The Knesset dissolved on July 17 ahead of the October 27 election, ushering in a period during which, broadly speaking, new Knesset legislation and business is frozen unless there is coalition-opposition consensus.

Defying that norm, however, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government last week convened the Knesset Finance Committee and attempted to allocate almost $100 million to the ultra-Orthodox education system — including millions to build more Haredi schools, millions for yeshivas, and millions aimed at preventing yeshiva students from dropping out. There was, to put it mildly, no coalition-opposition consensus on this package of additional pre-election finance for the Haredim, and opposition politicians managed to thwart it — staging an 11-hour filibuster to prevent a vote.

It had naively been expected that this would be the end of the matter — since opposition consent was believed to be required even to convene another committee session on the same matter. But the coalition scheduled a second session nonetheless, ignoring opposition objections and a failed petition to the High Court, and on Tuesday it bulldozed through a similar package of extra Haredi “educational” funding that also includes money for a so-called Yeshiva Committee that has encouraged ultra-Orthodox draft evasion.

Israel’s education system is in crisis. It ranks 31st among 36 participating OECD countries in the latest PISA tests (the Program for International Student Assessment, which assesses 15-year-old students’ reading, mathematics, and science abilities).

And that appalling standing does not fully reflect Israel’s dismal reality. The vast majority of ultra-Orthodox boys, from their early teens onward, do not study a core curriculum — indeed study no secular subjects at all. Naturally, they do not take the PISA tests. Were they to do so, the true status of Israeli education would be revealed in all its gravity.

Not all young ultra-Orthodox men insistently reject worldly education. But those who apply for higher education programs, get accepted and begin such studies drop out at disproportionately high rates, according to data prepared by academic economist Prof. Dan Ben-David, because they have been deprived during their earlier miseducation of the basic tools to give them a realistic chance of success.

All of this renders the men of the fastest-growing community in Israel either unwilling to enter Israel’s hitherto first-class workforce (choosing to stay in yeshiva) or incapable of doing so (because of miseducation) — exacerbating the decline in the prowess of the Israeli workforce, with genuinely existential consequences. “There won’t be a third-world Israel,” warns Ben-David. In the “spiral of collapse” that Israel has already entered, he says, an increasingly inadequate education system will inevitably be unable to maintain a first-class economy, a first-class health system, or a first-class army. And a weakened army won’t be capable of protecting the state.

Netanyahu knows this, knows it deep down. He recognizes the dangers to Israel’s current and future capacity to survive and thrive posed by the exponential growth of an ultra-Orthodox community that is being deprived of an adequate education, refuses to serve in the army, and lacks the tools to productively enter the workforce even if it wanted to.

As finance minister back in 2003-5, with Israel facing recession and needing to cut public spending and revitalize the economy after the suicide-bomber battering of the Second Intifada, Netanyahu drastically cut........

© The Times of Israel