The Israeli press revealed this week that the police suspect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of cutting a deal with Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon Mozes for favorable media treatment. But even as the storm was raging over the illicit contacts that would have made Netanyahu the censor of the nation’s most powerful media outlet, a small news item reported that Education Minister Naftali Bennett was on his way to becoming the chief censor of the school system. Under a unanimous Jan. 8 decision by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation, “The minister of education will set out rules to prevent any activity in schools by any external person or organization whose activity severely and significantly contradicts the aims of the national education system.”

According to the proposed bill, the minister is empowered to keep away from schools people and elements whose activity outside Israel raises “concern that soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces would be put on trial in international courts and foreign countries for actions they took in the course of their military service.” The main target is the veterans’ organization Breaking the Silence, which documents and publishes — in Israel and abroad — testimony by IDF soldiers of human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Bennett, who sponsored the bill, posted to Facebook example video clips from which, in his view, the tender souls of Israeli school children must be protected. The clips show the veterans’ organization telling foreign reporters about the abuse of Palestinian detainees and wholesale violations of the IDF’s rules of engagement with civilians. In the interviews, the veterans protest the bombing of homes whose inhabitants are suspected of harboring Hamas members and blame the political echelon for forcing the IDF to manage the occupation on its behalf.

Bennett does not point to lies or even to inexactitudes in the testimony by members of Breaking the Silence. One can assume that had he found any, he would have shared them with his Facebook followers. He wants to preserve the idea put forth in the preamble to the new bill: “The soldiers of the IDF are the consensus of Israeli society.” While his comments were written, Israeli society was divided over the conviction of a soldier who shot to death a wounded Palestinian attacker. Bennett, the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi, wants to shield schools from human rights organizations such as B’Tselem, which disseminated the footage showing the soldier, Elor Azaria, shooting the incapacitated Palestinian and contributed to a large extent to his conviction. The country’s education chief thinks Azaria deserves an immediate pardon.