Israel Cannot Read: Israeli Students Test at a 10-Year-Old Level

The apartheid state is literally illiterate.

The West has spent decades worshipping the myth of the “Start-Up Nation,” selling Israel as an unparalleled beacon of innovation and democracy. Yet, the reality behind this carefully curated propaganda is far less glamorous, as you cannot code advanced applications when your population cannot read a basic sentence.

A recent OECD PIAAC skills survey, analyzed by Israel’s own Central Bureau of Statistics, laid bare this educational collapse. The data showed 36% of Israeli adults failed basic reading comprehension, vastly exceeding the 26% OECD average. Mathematics and problem solving fared no better, with 34% and 40% failing their respective tests. Perhaps most damning is the finding that a massive proportion of young adults and university students are testing at Level 1, a cognitive benchmark equivalent to the skill level of a 10-year-old child.

Naturally, colonial state officials and pundits immediately scrambled for excuses, blaming everything from smartphones and video games to the lingering effects of the pandemic. Their primary panic centers on how tech companies will secure the skilled labor needed to build their next generation of surveillance tools.

Hebrew media like Haaretz ran headlines asking if Israeli students are "dumber than a 10-year-old." They pointed out that 43% of those who failed the reading test were Palestinian citizens of Israel. Palestinians make up 22% of the population but account for nearly half the failures. Haaretz framed this as a problem with the minority being overly represented, instead of admitting that it is the direct result of decades of underfunding, segregation, and educational apartheid. The data is real. The framing is a lie meant to blame the victims.

A state built on ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and the ongoing genocide, cannot teach truth. You cannot build a society on a lie and expect it to think clearly. When the zionist identity requires the erasure of the indigenous people, the whole system decays.

There is no tragedy in the declining test scores of an apartheid state. You cannot build a future on ethnic cleansing, because innovation cannot survive under occupation. True learning demands justice, and there is no justice without Palestinian liberation.