“One idea can be more destructive than a thousand tanks,” says MK who co-sponsored bill that cuts funding to terror-supporting schools.
By World Israel News Staff
The Israeli Knesset passed a bill on Tuesday clamping down on terror-supporting teachers and educational institutions, following a number of scandals involving educators celebrating terror attacks.
The bill paves the way for educators who post pro-terror content to be swiftly fired and to slash funding to schools that promote terror-supporting narratives.
The new law ensures that teacher who “identify with an act of terrorism in public or publish a direct call to commit an act of terrorism” can be fired with no advance notice.
Educators who promote pro-terror narratives are welcome to teach “in Tehran, Gaza or Ramallah today, but not in our schools,” said Likud MK Amit HaLevi, a co-sponsor of the bill.
MK Tvika Fogel (Religious Zionism), who introduced the bill, stressed that teachers have tremendous influence over children and youth.
The law, he said, ensures that educator and schools are held accountable for the narratives being promoted to students.
In recent years, several schools in eastern Jerusalem held ceremonies commemorating Palestinian terrorists.
Under the new law, these schools could lose their funding from the Education Ministry due to the pro-terror curriculum.
“The Knesset today is doing the most essential thing in the war against our enemies: damaging the strongest infrastructure of terrorism – education,” he said in a media statement.
“As we know, a bomb is not created and does not explode by itself. Its basic components are the brain and the heart, the consciousness of destruction, and the emotional fervor to carry it out, and these are created first of all in the educational system,” he continued.
“One teacher may raise dozens of ticking bombs every year. One idea can be more destructive than a thousand tanks.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir paised the law as “important” for “ending terrorism,” and emphasized that the government will “continue to fight terrorism in every way.”