Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 5 June 2026
How Israeli classrooms indoctrinate Jewish supremacy
Jewish Israelis grow up in an ideological society. National education seeks to produce loyal citizens, who not only identify with the state and its goals but are willing to die for it in a never-ending war with the “non-Jewish” inhabitants of the land they live in and their neighbours. The education system provides the ideological envelop in which Israel can pursue discrimination inside Israel, occupation in Palestine, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the granddaughter of Avraham Katznelson, a Zionist leader and signatory of the Israeli declaration of independence, daughter of Matti Peled, a general in the Israeli army turned peace activist, and is married to Rami Elhanan, also a peace activist. Their daughter Smadar was killed at the age of 13 in a Palestinian suicide bombing in central Jerusalem. Colum McCann’s magnificent narrative Apeirogon (2020) recounts the encounter of Rami and Bassam Aramin, who lost his 10-year-old daughter in a shooting by Israeli soldiers in 2007. (Click to read the review)
Listen to the podcast on +972 here: