On a Mission to Zionize Young Israelis

Education Minister Limor Livnat is a woman with a mission: to ensure Israel’s survival by instilling Jewish and Zionist values in the nation’s schoolchildren.

Locked in a tense standoff with the Palestinians, Israelis must have a clear understanding of what it is they are fighting for, she says. Otherwise, “why not just move to Los Angeles?”

Just three months into her job, Livnat, a fiery ideologue who counts Britain’s Margaret Thatcher among her political heroes, has unveiled plans for a “heritage” course for middle school students and vowed to eliminate the influence of so-called new historians from the education system.

Her zeal for inculcating in Israeli students the justness of the Zionist cause reflects a conviction many Israelis and Palestinians share: that their struggle is over historical narrative, not just land. Both sides suspect that, in the end, the side that wins may well be the one that believes most strongly in the morality of its claim.

Livnat’s crusade has won praise from conservatives and brickbats from liberals and some educators.

Calling her one of the government’s most innovative ministers, the conservative Jerusalem Post wrote that “a nation that has been the target of war since its inception requires a firm and resolute belief in the justness of its cause if it is to successfully confront the challenges that seem to proliferate with the passage of time.”

But the new historians she has attacked as “post-Zionist” have criticized Livnat for fighting what they say is a natural trend in a maturing democracy of reexamining long-held beliefs and critically appraising collective myths.

“Livnat . . . talks about the danger of post-Zionism as if the children of Israel have fallen into the clutches of a Satanic cult and she, the Batwoman of Zionism, will swoop down and rescue them,” a disdainful Tom Segev, one of the new historians, wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. “Post-Zionism is not an ideological substitute for Zionism, but a new reality that evolves as Zionism achieves its goals.”

For more than a decade, Segev and a small group of other historians have chipped away at the traditional Zionist interpretation of Israel’s founding and its struggle with Palestinian nationalism and the Arab world. Generally identified with the secular left in Israel, they have challenged the mainstream view that the Zionist movement sought to peacefully establish a Jewish state in a nearly empty land and that the Arab states were responsible for creating the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Livnat has said their views fall so far outside mainstream thinking that students should not be exposed to them.

One of Livnat’s first acts was to dump a history book introduced to ninth-graders during the tenure of her left-wing predecessor, Yossi Sarid. Sarid had caused an uproar when he introduced revisionist accounts of Israeli history and writings by Palestinians to high school students.

Sarid said his innovations were meant to acquaint Israeli students with Palestinian viewpoints and to give a realistic portrait of the nation’s past. Israeli students, he said, were secure enough in their Jewish and Zionist identities to deal with a warts-and-all account of history.

Livnat, a leader of the right-wing Likud Party with prime ministerial ambitions, said she simply followed the recommendations of the Education Committee of the Knesset, as parliament is known, and an academic committee appointed by the Education Ministry when she opted to pull the book “A World of Changes” from the ninth-grade curriculum.

The book was faulted for downplaying the Zionist movement’s importance in modern world history and “lacking balance” in its portrayal of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It became the first textbook pulled from the Israeli curriculum for inaccurately recounting the nation’s history.

Livnat also plans to add the hourlong weekly Jewish and Zionist heritage course for middle school students in the upcoming academic year. The course, she says, will teach students the basics about Judaism. They also will learn about the Zionist founders of the state and visit archeological sites, particularly in Jerusalem--the city both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital--in an effort to strengthen their attachment to the land.

“It is inconceivable that the kids today do not know the words of the national anthem, do not know what is tefillin [leather straps and boxes containing prayers that Orthodox Jews wrap around their arms and hands and across their foreheads during prayer rituals], have never seen a prayer book,” Livnat told a news conference. “They don’t know the basic terms that they ought to know. They have the fundamental right to know the values and the reasons for which we live here and have our country here.”

Battered by months of fighting with the Palestinians, many Israelis have welcomed Livnat’s focus on teaching nationalist values. She said she has received thousands of letters and telephone calls of support from Israelis of every political persuasion.

The heritage course will be extended to all grade levels in the next three years. Arab students will study “their own heritage,” Livnat says, in a program that is still being worked out.

She is also recommending that all teachers hold weekly discussions with students on values and end each session by singing the national anthem, a move that Taleb Sanaa, an Arab member of the Knesset, blasted as “bordering on fascism.”

New historian Danny Jacoby, author of the much-maligned “A World of Changes,” says he sees the dumping of his book--and Livnat’s other reforms--as evidence of a retrenchment by parts of Israeli society in the wake of the collapse of peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians. When peace seemed within reach, Jacoby said, the state felt self-assured enough to look critically at its past.

“The desire to teach tolerance and educate for peace is lost now,” Jacoby said. “Livnat wants to purify history, to deal only with myths.”

Her approach, he said, “is dangerous. Students will see it as trying to hide the truth.”

Others fault her emphasis on teaching religion and Zionism at a time when the system suffers from substandard facilities, a shortage of qualified teachers, a high dropout rate, endemic campus violence and a host of other ills.

“Our system’s biggest problem is that only 40% of high school graduates are qualified to continue in university,” former Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein said. “This exacerbates the existing social gap in the nation, and this should be our priority.”

Livnat brushes aside her critics. She likens her battle to that waged by cultural conservatives against postmodernism in the teaching of history and literature in the United States. But in Israel, with the nation locked in what many Israelis believe is an existential war with the Palestinians, even debates about the content of school curriculum take on the overtones of a life-and-death struggle.

“A democracy needs stamina and ideological conviction to persevere through times that make sunshine patriots get up and run,” Livnat said in a speech last month to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “If a population is usurped of its raison d’etre and sapped of its moral strength, it will not be able to confront the existential challenges to its survival.”