Can Israeli teachers and students talk about the Gaza war together?
Dina Kraft - August 25, 2025
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Last year, the first day of school, September 1, 2024, fell on a morning when especially tragic news was announced in Israel. For, overnight, what until then had been whispered as rumors and shared tentatively on social media was confirmed: six young Israelis were found executed, all shot at close range, in a Hamas tunnel under the Gaza city of Rafah.
Among them was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the dual American-Israeli citizen whose effervescent smile and whose parents’ advocacy had made him one of the most well-known of the hostages stolen into Gaza during the October 7 attack.
A photo of Hersh from captivity hangs outside the front gate of my son’s middle school in Tel Aviv under the words, “What if this was your son?”
It’s still hanging there now ready to “greet” another group of adolescents on another upcoming first day of school, this time almost two years into the Gaza war–with memories fresh from the Iran war that ended their school year as they sheltered in their city under attack by ballistic missile barrages.
The shadow of the killing of the “Beautiful Six” (as Rachel Goldberg-Polin dubbed them) hangs over the country as the cautionary tale, one that even the Israeli chief of staff has warned of, that military force endangers Israel’s remaining living hostages. All this while soldiers and reservists, among them the older brothers, cousins, and fathers of this country’s schoolchildren, take part in a newly-expanded and domestically-unpopular operation to take over Gaza City.
Yet in most classrooms there is likely to be little talk from teachers of the ongoing war and its impact on the students. Talking about the war in such a setting is often discouraged and dismissed here as engaging in “politics,” although some would argue that not talking about it is also a political act.
Roey Perlstein-Dvir, a high school civics teacher (and old friend) in the central Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, told me: “It’s a very volatile atmosphere right now and mostly teachers try to navigate it as carefully as possible to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes.”
As an example of how charged things are he points to a letter sent out to teachers nationwide yesterday by the Education Minister Yoav Kisch.
Kisch wrote about the dress code, suggesting the students should wear white shirts.
“It took me a while to understand what he was referring to was that he wants to make sure schools prevent students from coming to school in yellow shirts,” Perlstein-Dvir told me.
Yellow shirts would signify support for the hostages, an issue that one might think would be a consensus issue in Israel but has been made into a polarizing one. That sentiment has only ratcheted up as the government’s quest for “total victory” against Hamas is continually extended.
On the most recent episode of the podcast “Unholy,” Ruth Margalit, an Israeli journalist who has written about Israeli politics and society for The New Yorker shared: “I keep thinking about raising children here and how do we go on and what do we tell ourselves? And how do we make it better?”
“It does go back to the hostage issue and the Channel 14 narrative here (the nationalist TV station) and this is the government line too: is that it’s a personal tragedy, these are individual stories. Israel is a difficult place to live in; it requires a lot: mandatory service, terrible security, a ‘tough neighborhood.’ And the “only thing we have going for us,” she says, “is this sense of solidarity and the sense we have deep ties that bind us together. And if we look at hostages, at civilians kidnapped as personal stories, as families’ (cases of) bad luck, then really this place has no justification anymore.”
This week Sophie Pfeffer, principal of the Pelach School, a prestigious religious school for girls in Jerusalem sent a letter to students, parents, and faculty after she appeared in a video of school principals and made a statement that was welcomed by some, criticized by others.
In it, Pfeffer said:
Educators and community leaders cannot stand idly by. We, principals of schools across the country, are committed to the values of love and humanity and human dignity. We are committed to promoting the spiritual and physical health of our students, and to nurturing them into good people and caring, decent citizens. We cannot remain indifferent to the abandonment of the hostages, to endangering the lives of soldiers, and to the hunger and severe harm being caused to the civilian population in Gaza. Therefore, we call for an end to the war and the immediate return of the hostages.
Pfeffer’s statement also noted that it was teachers’ “professional and moral duty” to raise their voices.
In her letter responding to pushback, she shared a letter from the student council expressing discomfort some students had with her statement. Pfeffer wrote, “This is indeed a moment of discomfort – and that really is the situation. Discomfort is not an unwelcome state in a democracy, where the very expression of diverse and opposing opinions is of existential importance.”
Pfeffer went on to clarify, “My aim is not for my students to think what I think or to identify with my views. What matters to me very much is that they think. Young women learn and grow not only through imitation and identification, but they also form their identities out of friction and resistance to what exists. Every parent not only knows this, but also feels it. At the Pelech School, it is not only okay to ask questions, it is what we strive for. Silencing issues of fateful importance – especially those at the heart of the national agenda – is just sedation and obfuscation, and it is an anti-educational act.”
Perlstein-Dvir, the civics teacher, notes some teachers have been reprimanded by higher-ups for speaking out about the war, whether in social media or in the classroom.
There is fear within the education system, he says. That fear is compounded by wanting to be sensitive to those pupils who have relatives currently fighting in Gaza or those who have been injured or killed, which is another reason conversations don’t happen.
Conducting conversations like this requires teachers to know their students well, and ideally to be trained in mediating sensitive conversations. And then there is the challenge of teaching critical thinking in an era where students have grown up in the noise of social media, with little or no teaching of media literacy.
“There are some teachers who insist on talking, and work on trying to make students see the complexity of the situation by asking questions, being critical of the media, of social networks,” Perlstein-Dvir says. “The ‘post truth’ age is so hard on kids in which it is hard to differentiate between fake and real news… what is trending most has more truth for them.”
The combination of teachers’ fears of being sanctioned for opening up free and critical dialogue and the challenge of navigating a painful and confusing political situation in our social media age means most students will not get a chance to work through their thoughts in the classroom setting.
When I brought this question up of “processing” the war as students together in a class setting last year I was told that the school was seeking to keep schooltime as an oasis from the outside stress of the war. One parent told me she preferred it that way, noting she was careful to keep the news off in her house.
But of course in Israel there is no hiding from the reality when siren alarms go off as recently as this last Friday night, when a national strike in solidarity with the hostages and against the invasion of Gaza City disrupts the country and international outcry over what the UN declares as a famine in Gaza reaches even ears that prefer not to dwell on the suffering of Gazan civilians.
Dvir-Perlstein says that he has been fortunate, because even though he teaches in a largely right-wing school as someone with left-wing views, he has not been deterred from opening up dialogue with his students about political issues, even now, in wartime.
He lays out the facts and issues of any given moment, encourages students to debate, push back, and discuss. “And actually, it works out pretty nicely.”
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.
