it.
Pluralist Jewish organizations, much like the human rights NGOs, Rabinyan’s Living Fence, and the old civic textbook that dared to teach students about minority rights – they all stand in the way of the Messianic vision Bennett is advocating hence they had to be eliminated one by one.
Next Wednesday I will present in the Knesset an initiative to create a parliamentary investigative committee that will look at the due process used in the recent actions Bennett and his commissars over the past 8 months.
Parents, teachers, students, citizens, if you fear (rightly so) for the future of this country – if we ever had a reason to organize mass protest now is the time. We will fight Bennett’s Fascism using every tool we have – the Knesset, the streets and if we need to, the courts. Let’s prove to Bennett that we too know how to be unapologetic, that we are ready for the war he has declared on the secular and liberal people of Israel and nothing is worth fighting for more than our right to educate our children into the values of pluralism, freedom and humanism.
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