""Of all the nonsense you said, there's maybe one thing that has something to it," that was my most difficult conversation with Gideon Sa'ar, then Minister of Education.
A few days ago, I broadcast that he was the most disappointing minister in Netanyahu's government. Sa'ar is not used to such statements in the media, certainly not a letter he had good relations with.
Saar is number 1 in making journalists friends. He doesn't do it with juicy leaks (at least not to me), he simply invites you to his wife's 40th birthday (I didn't go) and to parties where he serves as a DJ ("but come without a camera"). He's the only politician I've somehow found myself on a night out with at a bar (and I don't drink at all).
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When he came to the position of Minister of Education, I thought that our fossilized and lame education system was facing a real revolution. Saar came with political power, first place in the Likud, an excellent parliamentarian, who knows the government and the Knesset from every angle and knows how to get things done.
He had optimal conditions to be Minister of Education that we haven't seen here. The teachers' organizations were at a rare weak point. The main treble maker, Ran Erez, was fighting precisely for his survival as chairman of the Secondary Teachers' Organization.
The prime minister was committed to the issue. In opposition, Netanyahu placed the issue high on his agenda. Even more important, the public was ripe for revolution. In polls, the education system was named the most significant problem in the country, more than ultra-Orthodox-secular relations, the Iranian threat, or the Palestinians.
Saar took all these winning conditions and squandered them. He brought a lot more money into the education budget, which was swallowed up in the general waste of the system, and that's more or less it.
He did not dare to confront the teachers' unions to change the way in which worn-out teachers could be moved or successful school principals rewarded. He allowed higher education to continue to deteriorate. Every program for every degree in every college in the castor oil industry continued to pass through what was supposed to be the filter of the Council for Higher Education. When there was already talk of trying to put order in law studies, which had become a joke, Saar himself stopped the attempt.
Worst of all, Sa'ar didn't touch, didn't even touch upon the subject of curricula in the education system. I tried to ask him once why is syntax still a mandatory exam in the matriculation exam? Why isn't general history a mandatory exam? He admitted that he didn't have time to get to it. The chairman of the pedagogical secretariat barely saw him. Chairmen of subject committees begged for a meeting with the minister. To no avail.
""The only thing you said that had something to do with it was the issue of the Haredim," Sa'ar explained to me in that unpleasant conversation. At this point in his term, he had already taken several steps that the Haredim did not like.
""This really needed to change, but Bibi won't let me. There's no coalition for that, and if I go for it, it means I'll have to resign." I tried to argue. If you fight the drift toward Haredi autonomy in education, the public will go with you. Even if you lose and are forced to resign, this message will get through.
Saar didn't buy it. He soon reconciled with the Haredim and returned to being a go-between in the rabbinical courts.
A month ago, Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar made a great decision. He corrected a decades-old injustice in the distribution of revenue between regional councils and cities in the Negev. Less money for the Tamar and Ramot Negev councils, which are overcrowded and sparsely populated, and more money for Sderot, Yeruham, and even the Bedouins. At least once, on the verge of retirement, Gideon Sa'ar used his political skills, not just to gain more power, but to do the right thing.
• From Raviv Drucker's blog: http://drucker10.net/?p=2382
