I wish the above were the prelude to a groveling apology for having repeatedly maligned Israel’s public education system as “failing.” Unfortunately, the public education system had nothing to do with these stunning results; the credit belongs almost entirely to an extracurricular program run by Ben-Gurion University’s Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center – which is why southern students featured so prominently. The center, founded in 2007, has produced a steady stream of Israeli achievements at the competition in recent years.

Thus what these results actually show is just how much potential our failing school system is wasting – and why improving it ought to be a top priority for whatever new government is elected in January.

Of course, saying that is easy; the tough part is figuring out how. In an editorial last week, The Jerusalem Post urged the adoption of recommendations prepared by the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which focus on improving teacher quality. That’s clearly essential; it’s hard to provide serious math education, for instance, when 42 percent of high school math teachers lack college degrees in math or any related subject. But it’s equally clearly a long-term project.

There is, however, something schools can do that produces almost immediate results, as one failing New York public school recently discovered: invest serious time and energy, rather than mere lip service, in teaching kids to write.

An article published in this month’s Atlantic magazine tells the story of the New Dorp public school. For years, New Dorp tried all the accepted methods for turning itself around: It fired bad teachers; it solicited grant money that led it to reduce class sizes and offer after-school enrichment programs. But nothing worked.

When principal Deirdre DeAngelis sought to find out why, her investigation led her to a stunning conclusion: The one thing that consistently distinguished successful from failing students was that the former could express themselves in writing and the latter couldn’t. In fact, the failing students didn’t even know how to use simple connecting words like “and,” “but” “although” or “despite” to combine simple ideas into more complex ones.

One of my best high school teachers used to say that your ability to think is limited by your vocabulary: You can’t even think a thought if you lack the words to express it. That, essentially, was what DeAngelis discovered about her students: Because they lacked the tools to express complex ideas, they also lacked the tools to understand them.

She therefore got an expert to show her teachers how to teach writing. Then New Dorp began teaching its students. First, they were drilled in basic grammar, learning how to use crucial connecting words like “although.” Then they were made to practice – relentlessly.

Writing became part of the curriculum in every subject except math. Even in chemistry class, students were assigned to produce complex sentences describing the concepts they had learned (like “Although hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion, a compound of them puts out fires.”)

Later, they were taught how to combine such sentences into paragraphs, then expository essays, so as to convey complex ideas. Essentially, New Dorp scrapped the prevailing American educational theory, which held that students learn writing best through fun, creative assignments. Now, instead of assignments like “Write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I,” students had to write essays describing three major causes of the war.

The results were dramatic. Between 2009 and 2011, the proportion of students who passed New York’s statewide Regents exams shot up from 67 to 89 percent in English and from 64 to 75 percent in history. The number of students put in remedial courses after failing the exams the first time fell from 175 to 40. And the number taking college-level courses rose from 148 in 2006 to 412 in 2011.

The implications for Israel should be obvious. Though Israeli students are taught grammar, they are required to do very little writing. And like any skill, writing can’t be learned without practice. The result, as university presidents have been warning for years, is that students enter college with very poor writing skills.

They also enter with poor skills in many other areas – as is clear not only from the laments of university presidents, but also from the results of the triannual PISA exam: On the 2009 exam (the 2012 results aren’t available yet), Israel ranked 36th out of 64 countries in reading and 41st in science and math. Yet as New Dorp’s experience shows, teaching kids to write can also improve their learning skills in general.

Obviously, better math and science education are also essential: From the shortage of trained teachers to problems with curricula (the sharp drop in eighth-grade math scores on last year’s nationwide Meitzav achievement tests, for instance, has prompted the Education Ministry to investigate whether its new middle-school math curriculum isn’t making things worse rather than better), Israeli schools face serious problems in math and science education that must be addressed.

But doing so will require both time and money: Not only is it impossible to recruit thousands of qualified teachers overnight, but persuading people with top-notch math and science skills to choose teaching over high-tech will require narrowing the enormous salary gap between these professions. In contrast, a serious writing program can be introduced quickly and cheaply, and it demonstrably produces quick results.

A beefed-up writing program would thus be an excellent way to start improving the education system. And it would even be politically smart – because nothing would make parents more likely to reelect a government than seeing their children’s achievements at school demonstrably improve.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

As Rabbi Yuval Cherlow pointed out recently, denying Jews the right to pray at their holiest site grossly violates their freedom of religion, making the silence of our “human rights” organizations unconscionable. “Anyone who doesn’t fight for freedom of worship on Temple Mount,” he correctly noted, “is not a true advocate of human rights.”

No less hypocritical is the silence of our self-styled defenders of “the rule of law.” In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that “Jewish prayer should not be prevented unless there is concrete information about actual danger to [human] life” or the worshipers’ safety. Yet despite the security quiet of the past six years, police have consistently barred Jewish prayer on the Mount, in gross violation of this ruling.

Still, hypocrisy by human rights organizations and “rule of law” advocates is nothing new. What is truly disturbing is the inertia of our elected representatives – the people whose job it is to ensure that the Jewish state fulfills its purpose.

Two justifications are usually cited for the prayer ban. One is that halakha (Jewish law) itself bars Jews from worshiping on the Mount, so the ban doesn’t actually infringe on Jewish freedom of worship. The other is that allowing Jewish worship would spark Arab riots, because Muslims consider the Mount their exclusive preserve. Neither holds water.

The first did have some validity when the ban was first imposed, immediately after Jerusalem’s reunification in 1967: Back then, rabbinical authorities almost unanimously agreed that halakha forbids Jews even to set foot on the Mount. But while haredi rabbis still maintain this view, most religious Zionist rabbis now consider it possible to distinguish the halakhically forbidden parts of the Mount from those that aren’t. Consequently, they not only permit ascending the Mount, but actively encourage it: In October 2009, for instance, leading religious Zionist rabbis publicly said Jews should go there frequently and in large numbers.

The religious public, incidentally, appears to be ahead of its leadership on this issue: A recent poll showed that fully 92 percent of religious Jews favor allowing Jewish worship on the Mount – as do 52 percent of Israeli Jews overall. 
 
The security argument, in contrast, was always specious, as proven by the success with which Jews and Muslims share another holy site: the Cave of the Patriarchs (Machpela) in Hebron. On most days, part of the cave functions as a mosque and part as a synagogue, while on Jewish and Muslim holidays, the cave is open only to members of the celebrating religion. The arrangement hasn’t been tension-free, but it has held for 45 years now – and far from sparking Arab unrest, Muslim riots actually occur far less frequently at Machpela than they do on the Mount.

Nor is this coincidental: It’s precisely because of Israel’s commitment to keeping Machpela open to Jews that Muslim riots are less common there. At Machpela, rioting would be counterproductive: Israel would more likely respond by closing the cave to Muslims than to Jews. But on the Mount, rioting pays off handsomely: Instead of closing the site to Muslims, Israel invariably responds by “temporarily” closing it to Jews. And “temporarily” is an elastic term: After the intifada erupted in September 2000, for instance, the Mount was “temporarily” closed to Jews for the next three years.

Thus while allowing Jewish worship on the Mount probably would spark Muslim outbursts at first, a consistent policy of penalizing Arabs rather than Jews for Arab rioting – instead of the current policy of penalizing Jews – would soon make such rioting as rare as it is at Machpela. Spontaneous riots might still occur occasionally, but many riots on the Mount are deliberately incited by political and religious leaders seeking to bolster Muslim control of the site. Once these leaders are convinced that rioting will undermine this goal rather than serving it, nonspontaneous riots will stop.

Indeed, sharing the Mount is actually easier than sharing Machpela, because Jews and Muslims aren’t seeking to pray in the very same spot: Both Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located in areas that all halakhic authorities deem off-limits to Jews.

Permitting Jewish worship on the Mount would also serve Israel’s diplomatic interests. By banning Jewish prayer, Israel has convinced the world that the Mount is far more religiously important to Muslims than to Jews, though in reality, it is Judaism’s holiest site, and only Islam’s third holiest. This misconception badly undermines Israel’s ability to muster international support for keeping Jerusalem united.

Yet this consideration, weighty though it is, pales beside the basic fact that banning Jewish worship on the Mount is a betrayal of everything the Jewish State is supposed to be. Two weeks ago, discussing another shocking incident, Robert Horenstein wrote in these pages that “The nation-state of the Jewish people cannot be a place where one of its citizens can be taken into custody for carrying a Torah.” I agree. But the nation-state of the Jewish people also can’t be a place where Jews are arrested for praying at Judaism’s holiest site.

In August, coalition chairman MK Zeev Elkin publicly declared that Israel should institute a shared-worship model on the Mount like the one at Machpela. That’s encouraging, but so far, he hasn’t translated his words into action. The only MK who has submitted legislation on the issue is opposition member Aryeh Eldad (National Union).

Even the US State Department now acknowledges that banning Jewish worship on the Mount violates religious freedom. It’s long past time for the Knesset to do the same – and to finally end this disgrace by enacting appropriate legislation.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

Other pundits have advanced this claim before, often persuasively. But what makes Gabriel Scheinmann’s piece in The National Interest unique is that he doesn’t ground it in either domestic or foreign-policy considerations, which could theoretically change. Rather, he points to a consistent, half-century-old policy tradition in which successive US governments, both Democratic and Republican, have repeatedly considered preemptive military action against nuclear programs, and always decided against it – from the Soviet Union in the 1950s through China in the 1960s all the way to Syria in 2007.

Indeed, as another article published recently by the Washington Institute reveals, US governments have sometimes gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to take action: In the 1980s, for instance, Washington knew Pakistan “was producing all the parts for a nuclear weapon–indeed, for several such weapons–and almost entirely assembling them. Yet because the last screw had not been tightened in Pakistan’s case, the US government certified to Congress each year that Pakistan did not have a nuclear weapon.”

Scheinmann doesn’t detail why successive governments rejected military action, but the reasons are fairly obvious: Most of the same arguments – from reluctance to be seen as the aggressor through belief in the feasibility of containment to fear of sparking a war – are made today by opponents of military action against Iran. But there’s another, even more important reason that often goes unspoken: America is a superpower. Hence even another nuclear superpower like the USSR doesn’t necessarily pose an existential threat to it. And a mere regional power like Iran certainly doesn’t.

This doesn’t mean a nuclear-armed Iran couldn’t cause America plenty of pain; it could. But pain isn’t an existential threat. The USSR also caused America plenty of pain, including hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded in several conventional wars against Soviet-backed forces. Yet overall, America still flourished during that half-century of conflict.

For a tiny country like Israel, in contrast, a nuclear Iran is an existential threat. This isn’t merely because a single nuclear bomb could wipe out much of the country; it’s also because Israel is so badly outnumbered by hostile neighbors’ conventional forces. Indeed, as former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold noted last month, tape recordings seized by US forces during the Iraq War show that this was a major impetus behind Saddam Hussein’s desire for nuclear weapons: On several occasions, he told senior aides that once Israel’s putative nukes had been neutralized by the threat of mutual assured destruction, Iraq and its allies would be able to destroy the Zionist entity in a conventional war.

Why does all this matter? Because one major reason why so many Israeli ministers and defense officials oppose an Israeli attack on Iran is their hope that eventually, once it’s clear time is running out, Washington will make good on its oft-repeated pledge to keep Iran from acquiring nukes by launching military action of its own.

There’s virtually no disagreement among Israel’s leadership that if the only choices are Israeli military action or a nuclear Iran, the former is preferable. But there’s also virtually no disagreement that American military action is preferable to either. America’s vastly more powerful military can do much more damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities than Israel’s can, while its superpower status means that afterward, it is both far less likely to suffer international penalties and far more likely to be able to mobilize international pressure to keep Iran from reconstituting its nuclear program. Hence if American military action is in the cards, it makes sense for Israel to eschew military action of its own.

But if American military action isn’t going to happen, then Israel has nothing to gain, and a great deal to lose, by postponing its own strike: Iran will exploit every extra day it is given to expand its nuclear program and fortify it against attack, so the more time passes, the less damage an Israeli strike will be able to inflict – and therefore, the less it will delay Iran’s pursuit of the bomb. And since delay is pointless unless it buys enough time for some more permanent solution – whether an internal uprising that overthrows the mullahs’ regime, an Iranian overreaction that prompts an America military response, or sanctions crippling enough to actually force Iran to abandon its nuclear program (something the current sanctions, for all the pain they are causing, as yet show no sign of doing) – less delay means less chance of ultimate success.

Obviously, there could still be other valid reasons for postponing Israeli action: If, for instance, waiting until after the US elections would significantly increase either the likelihood or the magnitude of American support for Israel after the strike, the benefits might outweigh the costs. But postponing an Israeli strike in the hope that America will attack instead would be the height of irresponsibility, because the chances of that are virtually nonexistent.

In a rare moment of candor, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey recently acknowledged that Iran’s nuclear program worries Israel more than it does America because Israelis “are living with an existential concern that we are not living with.” That’s the crucial point Israelis must keep in mind, because that’s why American military action is ultimately unlikely.

It’s no accident that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli politician most knowledgeable about America, is also the strongest supporter of Israeli military action against Iran: Unlike his fellows, he realizes just how unlikely American action is. But it’s past time for the rest of Israel’s decision makers to face up to this unpleasant fact as well. If military action is needed to keep Iran from getting nukes, Israel will have to launch the strike itself.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

“For 60 years I have defended Germany as a survivor of the Shoah. Now I ask myself if that was right,” wrote Charlotte Knobloch, responding to a German court’s ruling that circumcision was illegal and a subsequent criminal complaint against a rabbi for performing circumcisions. Charging that people who know nothing about Judaism “now want to tell us whether and how we can follow our religion,” she said that for six decades, she defended her decision to stay in Germany after the Holocaust “because I was firmly convinced that this country and these people deserved it. For the first time my basic convictions are starting to shake … I seriously ask if this country still wants us.”

Berlin has since unveiled draft legislation to legalize circumcision. But as a recent study by the Jewish People Policy Institute makes clear, Germany isn’t the only European country where non-Jews are trying to tell Jews “whether and how we can follow our religion.” Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland all ban kosher slaughter, and Holland came close to joining them this year before a last-minute deal averted the threat. Switzerland is now considering abolishing eternal cemeteries, a cornerstone of Jewish burial practice. Switzerland and France have both denied Jews the right to reschedule public exams administered on Shabbat or Jewish holidays. And the list could go on.

Perhaps even more troubling is the rise in physical assaults on Jews. Anti-Semitic attacks have occurred in many countries: In Germany, for instance, a rabbi out walking with his six-year-old daughter was brutally assaulted in August. But the worst outrages have occurred in France. In March, a Muslim extremist murdered three schoolchildren and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse, while just two weeks ago, a firebomb thrown at a kosher supermarket in a Parisian suburb wounded four people, at least one of them seriously.

A decade ago, at the height of the intifada, it was Israelis who had to fear being killed while engaging in everyday activities like attending school or going grocery shopping. Today, it seems, it’s French Jews who must live with this numbing fear. Being Jewish has always been more comfortable and convenient in Israel than in Europe, but this is the first time in 25 years here that I’ve felt I could honestly say it’s safer as well.

These developments clearly have serious implications – not just for European Jews, but also for European non-Jews and for Israel.

With regard to European Jews, France may prove to be a bellwether: French Jews have been buying second homes in Israel in record numbers in recent years (thereby contributing to the surge in home prices that brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets last year). Daniel Ben Simon, author of a 2007 book on French Jewry’s response to anti-Semitism, recently estimated that “almost one in two French Jews maintains a residence in Israel.” Partly, this is because many French Jews are committed Zionists: They care about Israel and like spending time here. But it’s also “a sort of insurance policy, just in case the situation in France gets even worse,” Ben Simon noted.

There hasn’t yet been any comparable surge of home-buying in Israel among other European Jews. But if their situation continues to deteriorate, more and more of them may consider leaving – or at least buying themselves an Israeli “insurance policy.”

Yet the implications may be even graver for Europe’s non-Jewish majority. Jews are the canary in the coal mine, in the sense that mistreatment of Jews has always been a warning sign of more widespread societal problems. In Europe, the problem is twofold: The physical attacks on Jews – almost all of which have been perpetrated by Muslims – reflect a rising radicalism among the continent’s sizable Muslim minority, while the legal attacks on Jewish praxis point to a majority increasingly intolerant of “the other.” Unless these trends reverse, Europe may well be headed for an ugly, violent clash between its intolerant majority and its radicalized minority. And unlike the continent’s Jews, who will always be welcome in Israel, its non-Jews have nowhere to go to escape the fallout.  

Finally, there are the implications for Israel. As the JPPI study noted, most of the attacks on Jewish praxis have been couched in the language of universal human rights: Circumcision allegedly causes pain and bodily harm to a helpless infant with no medical justification (and never mind the evidence to the contrary); kosher slaughter allegedly causes unacceptable suffering to animals (again, never mind the evidence to the contrary). That proponents of these bans are thereby denying Jews (and Muslims) one of the most fundamental human rights of all – freedom of religion – evidently doesn’t matter.

“Human rights,” of course, are also the favorite justification for European attacks on any and all Israeli self-defense measures: The West Bank security fence impedes Palestinians’ freedom of movement; the Gaza blockade impedes their freedom of commerce; Israeli military operations cause unjustified civilian casualties. Here too, no evidence to the contrary seems to matter (such as the testimony by a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan that the Israel Defense Forces does “more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”) Nor does the fact that acceding to European demands to eschew such measures would deprive Israelis of the most fundamental human right of all: the right to life.

But the fact that this twisted definition of “human rights” is now being turned against Europe’s own citizens means the disease is metastasizing. And if it continues to spread, even the limited support Israel now receives from European governments is liable to evaporate.

Yet even so, Israel will likely get the better of the bargain. For if these trends continue, it may well be compensated for the loss of European support by a mass immigration of European Jews. Europe, in contrast, would only be poorer for their loss.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.