However, the program’s authors were equally unequivocal regarding the significance of Israel’s Jewish character. Indeed, no fewer than four separate goals were devoted to teaching students in the general state schools to appreciate and identify with their state’s Jewish character. On the philosophical level, students were “to become familiar with the ideas, approaches, and ideologies that are likely to assist them in understanding Israel’s character as a Jewish, democratic state.” To give historical depth to this understanding, students were to study “the historical background” that gave rise to Israel’s special character, including its status as a Jewish state. Moreover, in the political and cultural spheres, students were “to know and understand the multifaceted connections linking the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”¹³ The section on “Goals Concerning Values” sought to go beyond imparting knowledge about the Jewish state, and called on the educational system to nurture within students “a feeling of solidarity with the Jewish people.”¹⁴

The course of study outlined in the curriculum was aimed at translating these goals into practice. Every civics student had to take a mandatory unit on “The Political Regime in Israel,” which included a section covering “Israel as a Jewish State: Expressions in Legislation and Public Life,” an extensive discussion about the role of the Jewish religion in Israeli public life, and a lengthy treatment of “Israel and the Jewish people.”¹⁵ In addition, Israel’s character as a Jewish state played a significant role in two of the six optional subjects that were offered,¹⁶ “Building Israeli Society by Absorbing New Immigrants” and “The Arab-Israeli Conflict”: The unit on immigration opened with an extended treatment of “the Zionist ideology, the Declaration of Independence, and the Basic Laws of the state,” moved on to consider “the mutual dependence between the State of Israel and Jews of the diaspora,” and also examined “Jewish immigration to Israel as a basis for the existence and development of the Jewish state.”¹⁷ Likewise, the study of “The Arab-Israeli Conflict” was centered on a discussion of “the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and… the Zionist ideology and movement as a response to the problems of the Jewish people.”¹⁸

Though the 1976 civics curriculum was admirable in its treatment of the Jewish state, it suffered from two noteworthy defects. Most significantly, it did not include a historical or philosophical examination of national states in general, and therefore left students unaware that democracy and nationalism have been viewed as compatible by some of the most important political thinkers of recent centuries, and have been combined successfully in dozens of countries. Second, the curriculum tended to place undue emphasis on the nuts and bolts of Israeli government, without giving sufficient attention to the ideas—whether taken from democratic theory or from the Jewish and Zionist tradition—that underlay them. Although the Education Ministry itself did not produce a textbook for studying the core subject, “The Political Regime in Israel,” the vast majority of texts published by private textbook companies on the basis of the ministry’s curriculum mirrored these flaws.¹⁹

These shortcomings notwithstanding, the 1976 curriculum played an important role in providing Jewish high-school students with a solid grounding in Israel’s character as a Jewish state. It signaled teachers that Israel’s Jewish character was a crucial part of learning about citizenship, outlined a course of study that would expose students to the most significant ideas and institutions of the Jewish state, and served as the frame of reference for the enrichment courses offered to civics teachers by the Ministry of Education.

Most importantly, the 1976 curriculum had a profound influence on the annual matriculation exams, on which college-bound students need to do well in order to be accepted into the most competitive college programs, and which therefore have a decisive impact on what is actually taught. In this regard, the exams given in accordance with the 1976 curriculum sent a clear signal to students and teachers that it was worth studying about Israel’s character as a Jewish state. In all but one of the fourteen exams offered before the introduction of the new civics curriculum in 1994, there was at least one long question about Israel as a Jewish state, and in most years students could choose to answer two long questions and one short one.²⁰ In practice, this meant that a student knowledgeable about his country’s Jewish character could parlay this knowledge into 65 points out of a possible 100—enough for a passing grade in and of itself, and more than two-thirds of what was needed to attain a grade of “excellent.”²¹

Moreover, the questions on the examinations generally reflected the premise that Israel’s status as a Jewish state was the object of consensus, and that the laws and institutions expressing this status should be viewed positively. In the 1983 exam, for example, one of the questions students could choose to answer in the section on “The Political Regime in Israel” read as follows:

Similarly, in 1984 one of the questions in the section on “The Diaspora” noted that a substantial portion of American Jews supported Israel, and called on students to explain the form in which this support was expressed and to describe “the factors that explain the powerful connection between American Jewry and the State of Israel.”²³

In addition, the exam writers seemed to go out of their way to raise current issues that could be linked to positive elements of Israel’s Jewish character. In early 1989, for example, lobbying by American Jewish leaders persuaded Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir not to amend the Law of Return in a way that they believed would delegitimize conversions carried out by non-Orthodox rabbis. A few months later, the Education Ministry included in its end-of-year civics exam a question that highlighted the Zionist meaning of such political activity on the part of diaspora Jewry: Students were asked to “explain three reasons for the involvement of diaspora Jews in the State of Israel’s internal affairs”—and then to give three reasons why “the State of Israel takes into account the views of Jewish groups and organizations in the world.”²⁴

Thus, from the inception of the 1976 curriculum until the early 1990s, the goals, course of study, and annual examinations in the subject of citizenship encouraged students to identify with the Jewish character of their state. Moreover, one would be hard-pressed to defend the assertion, so often heard today, that the old Labor Zionist conception of the Jewish state in some way downplayed education about democracy; on the contrary, the same curriculum that so clearly reflected the Labor Zionist support for a Jewish state also taught students about the theory and practice of democracy, encouraged them to become committed to the ideas and institutions on which Israel’s democracy is based, and sought to foster the critical thinking and tolerance that are the linchpin of its open society.

 

All of this was to change, however, in the wake of a new citizenship curriculum published in 1994, which was developed by an Education Ministry committee chaired by Hebrew University political scientist Emanuel Gutmann.²⁵ The committee was appointed in 1989 during the national unity government headed by the Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir, when the Ministry of Education was in the hands of the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Navon. It consisted of ministry staff members and teachers representing Israel’s various educational streams, as well as several academics known for their commitment to the idea of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.²⁶ Indeed, the authors of the curriculum sought to make it clear that they considered the Jewish and the democratic elements of Israel’s character to be equally crucial elements of learning about citizenship, as they noted in their introduction that “most committee members attributed equal weight” in teaching about Israel’s character as “a democratic state and as a Jewish state.”²⁷

Even so, the new curriculum introduced radical changes in the way students would be taught about Israel as a Jewish state. These became clear in its opening pages, where the assumptions and conclusions guiding the members’ work were set forth. First, the committee members decided to develop, for the first time, a unified curriculum for academic-track students in all four streams of the public school system—general, religious, Druze, and Arab—each of which had previously had its own course of study.²⁸ This approach was based on what seemed to be a reasonable premise: That young Israelis needed to learn about what was common to all of them, so that sectoral factionalism would be replaced by a shared sense of citizenship.²⁹ But in practice, this meant that the curricular goals related to teaching about Israel’s Jewish character had to be suitable for instruction in the Arab sector, in which many teachers and students find it difficult to accept the idea that Israel ought to be a Jewish state or to feel “solidarity with the Jewish people.” Since committee members were reluctant to impose such goals on the Arab sector, the decision to develop a unified curriculum left them with little choice but to water them down for Jewish students as well.