Israel’s Christian schools crisis reveals a country under the sway of tribal politics

It is almost a month into the Israeli school year, and the country’s Christian schools have still not started their studies. A prolonged strike, declared out of anger towards the government, is keeping classrooms closed.

Theirs is a fight that arouses little interest among most Israeli Jews, but one that has caught the attention of some very significant people around the world: the Pope raised the issue in a recent meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

The campaign is also attracting sympathy from the Arab sector, including in Muslim areas where residents normally care little about the Christian community. Earlier this month, virtually all Muslim schools in the country joined the strike for a day.

This is about money. Christian schools claim that they are being squeezed financially by the government, and that they are in dire financial straits. And this, they say, is unique to the Christian school sector.

The difficulty in assessing the claims of the Christian schools and the counter-claims of the government is that the tumultuous world of Israeli politics can sometimes generate great confusion as to what “normal” procedures are in public policy.

Trying to balance, on one hand, the desire to have institutions complying with national guidelines on education, with a need on the other hand to respect religious minorities, the state has developed a strange compromise with schools that insist on acting independently and shunning the national curriculum.

Those schools are “unofficial but recognised”, meaning, in short, that the state accepts that parents who send their children there are meeting their legal obligation to school their offspring, but does not entirely approve of how they are doing it. And it makes this clear with its cheque-book — for each hour these schools fail to teach the national curriculum, they lose funding.

On paper, this situation applies equally to “unofficial but recognised” schools of a Christian persuasion, and those in the strictly Orthodox Jewish sector. It is an even-handed rule for any schools that insist on independence. Except that the strictly Orthodox, represented by parties that sit in today’s government, have reached special arrangements so that their schools get full funding — or almost full funding — even when they flout the curriculum.

Christian schools, on the other hand, have no strong champions in the world of politics and have no such dispensation — plus they contest that even before deductions by the government, the new formula used to calculate their entitlements set their budgets too low. This lack of evenhandedness between Charedi schools and Christian schools in the same bracket is the root of much of the Christian resentment.

More than anything, the Christian schools crisis is illustrative of just how sectarian the Israeli political system is, and how even something so basic as classroom funding hinges on the political power of the politicians that parents in certain schools vote for.

Yes, there are rules, but if these politicians have enough power, the rules are made to be broken.