Students protest plan to appoint IDF officers to high schools By Yulie Khromchenko, Haaretz Correspondent
Three twelfth-grade students from Tel Aviv's municipal high school "A" protested on Tuesday the plan to appoint Israel Defense Forces officers to high schools around the country. The three students chained themselves to the entrance to an auditorium in which Brigadier General Yonatan Loker, commander of the air force's Hatzerim base, was due to give a lecture.
The students said they were protesting "the military takeover of the education system and [the plan to] turn high schools into military preparatory academies."
"We are declaring our opposition to the placing of military figures inside schools, a factor which would contribute to the dissolution of civil society and its total militarization," the students said.
Police officers were called to the school following the incident.
The invitation to Loker was made in the framework of widening cooperation between the Education Ministry and the IDF's Education Corps according to which officers will escort high school students through their final years of studies and will encourage their draft into the army.
In the first phase of the plan, officers will be assigned to 74 high schools around the country. The following year, the project will be expanded to include 250 high schools.
Activist organizations, including Courage to Refuse, have expressed their opposition to the involvement of the military in the country's education system.