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I will refrain from responding to ad hominem comments, although here too I should set the record straight: I was born in Israel, graduated from its public education system, served in the military, and studied for my B.A., Masters’ degree and Ph.D at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Tel-Aviv University. I was a teacher at a second chance school for 8 years, and taught history and civic studies (among other subjects) to various grades, including for the final exam required for a high school diploma (‘bagrut’). As an instructor at Tel-Aviv University I taught education at the college level. I moved to the United States in 2001 when offered a post-doctoral fellowship. I visit Israel regularly and maintain an active interest in its scholarly debates and political life. My familiarity with Israeli society and its education system is far from based on youthful memories.
I focus in this response on the Israeli system, to correspond to the focus in the review itself. However examples in the United States abound as well. In large urban schools the military today maintains a constant presence and sometimes an office of recruitment, and officers regularly provide their services as ‘substitute teachers’ giving lessons in character education.
For a detailed and well-grounded account of this phenomenon, including multiple examples of the military involvement in curricular and extra-curricular activities in the Israeli public education system, as well as the militarization of curriculum and pedagogy, see Haggith Gor, The Militarization of Education (‘Militarism be-chinuch’ in Hebrew, Babel Publishers 2005).
See http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3523955,00.html a report in the Israeli newspaper Yediot (in Hebrew), 3/26/08. A group of activists, ‘New Profile’ demonstrated against this military visits to schools, as reported in a related story to be found through the same link.
On the support which my work allegedly provides to the British boycott on Israeli universities: during the debate on the second boycott in the summer of 2007 I was invited to present a keynote address at the Second International Conference on Citizenship and Human Rights in Education at Roehampton University in the UK. I opened my remarks with a detailed argument against the boycott, based on the theoretical framework developed in the book (and in my talk). In brief, I suggested that the boycott is an attack on freedom of thought, which is a basic value which informs both democratic citizenship and the spirit of free inquiry essential to higher education. I argued that both support and opposition to a particular war have to occur within the framework of democratic values, and that the boycott represents an acceptance of the anti-democratic logic of war.
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Ben-Porath, S.R. Response to Review of Citizenship under Fire. Stud Philos Educ 28, 185–187 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9117-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9117-z