Education Ministry said monitoring posts of employees who criticize government

Ministry’s ‘Incitement Committee’ has compiled reports on 160 employees over their political expression, 52 of whom have been subject to disciplinary action, Haaretz reports

A shadowy Education Ministry body has been monitoring the social media posts of school teachers and counselors who engage in public criticism of the government under the guise of combating incitement, Haaretz reported Wednesday.

According to the Hebrew daily, the ministry operates a body called the Incitement Committee tasked with compiling reports on and recommending disciplinary action against employees over their speech inside and outside the classroom.

Though the government said the body has existed since 2016, Haaretz cited unnamed Education Ministry officials who claimed most of its activity has been conducted over the past three years, coinciding with the uptick in protests against the coalition’s judicial overhaul.

The committee is reportedly led by Lior Tuvia, a former high-ranking Shin Bet official who now serves as the head of the Education Ministry’s security department.

The Education Ministry, headed by the Likud party’s Yoav Kisch, said in a response to Haaretz that the body only probes employees when there is suspicion of “incitement, identification with terror or transgression of the law.”

But the body’s activities, as illustrated by Haaretz, appeared to deal mostly with political expression, especially criticism of the current government and its policies.

One of the committee’s reports obtained by the Hebrew daily concerned Yaron Avni, a 59-year-old school counselor who was probed in 2023 following an anonymous complaint filed against him for alleged “incitement against the government.”

The committee’s report included 24 screenshots of the counselor’s Facebook, where he called on Israelis to take to the streets in protest against the government.

On one occasion, Avni derided Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “enemy of the people.” Among his harshest posts was one saying that “criminals and psychos have taken over the Knesset” and will “receive a civil war in return.”

The committee concluded that Avni uploaded “incendiary posts against the Haredi sector, the government and its ministers and the prime minister” and had the school principal summon him for a hearing, in which he agreed to make his Facebook page private.

The committee has collected information on 160 educators since the start of 2023, according to the report. One-quarter of those investigated are Jewish, while the rest are Arab.

In another instance reported by the outlet, an Arab schoolteacher from the Jerusalem area was temporarily suspended from her position over an Instagram post she shared days after the Hamas-led October 7 massacre. The post depicted a young girl crying, alongside text that read, “stop the war” in Arabic and Hebrew.

According to Haaretz, the committee recommended disciplinary measures against a total of 52 Education Ministry employees. Seven cases resulted in the employee’s dismissal, but most involved their suspension or summoning to a disciplinary hearing. Nineteen of the cases are still in progress.

Responding to a Haaretz inquiry, the Education Ministry said that the Incitement Committee’s activity was regulated in September 2025. Before this, it had been operating under an internal document that the ministry refused to disclose.

Under the new guidelines, the committee reviews complaints about teachers’ “identification with terrorism” and examines “all expressions of teachers, whether within the framework of their work or outside of it, including posts on social media,” the ministry told the outlet.

Critics of Netanyahu and his coalition have frequently accused the government of abusing anti-incitement laws to crack down on political dissent.

In March, the High Court of Justice froze the operations of a police body established by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to combat incitement, after it was found to have engaged in the “proactive monitoring” of individuals’ social media activity to discover speech offenses.