A school principal mentioned Israeli settler violence; his students demanded he be fired

A student waves the flag of the Likud party at a protest against his school’s principal, in northern Israel, January 2026

Carolina Landsmann writes in Haaretz on 29 January 2026:

“Eldad brought this on himself” was what grabbed my attention the most in a video of the “demonstration” by students at the Hof Hacarmel school in Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael against their principal, Eldad Porat. They were demonstrating because he had dared to suggest that teachers hold a classroom discussion about settler violence, basing himself on data from a B’Tselem report.

This is what one student at the school – a regional public school – said in response to the teacher as she filmed her enthusiastic classmates singing “May their village burn” and “Let the IDF win; fuck the Arabs.” They blocked the school office and demanded the principal be fired.

The teacher had asked her to stop filming, because there were people there who didn’t want to be filmed, like Porat himself. “Eldad brought this on himself,” the girl replied.

Every adult will naturally wonder what enabled such audacity by a girl who looked perfectly ordinary. On what grounds did she act this way, without fear or respect, inside her school? Where did she get the feeling of absolute entitlement that allowed her to respond to a teacher that way and treat the principal of her school so dismissively? No effort is required to find the answer, because it was shouted out loud by the children themselves: “Go, Bibi!”

What enabled this girl and her classmates to stand in front of their teachers and principal without bowing to their authority, and even threatening them with dismissal, was their political subordination to “Go, Bibi!”  These weren’t children who scorned all authority, but children backed by a higher authority who scorned their teachers in its name. Right now, it’s just their teachers and principal. In the next stage – and it’s only a matter of time; don’t kid yourselves – it will also be their parents.

It’s impossible not to recall the Soviet legend about Pavlik Morozov, the boy who informed on his father and became a national hero. Everyone should know that a good child is one who is willing to inform on their parents in the name of ideology.

Just like in all the other regimes that have understood that whoever owns the young owns the future. And, like in every totalitarian regime, the system doesn’t work without informers. In this case, Channel 14 television played a key role – not just as a vehicle for “reporting,” but as an active player in the system of indoctrination.

The campaign of incitement against the principal began when someone leaked an internal document to Channel 14 containing the leftist recommendation that was based on data from B’Tselem (settler violence? There’s no such thing).  The day after the channel’s “report,” delivered with the requisite inflammatory framing, a Channel 14 crew went to the school to reap the fruits of its incitement.

The children also received backing at the institutional level. When MK Naama Lazimi (Labor) asked Education Minister Yoav Kisch to condemn the campaign of incitement and violence against the principal, he told her to go to Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street – the epicenter of the anti-government protests.

Later, he made it clear that in his view, the problem wasn’t the harassment of the principal, but the fact that Porat wanted this issue raised in class. “The Education Ministry isn’t a platform for political propaganda,” Kisch said. Then, having already backed the students, he paid lip service to his duty with a general condemnation of “violent or threatening language toward educational staff.”

The new members of the ruling Likud party are the commissars of old. There is nothing new under the sun. The papers reported that the principal served in the career army and left with the rank of major. But anyone who thought his rank would avail him against the Bibi-ist/Kahanist reeducation and ideological purges doesn’t understand that military rank is nothing but air in the new world that has arisen on the ruins of the old one.

The energy oozing from this video is the energy of a revolt familiar from history – a revolt against an old authority perpetrated in the name of a new authority. This is the moment when schools cease to educate and instead become venues in which children reeducate their teachers and principals.

This article is reproduced in its entirety