Wonderful opportunities Israel’s children: not for everyone
What brought me and my friends to choose hairdressing rather than dancing and continental philosophy? For years we’ve wondered what led us to that decision. Why, a life of liberty awaited us after the years of adolescence, yet we chose to be carpenters and car mechanics, with the underlying lie that any kind of work honors the worker, when in fact only a job chosen freely and wisely gives the job-holder dignity. Only people lacking self-awareness can ask themselves such questions, people such as the education minister and his smug Ashkenazi friends. These are the people who apparently cannot understand why a woman slides into prostitution instead of stretching out on a campus lawn or studying at Stanford. They regard this as wasting one’s life, not comprehending why 17-year-olds choose to begin their adult lives with police files, breaking into cars instead of joining science clubs in Tel Aviv.
It’s true, one can’t compare the hell of prostitution to other pits that people can be thrown into, but neither can one remain indifferent in the face of people who believe everyone is born responsible for his or her destiny, and all that’s left is to use one’s youth for shaping a future of one’s choice, choosing with clear eyes between the multiple options available. In practice, people choose from a range afforded them by the circumstances of their lives and environment, or to put it simpler, so that Bennett understands: A person selects a meal from the menu he’s presented. If the menu contains white bread and margarine or an omelette and olives, the choice will be between those two items, not between olives and entrecote.
When the minister of education, followed by the right-wing government, presents the 50-percent statistic as an example of a reasoned choice, I wonder: Is it possible that they really believe this? Is there no one in this government who will bow his head and tell the truth, bitter as it may be?
The truth is that there is no choice when a person is yoked to the struggle for survival. And there isn’t the official kind of dropping out of school and the hidden kind, only the perilous kind. This cosmetic division is only meant to cleanse the consciences of those responsible. These people should be grappling with the data just released, with its immediate and gloomy implications, whereby a substantial portion of Israelis, from their early years, do not have the privilege of choosing. They are marked and cast off to their destiny on the margins, where they will remain forever in what Israeli governments, for years, with deliberate insensitivity, have chosen for them. All this without them, even for a day, being part of the decision making, so that they could try to stop the train that’s hurtling towards Startup Nation while leaving more and more of its citizens in the dust.
Emilie Moatti