“Israeli teenagers: Racist and proud of it,” leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz titled a feature story on 23 August 2014. “Ethnic hatred has become a basic element in the everyday life of Israeli youth, a forthcoming book finds,” the byline reads.

Numerous Israeli scholars and activists, not to mention countless Palestinians and Africans in Israel, have been saying this for years. Haaretz, often referred to as “the Israeli New York Times,” is addressing it.

The piece opens with a quote from a 10th-grade Israeli girl from a high school in the central part of the country.

For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand. I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that … their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them. I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by the [bus] station and whistle. I wish them death.

The article is a review of upcoming book from which this interview is excerpted. Scenes from School Life is based on three years of field work by Israeli sociologist Idan Yaron at a six-year, secular Israeli high school. The school was “the most average school we could find,” says professor of education Yoram Harpaz, who wrote the book with Yaron. The quote above was taken from a student at this “most average school.”

Author Or Kashti writes

Yaron’s descriptions of what he saw at the school show that such hatred is a basic everyday element among youth, and a key component of their identity. Yaron portrays the hatred without rose-colored glasses or any attempt to present it as a sign of social “unity.” What he observed is unfiltered hatred. One conclusion that arises from the text is how little the education system is able—or wants—to deal with the racism problem.

Kashti writes of how the education “system’s internal logic” is fundamentally racist and how, although some educators “dare to try and take on the system, … they are a minority.”

In the same chapter from which the above quote is excerpted, he recalls a Bible lesson in a ninth-grade class in which a student “insists that revenge is an important emotion” and “utilizes the material being studied to hammer home his semi-covert message: All the Arabs should be killed. The class goes into an uproar. Five students agree with Yoav and say openly: The Arabs should be killed.”

These students’ racism is often tied up with their religious extremism. One student was told in synagogue that “Arabs are a rabble,” and that Arabs are “Amalek,” that “there is a commandment to kill them all.”

For some context, of the Amalekites, Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha writes, in his book Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion:

Frequently Jewish fundamentalists refer to the Palestinians as the “Amalekites” … of today … According to the Old Testament, the Amalek … were regarded as the Israelites’ inveterate foe, whose “annihilation” became a sacred duty and against whom war should be waged until their “memory be blotted out” forever (Ex 17:16; Deut 25:17-19)…. Some of the [modern] political messianics insist on giving the biblical commandment to “blot out the memory of the Amalek” an actual contemporary relevance in the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

When another student explains he only believes in killing Arabs in self-defense, some “of the other students are outraged.” No worries, to express that he’s racist enough to be accepted by his peers, he “then makes it clear that he has no love for Arabs and that he is not a leftist.”

A lone student says that “not all Arabs are bad, … and certainly they don’t all deserve to die.” She is taunted by the other students, called an “Arab lover” and a “leftist.” After the students left the classroom, they “formed a human chain” her and chanted “Fie, fie, fie, the Arabs will die.” The teacher took her “to the teachers’ room. She was in a state of shock, reeling under the insult, with tears to come instantly.”

The same 10th-grade girl whose quote opened the article later said

As soon as I heard about the quarrel with that leftist girl, I was ready to throw a brick at her head and kill her. In my opinion, all the leftists are Israel-haters. I personally find it very painful. Those people have no place in our country—both the Arabs and the leftists.

Comments like these demonstrate that Israel is not just racist; it is fascist. And not just fascist in the hyperbolic, colloquial sense. Literally fascist. As in Blackshirts, Mussolini fascist. Many Israelis are not just racist; they are extreme, far-right nationalists. And racism, hyper-nationalism, and utmost faith in the authoritarian racial state are the recipe for fascism.

“Anyone who imagines this as a local, passing outburst is wrong,” Kashti writes, telling of an incident in which a teacher expressed “left-wing views” in class and a student “cursed and shouted at a teacher who ‘justified the Arabs.'”

“Racism is part of our life, no matter how much people say it’s bad,” an interviewed student maintained. In a workshop about racism, when asked how racism might be eradicated, students immediately replied “Thin out the Arabs.” “If we’re not racist, that makes us leftists,” one student complained, conveying that it is not just racism that motivates them, but far-right politics—i.e., fascism.

This racism isn’t even directed just at Palestinians and Africans; it’s also directed toward fellow Jews who aren’t quite white enough. The book speaks too of Ashkenazi (Jews of European descent) racism toward Mizrahi (Jews of Middle Eastern or North African descent). White supremacy is a global phenomenon, and Israel is a white supremacist society.

The school’s principal addresses the fascist nature of Israeli society, explaining

There is no discussion about the topic of racism in the school and there probably will not be. We are not prepared for the deep, long-term process that’s necessary. Even though I am constantly aware of the problem, it is far from being dealt with. It stems in the first place from the home, the community and the society, and it’s hard for us to cope with it. You have to remember that another reason it’s hard to deal with the problem is that it also exists among the teachers. Issues such as “human dignity” or “humanism” are in any case considered left-wing, and anyone who addresses them is considered tainted.

At the expense of cheapening the principal’s point, I might also point out that, when you look at how Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and foreign fighters violently resisting oppression (often slandered as “terrorists”) are discussed in the US, you’ll see issues “such as ‘human dignity’ or ‘humanism’ are in any case considered left-wing, and anyone who addresses them is considered tainted” here too.

Co-author Prof. Harpaz admits the “schools are not geared for” dealing with racism.” He details the neoliberal nature of the schools, lamenting

They can only impart basic knowledge and skills, hold examinations on them and grade the students. In fact, they have a hard time doing even that. In classes of 40 students, with a strict curriculum and exams that have to be held, it is impossible to engage in values-based education.

(While we’re talking about connections to the US—only basic knowledge, large classes, and strict curricula and exams? Sound like US schools, don’t they? That’s because they’re based on the same neoliberal capitalist model: create an obedient work force that is just skilled enough to work and consume. Little more.)

Co-author Yaron explains that the “greatest threat to the teacher is that there will be noise—that someone will complain, that an argument will break out, etc.” and that teachers “lack the tools to cope with these issues, so they are outsourced.” Speaking of the neoliberal attack on education, the use of the term “outsourced” is quite appropriate.

Kashti points out too an “ideological aspect” to this “demand for quiet” (on a related note, “return the quiet” is the same euphemism the Israeli government uses to mean “bomb the Palestinians back into submission under our brutal occupation” whenever there is an uprising; this parallel should not go unnoticed). He indicates that there is a whole slew of subjects that are practically not on the table for discussion in schools, including Israel’s foundational ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (the Nakba), “human rights, and the morality of Israeli army operations.”

How can this racism change? Harpaz correctly insists that “every aspect of the schools—patterns of teaching, evaluation methods, curricula, the physical structure and the cultural climate—has to change in the direction of becoming far more dialogical and democratic,” but he doesn’t go far enough.

Zionism itself is racism. Zionism itself is colonialism. A state founded on racist settler colonialism and the brutal ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people is fundamentally, structurally racist. Kashti notes that a “more radical change is needed.” That change is much more radical than merely changing the school system. That change requires rejecting the ideology of Zionism itself.

As I have written before,

A Jewish state, by the very nature of it being a Jewish state, must necessarily discriminate against the non-Jewish, minority population, in order to ensure the continued supremacy of the majority. [Palestinians, as members] of the group on the receiving end of this racist oppression, naturally would be opposed to recognizing its calcification in the form of a racial state forcibly (bloodily) constructed upon the land of [their] ethnically cleansed ancestors.

The whole notion of the “Jewish state” must be rejected—just as the whole notion of any racial state, of any ethnocracy, must be rejected. A racial state is fundamentally racist; virulent racism in its schools is only a symptom of the systemic racism upon which the ethnocracy is constructed.

Israel must become a pluralist democracy, in which all citizens are treated equally, regardless of ethnicity, race, or religion. In doing so, it will live up to what it already claims to be.