Israeli teachers who criticize the war have been yanked from the classroom — and thrown in jail

 (The only 'democracy' in the Middle East, or so they say)

from Forward

Sabreen Msarwi lost her job teaching Arabic at a middle school in Ganei Tikva last week after marching, as she does every year, to commemorate the Nakba, the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians around Israel’s 1948 founding.

She is one of dozens of Israeli educators, some Palestinian and some Jewish, to be suspended or fired from local schools and universities since Oct. 7 for voicing critical opinions of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, support for Palestinian resistance, and other views the government finds objectionable. Civil rights groups and defense lawyers count at least 46 indictments over the past seven months of people in academic settings who have expressed dissent, and said that at least 28 of them spent time in jail.

“There is no freedom of speech for teachers just now,” Msarwi, who is 46 and has been teaching for 23 years, told me at her home here in Tayibe, an Arab city of 45,000 in central Israel. “We’re being persecuted for expressing our views.”...

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