The heads of the “Heschel Center for Sustainability” never imagined Education Minister Yoav Kisch would go this far.

The center, which in many ways serves as the brain and key knowledge hub of Israel’s environmental movement, has specialized for years in running programs and workshops on environmental and climate issues for various sectors of Israeli society.

Among those sectors, sometimes – though not often enough – are journalists. About 20 years ago, I was invited to take part in one such short seminar. Over the course of a single weekend, I was exposed to a whole world of knowledge, dilemmas and challenges that were barely discussed in the education system, the media, or the political arena – topics such as water, energy, agriculture, waste, food, and health.

About three years ago, the Heschel Center began running a climate crisis knowledge and training program for senior officials at the Education Ministry, called “Tevel.” It aimed to give senior ministry officials from all streams an essential window into a body of knowledge that they, in turn, would help convey to the younger generation.

The program, which included about 20 hours of study and a multi-day seminar, ran successfully for two years. The ministry’s professional staff approved the content and gave its blessing, and graduates of the first cohorts warmly recommended it. In the upcoming school year, the third cohort was set to launch, with the ministry contributing around NIS 500,000 (about $150,000) toward funding.

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Then the right-wing Channel 14 entered the fray, threatening to grill Kisch. The charge: funding leftists.

Education Minister Yoav Kisch attends a meeting of the Knesset Education, Culture, and Sports Committee in Jerusalem, May 12, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

To be clear, no one raised any such claim about the program’s content or its facilitators. Rather, someone had dug into the Heschel Center’s résumé, which includes a wide range of training programs, including the program of in-depth environmental studies.

Among the program’s alumni over the years were former MKs Dov Khenin, Gaby Lasky, and a few other more or less familiar figures from the political left. The smoking gun: the center’s chairwoman (soon stepping down) is former Blue and White party MK and TV anchor Miki Haimovich.

That was enough for Channel 14 to demand that the education minister shut the program down. And the worrying part of this story is – it worked.

Instead of dismissing the unfounded attack and putting the inciters in their place, a rattled Kisch rushed to announce the freezing of the program’s funding and its re-examination. When this was first reported in May by Zman Israel, The Times of Israel’s sister Hebrew website, the Heschel Center believed it best to keep its head down and let the storm pass.

The hope was that once tempers cooled and the left-hunt moved on to someone else, preparations for the coming school year could resume. But such optimism proved misguided.

Former Blue and White MK Miki Haimovich at the Knesset on May 27, 2019. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)

Senior ministry officials who took part in the first cohorts, along with the professional staff, urged Kisch to rethink his decision – but in vain. About two weeks ago, the Education Ministry announced the cancellation of the program and its funding. The announcement was devoid of any substantive reasoning.

This is a distilled and frightening moment that shows the direction the government and the education minister have chosen for the country. The Heschel Center holds immense, science-based knowledge, with broad, up-to-date thinking about challenges humanity is already facing and will continue to face in the coming decades and the century. The education minister knowingly chose ignorance.

“We keep complaining that the world boycotts us,” says an Education Ministry source, “but we are the ones actively excluding ourselves from the family of enlightened nations.”

Kisch is not alone. The Tevel program was a joint initiative of the Education Ministry, the Heschel Center, and the Environmental Protection Ministry. The environmental protection minister, Idit Silman, should have dug in her heels and fought to preserve the program – after all, expanding climate crisis awareness among government ministries is a top priority for her office.

Education Minister Yoav Kisch and Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman arrive at a Likud faction meeting at the Knesset, May 20, 2024 (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Well, Silman didn’t utter a word. She, too, is dependent on her right-wing voters and needs the support of Channel 14. In those circles, the “climate crisis” is a punchline.

Silman knows this, and lately it seems she’s even comfortable with the fact that the Finance Ministry, headed by the far-right Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich, is stalling the Climate Law, which is slowly rotting away in the basement of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation.

At the same time, Silman has frozen funding for environmental organizations: NIS 11 million (about $3.25 million) in grants that the Maintenance of Cleanliness Fund – funds collected from various environment-related fees and fines that are earmarked for environmental protection activities – had already allocated.

Silman first excused her decision by citing “budget constraints”; however, this money doesn’t come from the Environmental Protection Ministry’s budget, and the fund’s coffers are far from empty.

But lately, it seems, the real reason has been exposed. “Arutz 7”, a right-wing news website, reported that it was briefed by “sources in the Environmental Protection Ministry” claiming these were funds channeled over the years to“NGOs identified with the political left under the guise of environmental organizations.”

From left to right: Samaria Regional Council Head Yossi Dagan, Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu at the archaeological site of Sebastia in the West Bank on May 12, 2025. (Courtesy of Heritage Ministry)

Those anonymous ministry sources further stressed that “at last, there is a hand supervising and monitoring. For years, money flowed to extremist left-wing NGOs without sufficient transparency… Silman has put an end to the cynical misuse of state funds, stopping 11 million shekels that would have been wasted on political NGOs disguised as green.”

The matter has now landed before the High Court of Justice, following a petition from the organizations. But as far as Silman is concerned, she wins either way: If the court forces her to release the funds, she can claim it’s because of leftist judges and still score points with her base.

The painting of environmental issues in overtly political colors and the submission to the base’s contempt for anything “green” only intensify as primaries and elections draw nearer.

As time goes on, Silman scatters more promises aimed at settler ears. At a settlement solidarity event in Binyamin last week, she told an Arutz 7 reporter of her plan to initiate “environmental sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.”

At the same event, she took another swipe at the greens and those protesting against the government in calls to agree a deal to end the war and free all hostages held by Hamas: “Those people demonstrating today about hostages,” she said, “are the same people who spoke to me about climate, and today they’re burning tires in the streets with their MKs.”

Waste burned in Nazareth, Israel. May 2025 (Photo courtesy of “Citizens for Clean Air”)

Silman has also recently promised to tackle the severe problem of waste-burning in the West Bank. It is indeed a serious hazard – but such fires also occur on the Israeli side of the Green Line, and Silman and her government have utterly failed to address them.

According to the Environmental Emissions Inventory report her own ministry published last week, 75% of carcinogenic substances in Israel are released into the air from illegal waste-burning – and that’s without even counting the fires in the West Bank.

While government ministers are busy targeting and smearing environmentalists, the environment itself – the very thing they are charged with protecting – is steadily deteriorating, already approaching third-world standards.

The detailed report published last week by the Environmental Protection Ministry reveals that the ongoing war, which began on 7 October 2023, has caused massive damage to the environment and to public health in a range of areas – including the widespread forest fires sparked by Hezbollah rockets in the north.

The report does not list the damage caused by another war: the one the government has declared on the environmental movement.

Translated and edited from the original article on Times of Israel’s Hebrew site Zman Yisrael.