According to the head of the teachers’ union, every student who becomes a soldier is proof the education system is succeeding – despite students failing at math, language and humanities. But how can a school system that raises soldiers eager to fight ever churn out peacemakers?
By Etan Nechin, reposted from Haaretz, June 1, 2026
Newly exposed test results show the depth of Israel’s educational crisis and the government’s response to it. In 2025, only 3 percent of Israeli ninth graders who took the nationwide standardized test in science met the standards set by the Education Ministry. Over half failed the exam.
The results were so bad that Education Minister Yoav Kisch, rather than reckon with them, tried to hide them, and then tried to fire the official who refused to help.
Haaretz journalist Nir Gontarz asked Ran Erez, the longtime head of the teachers’ union, how he was okay heading a system that was empirically a failure. Erez answered: “I’ll tell you something: Look at the soldiers and reservists out there fighting right now. The education system is what makes soldiers go fight and even give their lives for the country.”
Although Erez’s answer seems like a non sequitur, it revealed a great deal about why the system can live with those failures – and why the war is still going.
He isn’t concerned about the scores, because academic achievements are beside the point. The failing grades aren’t a sign of a broken system, but a sign the system is focused on something else: producing soldiers and conserving the military as the highest value in society.
It’s nothing new that the Israeli ethos is centered around the military. Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the fact that almost three years after October 7, soldiers and reservists continue to show up for service, despite knowing the government is corrupt and that some of its members cared less about bringing back the hostages or rehabilitating the communities at the borders with Gaza and Lebanon, and more about trying to resettle the Strip and annexing the West Bank.
They show up because the military is seen as the ultimate extension of Israeli civil society, and they do so instead of protesting against Netanyahu’s authoritarian coalition and despite the myriad of war crimes accusations. And somehow, in many minds, the military is among the last state institutions that Netanyahu hasn’t managed to corrupt.
Erez’s statement is a reminder that this sentiment doesn’t appear out of the blue on draft day. It is built year-by-year in classrooms around Israel.
The education system’s purpose
There’s a misconception that the army can break you down to build a soldier. The truth is that the schools have already primed you: from militaristic Memorial Day ceremonies to pre-army training camps for high-schoolers, from youth movements to unit screening days, the school curriculum doesn’t only move by semester and subject. It already bends itself to the will of the army.
If the system exists to produce soldiers, and the value it teaches is the willingness to fight and die, then the war itself becomes self-justifying and the ultimate result. Every student who becomes a soldier is proof the education system is succeeding – despite students failing at math, language and humanities.
And when the whole country is enlisted, sacrifice is demanded from everyone: of families huddled in shelters from Iranian missiles, of communities under constant bombardment in the north. The cliché of “national resilience” pushed by the government and echoed by the media exists to rank war above school, family, and ordinary life, and casts anyone who objects as weak.
The militaristic closed circuit
In an interview with the teacher of Uri Greenberg, a soldier killed in Lebanon in mid-May, she described a talented, ambitious student who had wanted to serve in a combat unit. She recalled that at memorial ceremonies, he would recite “The Silver Platter,” Natan Alterman’s poem about the young people who die so Israel can exist.
Days later, Sgt. Rotem Yanai, who was still in high school when the war began, was killed in northern Israel.
This is the militaristic closed circuit. An education system built to produce soldiers will never produce the people who could end the war, who might envision a different way to live, to ask what a day after looks like.
There’s a deeper irony in Erez insisting the system succeeds because it produces soldiers. The soldiering Israel has demanded in the past few decades – whether it is policing Palestinians in the West Bank or dropping American-made one-ton bombs – doesn’t require a robust educational system. The system only demands from teachers to instill the willingness to be drafted, and teach the narrative that there’s no other way.
Maintaining this system takes more than persuasion, but coercion and cover up. This is why the Education Ministry ordered the removal of maps showing the 1967 borders from classrooms.
It’s why dozens of students gathered outside the principal’s office of the Hof HaCarmel school in Ma’agan Michael – my old school – shouting “traitor, resign,” “may your village burn,” “death to Arabs,” “go Bibi,” after he suggested teachers speak with students about settler violence.
And it’s why the Education Ministry is spying on teachers critical of the government.
Polls show younger Israelis are more right-wing than their parents. This isn’t just because these kids grew up during or after the second intifada, Netanyahu’s right-wing hold, “rounds” in Gaza, the pandemic and October 7, but because there’s a system which aims to defend and justify this bloody status quo.
Teachers win wars
In the 2025 Oscar-winning documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” about a Russian teacher who documents how his school turned into a war recruitment center during the Ukrainian invasion, there’s a snippet by Vladimir Putin saying, “Commanders don’t win wars. Teachers win wars.”
This is the ultimate reason why I refused to enlist in the Israeli army. At 16, I didn’t know much about the occupation; I wasn’t too politically active nor was I a pacifist. I just saw the teachers and the system preparing us for the army, not for life.
Once I understood that, the system logic became clear – who it shapes, who it discards. It wasn’t failing to educate because it was striving for – and succeeding – in something else entirely.
The result is a civil society organized around the military and one that, by the same logic, excludes anyone who doesn’t serve. Haredim – who prove they’d rather go to jail or even die than serve – and Arab citizens – who aren’t drafted because they’d be considered a fifth column – are treated as less Israeli. It is no wonder that the population has autonomous and siloed education systems.
Refusing was hard because the school had pointed us in one direction the whole time. Serving is how you become a full member of society. It shapes who get hired, who gets a voice. Most students never know dissent is possible, because the system never gave them words for it.
After I refused, there was no obvious direction to go; the system treats the decision to dissent as a defect, not as a political position. In this regard, Erez is right. The system is working because those for whom it doesn’t work, including the many soldiers who took their own life, are erased.
This system, however, can be dismantled the same way it was erected: by educating young Israelis to question the role of the military, rather than taking it as self-evident.
If the military stops being the answer to everything, and the justification to do anything, we might finally pause and consider what we are fighting for and for whom. The dead would stop serving as an excuse for more dead.
Etan Nechin is Haaretz’s New York correspondent.
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