In 1968, after a long process lasting over a decade, the Israeli Ministry of Education adopted the reform in the structure school-system, which was the most comprehensive and expensive reform in the history of the Israeli education system.

Fundamentally, the reform altered the structure of schools, created a new framework for comprehensive middle school following elementary school, and championed educational integration between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The reform was a response to rising social tensions between two groups with distinct identities and social standings – Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews.

The large migration of Mizrahi Jews from Islamic countries and their absorption primarily by Ashkenazi Jews from European countries created persistent social friction and ingrained inequality in the young Israeli state. In 1959, a popular protest erupted in the port city of Haifa, spreading to other towns in Israel. This protest, known as the Wadi Salib events, expressed the social unrest between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, with protest leaders demanding distributive and cultural equality, with one of their central demands being equality in education.

In many ways, the education reform was a policy response by decision-makers to leverage the education system as a tool to reduce gaps and ease social tensions, yet despite starting implementation in the late 1960s, another social protest erupted in 1971 – the Black Panthers movement – making clear to policymakers the urgent need to address socioeconomic unrest.

In my lecture, I will seek to answer whether there was a necessary link between those social protests and the reform policy that created Israeli middle schools and promoted an agenda of educational integration between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. In doing so, I will explain the motivations behind the reform and clarify why the ministers from the Israeli Labor Party spearheading it did not initially aim to change inequality in education but rather to first and foremost prevent social unrest. They adopted models from American, French, Dutch, British and Swedish education and thereby created a reform that transformed the education system – but not necessarily the reality of social inequality.

In closing, I will provide a brief comparative outlook on similar reforms implemented in Western Europe and the United States to understand the historical shift in secondary education in the decades after 1945. The lecture is grounded in the methodology of the political history of education and relies on extensive archival research of primary contemporary sources as well as local and international scholarly literature on education reforms, educational integration, and inequality in education.

The methodology of my lecture is historical research based on archival materials, influenced by three scholarly traditions – the history of education, Israel studies, and the study of reforms and politics of education. The archival material underpinning the lecture comes from 10 different archives across Israel, chiefly the Israel State Archives, the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) Archives, municipal archives, the Jewish Education Archives, and others.

A key output of my lecture is the initial drafting of a paper that I intend to submit for publication in an English journal. Additionally, the discussion on utilizing the education system as an instrument to mitigate social unrest is highly important to me as both an educator and researcher, and I look forward to engaging my colleagues whom I will meet at the conference in conversations on this topic.

Jon Clark (Editor), James S. Coleman, London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer (1996). Stephen J. Ball, Education Policy and Social Class: The selected works of Stephen J. Ball, London and New York: Routledge (2006) Aaron Schutz, Social class, social action, and education: the failure of progressive democracy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2010) Peter Mandler, Presidential Address: Educating the Nation I: Schools, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 24 (2014) Hilda T.A. Amsing and Nelleke Bakker, Comprehensive education: lost in the mi(d)st of a debate. Dutch politicians on equal opportunity insecondary schooling (1965–1979), History of Education 43:5 (2014), 657-675. Joshua Zeitz, Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's Whith House, New York: Viking (2018). I can provide a comprehensive bibliography of sources in Hebrew, but I assumed that would not be relevant for this submission.