Last week, a special ceremony took place at Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, complete with Israeli flags, songs about Jerusalem, a reading about a fallen paratrooper and, to top it off, a military-style march with cardboard tanks, cardboard submarines and even cardboard soldiers. But this event at the memorial-museum was no military ceremony honoring the fallen; it was a school graduation ceremony for some 600 sixth-graders from Kiryat Ono.

Nor is Kiryat Ono unique: A similar graduation ceremony took place there this week, for elementary school students from Ashdod’s Hayovel School.

Altogether, officials from the Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site said, about 10 public schools are holding graduation ceremonies there. And schools regularly hold other ceremonies there as well – even bar-mitzvah parties.

“It’s been growing over the past two years,” said the site’s marking manager, Alon Wald. Typically, he added, children recite or act out scenes that took place at Ammunition Hill, hold flag marches, dance and sing.

The Armored Corps Museum at Latrun also hosts school graduation ceremonies, though less often. This year’s graduation will be for sixth-graders from a school in Ashkelon, and it, too, will include a military-style parade. The children will also tour the site’s tanks and visit the memorial, and each student will choose one fallen soldier from the memorial’s list to learn about.

Other sites with grim histories that host school graduations include Masada, a fortress that fell to the Romans 2,000 years ago, and Atlit, an internment camp for illegal Jewish immigrants under the British Mandate. Masada said it will host roughly three graduations a week during the month of June.

At Atlit, the ceremony often includes a reenactment in which students playing the illegal immigrants are caught by “British ambushers,” aka their parents. The institutions that will hold graduations there this month include elementary schools from Kiryat Yam, Rishon Letzion and Kiryat Motzkin.

Military memorials and other sites with blood-drenched histories don’t seem like a natural choice for elementary school graduations. But the principals, teachers and parents who chose these sites said their main attraction is that they’re cheap compared to an ordinary graduation party, which requires a hall, deejay, sound system, lighting, party manager and many wasted school days for rehearsals. Having the ceremony in Jerusalem is especially cheap, because the Education Ministry subsidizes trips to the capital for schoolchildren from other cities.

Moreover, they said, these sites provide an opportunity for the children to learn some history instead of just having a party.

Still, graduation comes hard on the heels of Memorial Day, Independence Day and Jerusalem Day, when similar material is studied. So why do graduations also need to focus on national history and the military instead of other values?

“We’re a state education system that’s connected to the Land of Israel, the people of Israel; we carry the flag proudly,” responded Tammy Alfasi, principal of Hayovel, adding that every day in her school begins with singing the national anthem.

Dr. Yardena Hadad, who heads Kiryat Ono’s municipal department of elementary education, said that during the ceremonies, “we don’t speak about the fallen; we talk about strength, about national pride.” The flag marches, she added, aren’t about the military, but about “love of the homeland, giving and unity.”

Shimon Amos, principal of the Rambam School in Ashkelon, said that visiting a site like Latrun and actually seeing the weaponry “gives added value” to the history lectures students hear in class.

One of his teachers, Orly Medina, added, “Children who see soldiers identify with them, especially after the last war. That’s the awareness they need when they study this in history [or] Bible; they learn about wars. They have to be exposed to the future, no?”

That’s precisely what infuriates Dr. Hagit Gur-Ziv, an expert in early childhood education who teaches at The Kibbutz Teachers College and Tel Aviv University and has researched the issue of militarism in education.

“They prepare the children to be drafted and to accept that war always was and always will be, and that we’re sentenced to live by the sword,” she said. “And we don’t ask whether perhaps all this education also creates war.”

Gur-Ziv said she agrees that graduation ceremonies should inculcate values; “the question is, which values? I don’t think that in sixth grade, the value ought to be militarist, or one that sanctifies death ... There’s an argument of principle here over what education we want – nationalist/militarist or humanist.”

Prof. Eyal Naveh, a historian from Tel Aviv University, agreed. “To me, it seems a bit perverted to go to a place where people died,” he said. “Its source is an unhealthy nationalism, as if we have to prove that we’re here and this is ours ... It’s a kind of indoctrination.”

One teacher from a Tel Aviv high school said that while she disapproves of this trend, “as a teacher, I have no possibility of expressing another view or balancing it; I’ve already been reprimanded in the past.”

A., a seventh-grade civics teacher from central Israel, said he found it chilling to watch a bar-mitzvah ceremony at Ammunition Hill with military-style content, but heard no complaints from parents. “There’s a feeling that it’s forbidden to talk with them, because this is explosive material,” he said.

“It’s fine to educate the children to love the state and its symbols,” he added. “But why do you need an Israel Defense Forces march in the background? What’s the connection to the army?”