‘To ask an Arab student to internalize this is a way of humiliating him’
Israeli-Arab students seen at the campus of “Givat Ram” at Hebrew University on the first day of the new academic year.
Henrietta Chacar writes in +972:
Before a high school student in Israel can participate in a school-sponsored trip overseas they must first answer a series of questions. “How do Palestinian organizations use social media?” is one of them. The only correct answer? “To incite violence.”
The Education Ministry’s online course and test purport to equip students with “tools and basic information” on questions and issues they might encounter abroad. Far-right politician Naftali Bennett made the course mandatory two years ago, when he was education minister.
Last month, The Masar Alternative School in Nazareth challenged the course’s legality. In a letter addressed to the Education Ministry, the school argued that the course is humiliating toward Palestinian citizens of Israel and violates the country’s education law, which “requires consideration of the uniqueness of the Arab minority.”
The course, available only in Hebrew but with optional Arabic subtitles, involves a series of short videos covering 11 topics followed by a multiple-choice exam and can be completed in a matter of hours. Upon completion, students receive a certificate that is valid for four years.
“Students who were traveling abroad were met with questions like what’s going on in Israel? … They were asked about the separation wall, about the country’s borders. They didn’t know what to say,” an Education Ministry official explained in 2015, when an earlier version of the course was offered, although it wasn’t mandatory at the time.
Reflecting the core thinking behind hasbara, the course centers on the conviction that people around the world criticize Israel not because it occupies millions of Palestinians, but because “they don’t know Israel,” Tal Brody, an American-Israeli former basketball star, says in one of the tutorials.