People with leftwing views should not teach

Ashkelon Mayor Itamar Shimoni and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visit a primary school on the first day of the school year in Ashkelon, Israel, Sept. 1, 2015. Photo from FACEBOOK/Ashkelon.muni

You won’t believe what’s happening to these Israeli teachers

Motivated by populism and the political climate, the mayors of Ashkelon and Ramat Gan have been attacking left-wing educators for legal activities pursued in their free time.

By Mazal Mualem, trans. Danny Wool, Al Monitor / Israel Pulse
September 02, 2015

With a smug, self-satisfied expression on his face, Ashkelon Mayor Itamar Shimoni took to Channel 2 on Aug. 31 to read a letter he had received from Avital Benshalom, the newly appointed principal of that city’s School of the Arts. In her letter, Benshalom clarifies that she considers herself a Zionist and a patriot and believes military service to be a civic duty.

Shimoni was interviewed about why he opposed Benshalom’s appointment: He had been informed by several parents that in 2002, Benshalom had signed a petition in support of soldiers refusing to serve in Judea and Samaria. Parents demanded that Shimoni block the appointment and even threatened a school strike if she became principal. Shimoni, a member of the Likud Party, was quick to support the parents and asked the Ministry of Education to rescind Benshalom’s appointment.

The result was easy to anticipate. There was a media storm, and Benshalom found herself forced to justify herself with all sorts of contortions, right before the school year started Sept. 1. After all, her appointment was in jeopardy. Although she had not committed a crime by signing the petition — she was simply expressing a legitimate political opinion — Benshalom became an “enemy of the people.” In other words, she was deemed a dangerous leftist who must be kept far away from Israeli children.

After reading Benshalom’s letter on television, Shimoni said that he considers the episode closed. He noted that Benshalom had explained her educational approach, writing, among other things, “I have always encouraged my students to become socially active, and that includes serving in the army in a meaningful way.” In other words, she passed Shimoni’s morality test. This was an embarrassing and delusional moment. Here was a mayor, sitting on live TV, conducting some sort of political trial against an esteemed educator simply because she had signed a petition 13 years ago!

It isn’t that surprising given that the mayor is Shimoni. After Operation Protective Edge in 2014, he announced that he would not allow Israeli Arab workers to build safe rooms in local schools, so as to increase the sense of personal security among parents and students. This racist initiative was eventually repealed after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials condemned it. Still, Shimoni got what he wanted. He got media attention as an Israeli patriot. His attitude, after all, reflected the popular mood in the street, especially in a city like Ashkelon, considered to be right wing.

Yes, Shimoni faced serious condemnation for his efforts to fire Arab workers. This makes it all the more unfortunate that the prime minister and Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who visited Ashkelon on the first day of the school year, ignored that the mayor was going after an educator simply because of her political opinions, all in the name of populist appeal.

Shimoni isn’t the only mayor who has demanded that educators be fired for participating in some political act or other. On Aug. 30, public outcry arose in Ramat Gan over parents’ demands that Herzl Schubert, a history teacher, be fired for participating in the well-publicized Aug. 28 incident in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, in which a helpless soldier from the Golani Brigade was filmed in a confrontation with Palestinian women where he was unable to defend himself.

Schubert is a well-known left-wing activist. His participation at the demonstration was enough for parents to demand that he be fired. Parents argued that it is inconceivable that he would stand on the sidelines while a soldier was being attacked. Ramat Gan Mayor Israel Zinger was quick to take their side.

“If the information that appeared in the media is accurate, people who assaulted IDF [Israel Defense Forces] troops have no place educating the children of this city,” said Zinger. “The educational system in Ramat Gan places enormous importance on the political neutrality of our educational teams, so as to enable pluralism and real dialogue among students, foster the acceptance of a diverse set of ideas, and promote patience and tolerance toward all other opinions.”

In this case, it appears that Zinger too was appealing to the mob mentality, or in other words, the students’ parents. His cliche-riddled and contradictory response proved that he has a problem understanding such basic civic concepts as the right to liberty, from which freedom of expression, thought and opinion stem. Given how concerned he claims to be about children’s education, exactly what message is Zinger sending to students?

No one waving the banner of tolerance and pluralism can demand the sacking of a teacher whose sole crime is using his free time to participate in a demonstration against the occupation. After all, if the teacher had, in fact, broken the law or attacked a soldier, the security forces at the scene certainly would have arrested him.

In the case of Zinger, the prime minister and the education minister should have put him in his place and stopped what looks like the beginning of a new phenomenon in Israel: mayors going after left-wing educators. In this context, it is interesting to note that there are no cases in recent memory of educators from the far right being treated like this because they protested the 2005 disengagement from Gaza or participated in turbulent right-wing demonstrations — and that is a good thing. No one demanded that the prime minister’s brother-in-law Hagai Ben-Artzi be removed from his position as a teacher because he participated in a demonstration against the evacuation of homes in the Beit El settlement​ on the West Bank July 29.

There is a simple reason why we are now seeing mayors appoint themselves the morality police for the educational system: They can sense political energy moving in a certain direction. They hear the prime minister using terms that brand the left as the “anti-Zionist” camp. Then there is the education minister’s anti-left rhetoric. They are riding this populist wave, and it is dangerous mainly because there is no one to stop their foolishness.