Israeli Schooling and the Pedagogy of Hate

Hadas Emma Kedar is an Israeli academic based in Germany, a doctoral student in communication studies with previous training in art, education, and teaching. For years she worked as an art and video teacher and as a moderator for alternative news in Israel. In recent years she has become a visible figure within the pro-Palestinian movement in Germany, combining public activism, participation in demonstrations, and systematic work within the university environment, where she gives talks and organizes discussions with students and colleagues. Her trajectory places her in a singular position: she speaks as a researcher, as an educator, and as someone shaped by the Israeli educational system which, as she explains, forms political identities from childhood.


In her conversation, Kedar describes with precision how Israeli education is structured, above all, as a Zionist ecosystem that operates without naming itself. She defines it as “the air you breathe”: an ideology that shapes the historical narrative, school content, ethnic hierarchies, and the relationship with Palestinians. Kedar details how this system instills the idea of Jewish superiority, the notion of a democracy reserved primarily for Jews, and an emotional structure centered on permanent victimhood, built above all through Holocaust instruction. Her testimony describes how the national narrative links historical trauma directly to the need for militarization, turning schools into spaces where soldiers and teachers share functions, and where the transition into the Israeli Defense Forces is presented as a natural destiny. Drawing from her experience as a student and later as a teacher, Kedar exposes the depth of the dehumanization of Palestinians in classrooms and the impossibility of introducing even minimal elements of empathy without facing sanctions, threats, or censorship. For her, Israeli society —and its educational system— have reached a point where no meaningful change can emerge from within: only international intervention, she argues, could break the ideological structure that today sustains violence and denial.


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