HAARETZ (ISRAEL)
Israeli Students Resist Militarization of their Schools
30 December 2004
Israeli students are resisting a plan of "widening cooperation between the Education Ministry and the IDF's [Israeli Occupation Army's] Education Corps according to which officers will escort high school students through their final years of studies and will encourage their draft into the army."
[Article pasted below]
Thank goodness these students have managed to keep their wits about them despite the other propaganda and misinformation they are surrounded by. Even more, and more blatant, military indoctrination seems to be needed by Israel to maintain its status quo of illegal occupation over a brutalized and dispossessed civilian population. No wonder. More and more people are seeking the truth and finding out what occupation really means.
Case in point - the right-wing former-IDF-soldier mild-mannered Israeli secretary who just wanted to find out why 'terrorists' would attack Israeli civilians and found herself completely sympathetic to their cause (if not all of their methods, although she started to understand them) after she visited Jenin. An interview with her.
Absurd account of the allegations and charges against her, among them "translating Hebrew for the enemy." Haaretz failed to mention in its English edition that half the Palestinians in Jenin speak Hebrew. Regardless of the absurdity of the charges, she could face life imprisonment, something a lot of Palestinian political prisoners know all about.
Among many other erosions of Israeli society, all this lying and bullying means severely declining standards of living for Israel's poor due to the enormous costs of occupation. New illegal settlements are being built on stolen land in Jayyous and elsewhere while Israeli kids are going hungry... not to mention Palestinian kids! This house of cards is falling fast.
"People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake... We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust. Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment."
~ Desmond Tutu, South African Bishop and peace activist, at a conference on Ending the Israeli Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, in April 2002.
THE ARTICLE:
Students protest plan to appoint IDF officers to high schools
By Yulie Khromchenko, Haaretz Correspondent
Three twelfth-grade students from Tel Aviv's municipal high school "A" protested on Tuesday the plan to appoint Israel Defense Forces officers to high schools around the country.
The three students chained themselves to the entrance to an auditorium in which Brigadier General Yonatan Loker, commander of the air force's Hatzerim base, was due to give a lecture.
The students said they were protesting "the military takeover of the education system and [the plan to] turn high schools into military preparatory academies."
"We are declaring our opposition to the placing of military figures inside schools, a factor which would contribute to the dissolution of civil society and its total militarization," the students said.
Police officers were called to the school following the incident.
The invitation to Loker was made in the framework of widening cooperation between the Education Ministry and the IDF's Education Corps according to which officers will escort high school students through their final years of studies and will encourage their draft into the army.
In the first phase of the plan, officers will be assigned to 74 high schools around the country. The following year, the project will be expanded to include 250 high schools.
Activist organizations, including Courage to Refuse, have expressed their opposition to the involvement of the military in the country's education system.