On Thursday 8 November, two Grade 9 students at Herzlia Middle School in Cape Town bravely took a knee during the singing of the Israeli national anthem at the school’s prizegiving ceremony. By kneeling, the boys stood up for what they believed was right. Had they stood for the anthem, they would have implicitly lent their support to the unjust actions of an oppressive regime, which they refused to do.

Shortly after their protest, Herzlia (one of several South African Jewish schools which together comprise United Herzlia Schools) issued a public rebuke of the students involved, strongly condemning their actions and declaring that the school would impose a “set of consequences” that would be “both disciplinary and educational”.

To take disciplinary action against young children for peaceful protest is not just morally despicable, it is plainly unconstitutional.

GroundUp reports that among the disciplinary actions taken against the students, they will not be allowed to wear their honours blazers (a mark of significant achievement) for six months; they cannot represent the school for six months; they must write two 3,000 word essays and an apology letter; they must attend four meetings with elected community members, and they may not attend the Grade 9 farewell ceremony. Perhaps most astonishingly, the boys are not permitted to speak to the press.

The students should be praised rather than punished for their actions. For one, they are right to question some of the clear injustices that are perpetrated by the state of Israel. For another, a school should nurture and instil in its students the important skills of critical thought and engagement in the world, together with a conviction in one’s beliefs. To instead insist on conformity and silence is to develop young adults who are primed to disengage from the world and to regurgitate inherited beliefs.

More fundamentally, though, it is vital to the health of our own democracy that we ensure that the constitutionally protected right to protest is respected by public and private institutions in our country. Whether or not you think that the boys’ protest was justified and regardless of its timing or appropriateness, the fact remains that their right to peaceful protest is protected by the Constitution – a great achievement that was secured through significant sacrifices made by many before us. Their right to peaceful protest and to freedom of expression is unambiguously protected and must be enforced. For Herzlia to flagrantly disregard this constitutional right by instituting any punishment against the two boys is absolutely unacceptable.

In response to this, some have claimed that the boys shouldn’t be at Herzlia in the first place if they are not Zionist. But this betrays a further lack of familiarity with our Constitution, which prohibits discrimination by any entity on grounds including “conscience” and “belief.” Herzlia cannot tell students that they are not welcome if they do not share certain political views, because that would constitute discrimination against them on these grounds. The logical conclusion of asserting a private institution’s right to enforce political views is that we should all be siloed into schools, workplaces, and communities based on our internally held convictions. This is anathema to a free and open society of diverse views and beliefs.

While Herzlia’s decision to take disciplinary action against a peaceful protest is more than sufficient to enrage any reasonable observer, what is perhaps more unsettling is the duplicitous way in which the school has tried to deflect public criticism. In its initial statement, Herzlia strongly condemned the protest, claiming that it “showed a lack of respect, pride, gratitude, responsibility, compassion and understanding of the community.” This was the statement in which they publicly insisted that the children would be punished, although the nature of this punishment was conveniently not specified.

Later, after an outpouring of criticism from both within and outside the Jewish community, the school put out another statement – this time signalling an apparent change of course. The second statement acknowledged that “we are fortunate to live in a country with a progressive Constitution that allows for people to express their diverse opinions”, and claimed that the school had “resolved the issue amicably”. This statement made no mention of any disciplinary sanctions, and any reasonable reader would have been led to believe that the school had decided not to punish the students after all.

And yet, just days after this placating statement, it has emerged that the boys will indeed be punished, and are not being allowed to speak to the press. How is punishment and a ban on speaking to the press anything like an “amicable resolution”? More important, how can it possibly reflect a commitment to free speech? It is abundantly clear that the school’s statement was intentionally designed to mislead the public.

The issue could not be clearer-cut. The students had a constitutionally protected right to be at Herzlia regardless of their political views, and an equal right to peacefully protest within the school. Regardless of what you think about their political opinions, you must be enraged by Herzlia’s blatant flouting of the Constitution by instituting any punishment.

The most recent incident at Herzlia is part of a long history of similar repression, intimidation, and humiliation of students at South African Jewish schools. Each time this happens, the institutions that are responsible are allowed to get away with it because they succeed in muddying the waters to make all sides look culpable, and to erect a superficial façade of respect for freedom of speech and the law. At the same time, however, these schools continue to insist on conformity and to actively silence dissenters.

This must be confronted powerfully and directly, both within the community and in the country as a whole. We cannot let these schools get away with repressing political expression and undermining constitutional rights by simply issuing a false statement claiming vaguely to respect diverse opinions, without any apology or a meaningful commitment to change. DM