The Jerusalem District Court on Sunday overturned the Education Ministry’s decision to remove the Parents Circle Families Forum’s dialogue program from the GEFEN database, allowing schools to again invite the group’s “Dialogue Meetings – From Pain to Hope” program.
The ruling marks the third round of litigation on the program between the forum, together with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), and Education Minister Yoav Kisch, which brings bereaved Israeli and Palestinian family members into high schools for a 90-minute meeting on loss, dialogue, and reconciliation.
Judge Avraham Dan Rubin, sitting as an administrative court judge, accepted the petition filed by the forum and ACRI against Kisch, the ministry official responsible for external programs and the ministry’s tenders committee.
Rubin canceled the ministry’s January 25 decision and ordered it to pay the petitioners NIS 20,000 in legal expenses.
The forum, according to the ruling, includes more than 800 Israeli and Palestinian families who lost relatives in the conflict and work to promote reconciliation and dialogue. The program has operated in schools since the early 2000s, and the petitioners said, without contradiction, that some 200,000 students and educators had been exposed to it.
Program discourages military service, Education Ministry says
Since the closure imposed on the West Bank and Gaza Strip at the start of the Israel-Hamas War, the program has been operated by Israeli facilitators only, according to the ruling.
The Education Ministry argued that the program contradicted the goals of state education, particularly the goal of encouraging meaningful service in the IDF. It also argued that the program was pedagogically unsuitable for high school students, especially after October 7, because it allegedly blurred the difference between Israeli bereavement and Palestinian bereavement, exposed students to one-sided narratives, and included terms such as “occupation.”
Rubin rejected those arguments, finding that the ministry had not established that the program contradicted state education goals or contained a pedagogical flaw serious enough to justify removal from the database.
The judge said state education goals must be read together, not as a hierarchy in which one value erases the others. The ministry’s decision, he noted, relied only on the claim that the program contradicted education for meaningful IDF service, and not on any broader finding that it contradicted other purposes of state education, such as education for peace, tolerance, critical thinking, and respect for human rights.
A central part of the ruling dealt with the factual basis used by ministry officials. Rubin found that the professional opinions on which the ministry relied stretched the monitoring reports beyond what they actually showed.
Three reports cited by the ministry, he noted, explicitly said that no unusual remarks were made in the meetings, or that the meeting observed was too short to draw conclusions. The judge also cited a summary by the head of the ministry’s monitoring department that the forum and its lecturers were aware of ongoing supervision.
In one example, Rubin addressed a ministry claim that a forum speaker’s remarks could be understood as discouraging military service.
The full quote, he said, showed the opposite: Students were urged to enlist for the right reasons, defend the state, and not serve out of hatred or revenge.
The court also criticized what it described as a lack of trust in teachers, students, and school principals. The Education Ministry’s own circular on controversial classroom discussions, Rubin wrote, distinguishes between criticism and delegitimization of state institutions, and recognizes the importance of discussing disputed subjects in school.
He added that the ministry’s position did not give proper weight to the role of teachers present in the classroom, the ability of older high school students to think critically, or the fact that principals are not required to invite the program and students are not forced to participate.
The ruling also addressed arguments by Btsalmo, Choosing Life Forum, and bereaved families who opposed the program and were permitted to submit their position. Rubin said many of their arguments concerned publications and claims about the forum as an organization, rather than the educational program itself. Those claims, he said, were not the basis of the ministry’s decision and had not been properly examined by the authorized officials.
Kisch sharply criticized the ruling, saying the court was forcing the ministry to allow what he called “an organization of terrorists’ families” into classrooms. He called the decision “scandalous and disgraceful” and vowed to keep the program out of the education system.
Btsalmo also attacked the ruling, arguing that the judge ignored its claims against the forum.
ACRI attorney Tal Hassin, who represented the petitioners, said the court had made clear that students are not a captive audience and that the education system cannot be used to silence complex discussion.