school uniforms cons essay

35 Pros and Cons of School Uniforms

School uniforms in public schools are considered essential for teaching children to obey rules and develop a sense of community in many countries, including the UK and Australia. But public schools in other countries like the USA and Canada rarely enforce mandatory school uniforms.

It is, however, far more common for private schools to enforce school uniforms no matter the country in question.

This article takes a deep dive into the pros and cons of school uniforms, showing that there are positive arguments on both sides of this debate.

Overview – 10 Top Pros and Cons of School Uniforms

Pros of school uniforms, 1. affordability.

Many schools intentionally choose uniforms that are very basic, such as “white polo shirt and grey shorts”, so that parents do not have to pay exorbitant amounts of money on the uniforms. Many low-cost clothing stores also make the effort to produce and distribute these typical uniform-conformant clothes at low cost during back-to-school sales.

A typical 5 pack of basic white polo shirts that students can wear to school as a uniform is likely to be significantly cheaper than an outfit a child would wear otherwise.

Furthermore, while children in schools without uniforms would feel pressure to change up their outfits regularly (adding to costs), the forced repetition of wearing

Related Article: 17 Surprising School Uniform Statistics, Facts & Data

2. Hand-me-Down Options

It is regular practice at schools with school uniforms for parents to offer uniforms for free as hand-me-down outfits once their children grow out of the uniform. This has the effect of helping poorer families to access uniforms for their children without cost.

There tends to be an over-supply of uniforms – both new and second-hand – because of the sheer number of children growing out of their uniform every month. As a result, parents in desperate need of uniforms are often able to source uniforms for free.

Many schools have a hand-me-down bin in their front office, allowing parents to drop-off pre-loved uniforms, and other parents to arrive and request free shirts and pants discretely.

3. Visible Poverty is Reduced

If all children are dressed the same, the poorer children whose parents cannot afford brand-name clothing are not as visibly singled-out. They will be wearing the same clothes as the wealthier children.

This can have the effect of reducing chances of bullying based on a child’s family’s levels of wealth. But it also enables children who are poor to feel as if they are no different from others. It helps to start all children off on a level playing field, and makes them feel more secure that they’re just another student – neither better or worse than other students who are of higher or lower wealth.

4. Students may Focus and Listen Better

In this study by Chris Baumann and Hana Krskova, published in the International Journal of Educational Management , it was found that children wearing school uniforms tend to listen more intently and for longer periods of time than children without uniforms.

As a result, they found that teachers also spent less time disciplining students and waiting for students to give their attention to the teachers. This leads to more engaged working time in the classroom.

One potential reason behind this finding is that the conformity in dress reduces distractions for students.

However, there are plenty of other studies that have found no significant difference in academic achievement by parents, so in my opinion the jury is still out on whether this is true. More research is required.

5. Ensures Appropriate Sporting Outfits

Even schools that do not have mandatory school uniforms often have sports uniforms for physical education lessons. This is for several reasons, including both conformity and practicality.

Firstly, there are unique pros and cons of sports uniforms that differ from those of school uniforms. Namely, teams in sports need to have a sense of camaraderie and unity that the uniform can help achieve. Wearing the same colors can instil team spirit that helps with the team’s performance.

Secondly, a team uniform is useful in sports for helping to quickly identify team members to pass the ball to or seek support in the fast pace of a game.

Thirdly, a sports uniform is specifically designed and loosely fitted so students are comfortable while engaging in physical activity, which may include physical contortions, stretching, sprinting, and other actions not usually undertaken outside of the sporting arena.

6. Increases Physical Activity During Physical Education

A study by Nathan et al. in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity found that children who wear dedicated sporting uniforms during sports lessons tend to do more physical activity than children who do not.

This was a sizeable study – with 42 schools and over 3000 children studied – making these findings some of the more reliable results within the school uniforms literature.

Logically, this also checks out.

Firstly, if all children are wearing a pre-approved sporting outfit that is fit for purpose and can be comfortable during physical activity, they will have less clothing distractions and have one less potential barrier preventing them from participation in lessons.

Secondly, another logical rationale for this is that the students know they can change out of the uniform after the lesson (into either their regular uniform or non-uniform clothing), giving them the sense that they can sweat and get the uniforms dirty without suffering negative consequences for the remainder of the day.

Thirdly, it could be argued that the act of putting on the sporting uniform can help students psychologically prepare for the physical activity. The uniform is a psychological signal to the students that it’s time for them to do exercise.

7. Less Bullying

School uniforms could remove one more thing that children can be bullied over. If all children are dressed the same, then children will not bully one another for their fashion choices.

And high school students seem to agree that bullying will be decreased if mandatory uniform policies are introduced.

However, empirical evidence does not always support this widely-held belief. This study , for example, found no difference in disciplinary issues before and after a school uniform was introduced at one particular school.

It is possible that bullying will happen regardless of uniforms, and that making all children wear uniforms does nothing to actually teach kindness. A bully will be a bully – targeting things other than dress codes if need be – unless the bully is actively taught not to do so.

8. Confidence and Self-Esteem

A study by Sanchez et al. interviewed 604 middle school students found that the students reported increased confidence and self-esteem while wearing uniforms. The primary hypothesis for this growth in confidence is that students didn’t feel so self-aware about the way they dressed.

However, it’s possible that some students may also develop increased confidence by expressing themselves through their uniforms. By trying out new clothes, children learn to develop a unique identity and get more practice dressing in ways that make them feel good about themselves.

9. Improves the School’s Image in the Community

A school with a cleaner uniform where students appear well-dressed may have a better image in the community than a school without a uniform, or even with an outdated or simple uniform.

And a study by the National Association of Elementary Schools Principals (NAESP) shows that this is a key concern for school principals. 83% of principals in the study reported that they believed the uniforms improved their school’s image in the community.

Here, the main concern of the school principals is the message the uniform sends and not and actual tangible effect. Given there are several studies highlighting that there is no academic benefit of a uniform, this seems like a vanity metric.

Nevertheless, the symbolism of having well-dressed students can have the effects of attracting new parents to the school and having parents and the community value and respect the school and its students more.

10. School Spirit

School spirit includes pride and sense of belonging within a school. Wearing a uniform may help with this. If all the students are wearing the same clothing, there’s a sense that they’re “a team” and “working together” rather than being individualistic.

The NAESP study named above also looked at principals’ perceptions of whether uniforms improve school spirit. 77% of school principals in schools with uniforms believed that uniforms did help with school spirit.

11. Saving Time in Mornings

Many parents also like schools that have uniforms. It’s simply easier to get ready in the morning if children know exactly what to wear. There is no back-and-forth choosing and changing outfits or arguments between parents and children about what is acceptable to wear.

And in fact, the NAESP study found that 92% of parents believe it’s easier to get their kids ready in the morning if they have a school uniform. Similarly, 93% of parents believe that a uniform policy saves time in mornings.

Significantly, the parents cited less wardrobe battles as the key reason time is saved.

12. Safety and Identifiability on School Grounds

If all students are wearing school uniforms, it’s easier to identify people on the school grounds who do not belong there. Those people would not be wearing uniforms.

This is why (as this study shows) parents and teachers tend to perceive uniforms as positively impacting school safety, while students don’t believe uniforms make them more safe.

Of course, there is one big hole in this argument.

It would only make it easier to identify children or teenagers who do not belong. Parents who do not belong could easily be confused for a teacher seeing as most schools don’t have uniform policies for teachers.

And of course, one big threat to school safety is adults coming onto the grounds impersonating teachers.

Which begs the question: why do children have to wear uniforms and teachers don’t? If the argument is children on school grounds need to be identifiable by their uniforms, then shouldn’t teachers also have to wear uniforms so they’re identifiable? It seems like adult hypocrisy to me.

13. Age and Gender Identification

Uniforms may also be useful to schools for age identification of children. This would require different year levels to have different uniforms. For example, the infants could wear one color while the older children can wear another.

This would allow schools to police movement through the school. If a younger child is in a part of the school reserved for the older children, they could be easily identified and sent to their dedicated space (which may also help with safety).

This identification could also work across gender lines, where different genders can wear different uniforms. For example, if there are two private schools side-by-side where one is all-girls and one is all-boys, then this could work well to ensure the two genders remain separated, as per the private schools’ policies and ethos.

14. Reduction of Prejudice

It could be argued that, if all students dress the same, then there is less chance of prejudice by students and teachers.

For example, if a child wears a particular religious dress that a teacher dislikes, the teacher may treat them differently. But if all children dress the same, then the teacher is less likely to be prejudiced toward that child.

However, there is an obvious flaw in this argument. It doesn’t reduce prejudice because it is potentially prejudicial to tell some children they’re not allowed to dress in ways that accord with their culture or religion.

15. Identification during Excursions

School excursions to busy places can be stressful for teachers. The teacher needs to keep an eye on all the students in the class while there are also many other members of the public in the same space.

Uniforms are very useful in these situations. The teacher can count-off all the people in uniform to easily ensure all the students are there and ready for their next instructions.

16. Learning to ‘Dress Appropriately’

All cultures have rules around acceptable forms of dress. Usually, these have to do with not wearing sexually provocative clothing and not wearing clothing with insulting or provocative signs on them.

A uniform gives students a set of guidelines about what is considered acceptable and unacceptable to wear.

And it seems parents and school administrators often cite this as a key reason for mandatory school uniforms, particularly in religious schools .

However, this also raises concerns about exclusionary dress. Different people have different ideas around what is and is not appropriate. If you’re attending a school that has more conservative values than your family, you may feel particularly constrained by an arbitrary dress code that doesn’t conform with your own values.

17. Protects and Extends Childhood

Most people believe that sexuality and sexualization should not be associated with childhood. By enforcing a school uniform, children are discouraged from wearing sexually evocative clothing that most of society would consider inappropriate at a young age.

Thus, by enforcing a uniform, children feel less pressure to focus on their outfits, ‘looking good’ for the opposite (or same!) sex, or thinking about sexually provocative clothing.

18. Truancy can be Identified

I grew up in a school where we all wore uniforms. Police would often approach students walking around town in uniform during the school day. They would ask if we were supposed to be at school (and sometimes even call the school).

If students were found to be truanting, the police would drive them back to school.

Thus, uniforms can also be a useful way for the whole community to oversee where children of school age should be at all times.

Of course, children can simply get around this by bringing a change of clothes, which would in-turn make it easier for them to truant if the police are looking for people in school uniform!

19. They Teach Gender Norms

Many conservative parents want their children to grow up conforming to society’s gender norms. Boys are raised to be leaders and girls are raised to be ladies.

And while in today’s age, gender norms are increasingly considered to be bad for society and children, some parents still desire this for their children.

So, for those parents, uniforms could be a positive. Girls are taught to wear skirts and dresses, while boys are taught to wear shorts. Even these uniform requirements send a message – it’s harder to do rough and tumble activities in a skirt than shorts!

By raising children from a young age to wear gender-conforming outfits, the schools are showing the children how to ‘act their gender’.

I personally consider this to be a negative, but many parents see it as a positive, so I’ve placed it here for them!

20. Protection of a School’s Religious, Cultural, or Social-Class Identity

Public schools usually do not have religious, cultural or social-class identities that diverge from the mainstream.

However, many private schools have particular affiliations, such as:

• Affiliation with a religion.
• A desire to appear upper-class.
• Affiliation with a particular cultural group (such as international schools).

For these schools, uniforms can act as signals about the school’s values. An upper-class school might enforce the wearing of blazers with school crests on them.

And some religious schools may have rules about wearing traditional or conservative clothing.

This can help create a unified sense of the school’s identity.

21. Prevention of Gang-Related Color Schemes

In areas where gangs are active, school uniforms can help ensure gang-related colors are not worn on school grounds. This can help make schools gang-free zones and help prevent student recruitment into gangs.

Without the visible signs of gangs at school, the gangs’ influence and perceived power is reduced. It can also help minimize chances of rival gang groups from targeting one another on school grounds based on the clothing the students are wearing.

Furthermore, students who have no affiliation to gangs could be made to feel safer if the visibility of gangs is reduced. The intimidating insignia of gangs would not be visible to them at school each day. Read more about the relationship between gangs and school uniforms here .

22. Uniforms make Plain Clothes Dress Days Fun!

Let’s finish up with a fun one. In Australia we used to have a thing called “mufti day”. We would have this day about twice a year. And it was a day where you could wear whatever you want!

In the lead-up to mufti day, we would all be on our best behavior so it would go ahead. The day was, after all, a reward for good behavior.

On mufti day, everyone would be very excited. We would plan out and wear our favorite outfits.

This gave the teachers extra leverage to get the students to behave. And it gave the students something fun to look forward to!

Cons of School Uniforms

23. there is no impact on grades.

Several studies have found no changes in academic achievement between groups of students who wear uniforms and those who do not. If there is no clear academic benefit of a uniform, it can be argued that the uniforms are pointless.

It seems that the true benefit of wearing a uniform is in the hidden curriculum – that is, in teaching things at school that are not in the academic curriculum. That includes things like discipline and conformity. Whether it’s the role of schools to teach these things, however, is open for debate. Should schools just focus on grades and not on reinforcing conformity and discipline?

24. Lack of Freedom of Expression

There are some who question the legality and constitutionality of enforcing school uniforms in public schools in the United States. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech , which may also protect free dress.

However, to date, the Supreme Court has not made any comment on the constitutionality of uniforms. In 1969 , it got close, but upholding students’ rights to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam war.

Overall, the key argument here is that a dress code restricts creative expression. If we want our education system to build-up creative, critical, and free-thinking people, a uniform seems inappropriate.

The uniform literally makes people uniform , in the sense that ‘uniform’ means ‘the same’.

Do we really want schools to be making us all the same? Isn’t that exactly the problem with the education system today?

25. Visible Diversity can be a Good Thing

People who argue for school uniforms say that it prevents bullying. It stops children from teasing each other because of what they wear.

But if we want a multi-cultural world, isn’t school the perfect place to start talking about our diversity and how it’s a good thing?

But making all children wear uniforms, we’re hiding (“sweeping under the rug”) diversity. We’re preventing conversations about it and celebration of it.

Thus, uniforms are arguably outdated in a world where diversity should be something that is visible, celebrated, and discussed – especially in schools.

26. Lack of Choice of Dress Codes

Another key problem with school uniforms is that children often don’t get a chance to have a say about what the dress code should be. Many uniform dress codes are decades old , and the children currently wearing the uniforms just wear what they’re told to wear.

But, you would think that a fair and democratic school would let the children wearing the uniform to choose what it looks like.

Unfortunately, it is usually the teachers, administrators, and parents who make these decisions. Even worse, sometimes it’s an outside company that is hired to select the uniform. Children are rarely consulted.

What does that say about what sort of people we’re raising in our schools? Do we want to raise compliant sheep, or creative people who are active participants in community decision-making, especially when it comes to decisions that directly affect them?

Related: 31 School Dress Code Examples

27. Uniforms can be Ugly

This may seem like a very superficial point, but it’s also serious. We’re forcing children to wear clothing that the children themselves might consider to be ugly. It seems a little unfair to tell people to wear something that they consider to be unattractive.

You look around at some schools and they have color schemes that include browns, mustards, and greys, that most people wouldn’t choose to wear if they had the choice!

Of course, this isn’t the most serious of points. But, for the children, it may be a very serious one indeed. They have to deal with it every day!

28. Violation of Religious Expression

This is one of the most serious problems with school uniforms. There are religions that have very strict dress code rules. These include having to wear certain colors, hair coverings, and even ceremonial knives (for some Sikhs).

By enforcing a strict uniform policy, you may be violating religious liberty.

When I was in school, we had one girl at the school who was a Muslim and who wore a Hijab. Her parents had to negotiate with the school principal about what uniform she could wear, seeing as the school didn’t have approved hijabs in the uniform code.

At the end of the day, her mother made her a hijab that was in the school colors, and everyone was happy. But, it still required some negotiation because of differences between religious requirements and school uniform policy.

29. Uniforms Require Parental Cooperation

Uniforms can cause conflicts between the school and the parents. I remember one girl I went to school with who would sometimes come to school out of uniform. She would get into trouble and not be allowed to play at lunch.

The problem was that it wasn’t her fault. Her parents often wouldn’t wash her uniform for her, meaning she didn’t have a choice but to wear a non-uniform outfit.

Here, my classmate was getting into trouble even though it wasn’t her fault – it was her parents!

We can see that parents need to cooperate and consent to the uniform policy. They have to make sure their child wears the uniform, and if enough parents don’t participate, the mandatory uniform policy falls apart.

30. Gender Expression Issues

In today’s day and age, we’re learning that enforcing gender norms in schools could be a violation of the gender expression of children. Some girls don’t want to wear dresses . And sometimes this isn’t even an issue of gender selection. It’s simply the fact that some girls don’t want to wear dresses!

Here, a uniform could be considered a violation of a child’s gender expression. Conservative old people are telling kids what to wear, even though perhaps their values are outdated for today’s world!

In fact, this became a big issue in a state in Australia where it was found many private schools forced girls to wear dresses . The state government had to intervene, with a government commissioner saying the schools were “stuck in a different age”.

31. Erases Cultural Differences

While school uniforms are seen as a positive for helping to erase visible social-class differences in schools (rich vs poor), they also have the negative effect over erasing cultural differences.

Children of all different races, cultures, and ethnicities attend modern schools. But, at least in Western schools, they must all adhere to a western dress code that doesn’t allow for cultural expression.

Forcing children to wear the clothes of a culture that is not their own is most visible (and, perhaps, offensive) when it comes to religious objections. However, even without the religious element, forcing children to wear uniforms can be seen as a form of cultural assimilation. It denies people their chance to practice their culture in the public sphere.

32. Difficulty in Finding the Uniform

When a school decides to enforce a uniform policy, it needs to take into account how easy it would be for parents to find the uniform.

Many public schools with uniform policies intentionally make this easy. They will be okay with a plain white or blue polo shirt.

But more prestigious schools will often develop uniforms that are very specific – with complex logos or designs on them. These uniforms often need to be bought straight from the school uniform shop or a small number of pre-approved nearby stores.

At the start of the school year, it can be find to get your hands on a uniform. All the parents are trying to get them at the same time!

This can also lead to price gouging where shops raise the price because they know demand is higher than supply.

33. They Promote Social-Class Identities

If you look at different schools’ uniform policies, you quickly see that some schools have very posh policies while other public schools that serve working-class communities have simple bland polo shirts.

In fact, some elite private schools require ‘white collared’ dress shirts, while public schools will require ‘blue collared’ shirts you’d more commonly see being worn by a construction worker.

These differences in dress codes from so early on reveal something unfair about the school system: wealthy people have the choice to go to elite schools where they’re raised for high-powered, high-paid white collar jobs (lawyers, etc.). Many public schools, as seen by the sorts of uniforms provided, are more humble and appear to be raising people in comfortable clothes that you’d expect to be worn for manual labor jobs.

In other words, uniforms don’t just train people to embrace gender norms. It also trains people to embrace social-class based identities.

34. It’s Another Thing for Teachers to Police

Mandatory school uniforms are just one more thing for teachers to have to worry about. In a world where teachers are over-worked and under-paid, it might be better for teachers to simply not have to worry about what their students wear.

Furthermore, for teachers who are on a power trip, it gives the teachers an excuse to get children into trouble. A small and minor problem, such as having an untucked t-shirt , could lead a child to get into trouble.

Here, rather than the school focusing on education, it may focus on nit-picking and bullying of students (as a teacher, I have a real issue with how often I see teachers bullying students based on things irrelevant to their education).

35. Upfront Costs

While it is arguable that school uniforms can be a more affordable choice than non-uniform outfits for children, some still argue that mandating school uniforms adds a cost burden for parents. Parents need to buy everyday clothing for their children regardless of whether they’re at school. Children need something to wear on weekends and during school holidays, after all!

So, at the start of the school year, often parents do need to fork out money they hadn’t planned to, and all at once.

For example, this report from the London School of Economics, points to one case study where a parent in England had to pay £310 for her children’s uniforms at the start of the school year. The woman was under particular financial strain as she was living on subsistence from the government, which was £556 a month. In this instance, uniforms took up more than half the family’s income for the month.

Summary Image

Clearly, there are many pros and cons of school uniforms. But, one thing I did realize when researching for this article was that there are a lot of differing opinions within the research. Some research papers (such as the one by NAESP that I cited several times) appear very biased toward school uniforms. And some academic studies found conflicting information, particularly around whether uniforms increased grades.

In other words, it seems like a lot of these arguments are philosophical and hypothetical. People can land on either side of the mandatory school uniforms debate depending on their own values, opinions, and backgrounds.

Another thing I found really interesting personally was that my friends who didn’t wear uniforms as kids looked at uniforms negatively – they saw them as tools for suppression of creative expression and even referred to them as looking a little communist! By contrast, my friends who wore uniforms as kids were much more positive toward them.

For me, this shows just how much our backgrounds and experiences have conditioned us to sit on one side of the debate or the other. So, I’d encourage you to genuinely think about the other perspective and see if you can come to the debate with as neutral and open a mindset as possible (if that’s possible at all!).

Scholarly Sources and Studies Cited

Baumann, C. & Krskova, H. (2016). School discipline, school uniforms and academic performance. International Journal of Educational Management , 30 (6), pp. 1003-1029. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-09-2015-0118

Firmin, M., Smith, S. & Perry, L. (2006). School Uniforms: A Qualitative Analysis of Aims and Accomplishments at Two Christian Schools, Journal of Research on Christian Education, 15(2), 143-168. https://doi.org/10.1080/10656210609485000

Gregory, S. L. (2013). Perceptions of High School Students of the Impact of a School Uniform Policy . PhD Dissertation. University of Arkansas. https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/592

Han, S. (2010). A mandatory uniform policy in urban schools: Findings from the school survey on crime and safety: 2003-04.  International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership ,  5 (8). https://doi.org/10.22230/ijepl.2010v5n8a253

Mahling, W. (1996). Scondhand Codes: An Analysis of the Constitutionality of Dress Code in the Public Schools. Minnesota Law Review,  80 (1): 715. https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/2492

Morris, E. (2005). ‘Tuck in That Shirt!’ Race, Class, Gender, and Discipline in an Urban School. Sociological Perspectives. 48(1): 25-48. https://doi.org/10.1525%2Fsop.2005.48.1.25

Nathan, N., McCarthy, N., Hope, K. et al. (2021). The impact of school uniforms on primary school student’s physical activity at school: outcomes of a cluster randomized controlled trial. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity , 18 (17). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-021-01084-0

National Association of Elementary School Principals. (2013). The Right Fit: Principals on School Uniforms. Communicator , 36 (12). https://www.naesp.org/resource/the-right-fit-principals-on-school-uniforms/

Sanchez, J. E., Yoxsimer, A., & Hill, G. C. (2012). Uniforms in the Middle School: Student Opinions, Discipline Data, and School Police Data. Journal of School Violence , 11 (4), 345-356. https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220.2012.706873

Velder, J. (2012). An Analysis of the Implementation and Impact of School Uniforms on Graduation and Discipline Rates in a Unified School . PhD Dissertation. Northwest Missouri State University). https://www.nwmissouri.edu/library/ResearchPapers/2012/Velder,%20Jessica.pdf

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Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Do uniforms make schools better?

by: Marian Wilde | Updated: March 1, 2024

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Schools, parents, and students frequently clash over the issue of regulating what students may and may not wear to school. These controversies often pegged to the culture war of the moment touch on everything from gender and sexuality to politics, race, and religion. In 2021, a group of about 50 students in Georgia protested their middle school’s dress code for being discriminatory against BIPOC girls by wearing t-shirts every Friday emblazoned with the words “sexist,” “racist,” and “classist.” In 2022, a fight between students, staff, and police officers broke out at a Pennsylvania high school when hats and hoodies were banned as part of a revision by the school board to the school’s dress code. And in 2023, two Michigan middle schoolers, via their mother, sued their school district after they were banned from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts.

Are school uniforms the best solution to this contentious debate? If every student is wearing the same outfit, will a host of campus problems be solved? Researchers are divided over how much of an impact — if any — dress policies have on student learning. There are multiple studies with conflicting conclusions, plus books such as 2018’s The Debate About School Uniforms , but the argument wears on, with a list of pros and cons on each side.

Why do some public schools have uniforms?

In the 1980s, public schools were often compared unfavorably to Catholic schools. Noting the perceived benefit that uniforms conferred upon Catholic schools, some public schools decided to adopt a school uniform policy.

President Clinton provided momentum to the school uniform movement when he said in his 1996 State of the Union speech, “If it means teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms.”

The pros and cons of school uniforms

According to proponents, school uniforms:.

• Help prevent gangs from forming on campus

• Encourage discipline

• Help students resist peer pressure to buy trendy clothes

• Help identify intruders in the school

• Diminish economic and social barriers between students

• Increase a sense of belonging and school pride

• Improve attendance

Opponents contend that school uniforms:

• Violate a student’s right to freedom of expression

• Are simply a Band-Aid on the issue of school violence

• Make students a target for bullies from other schools

• Are a financial burden for poor families

• Are an unfair additional expense for parents who pay taxes for a free public education

• Are difficult to enforce in public schools

Uniforms vs. dress codes

Schools and districts vary widely in how closely they adhere to the concept of uniformity.

What’s a dress code?

Generally, dress codes are more relaxed than uniform policies. Sometimes, however, dress codes are quite strict with requirements that are potentially viewed as biased based on race or gender. In 2020, two Black male students in Texas, cousins with West Indian heritage, were suspended for wearing dreadlocks in supposed violation of the district’s hair and grooming policy, part of the dress code. The elder one, a senior, was told he couldn’t attend prom or graduation until his dreads were trimmed. In 2022, girls on the track team at an Albany, NY high school were sent home for wearing sports bras at practice.

Uniforms are certainly easier for administrators to enforce than dress codes, largely because the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) can be depended upon to protect a student’s “right to express themselves.” The ACLU believes dress codes are often used to, “shame girls, force students to conform to gender stereotypes… punish students who wear political and countercultural messages. Such policies can be used as cover for racial discrimination… Dress codes can also infringe on a student’s religious rights…” To successfully enforce a dress code, insists the ACLU, the school must prove the student’s attire, “is disruptive to school activities.”

The ACLU’s dress code stance is regularly supported by federal courts , like the 2023 lower court ruling in North Carolina that ended a charter school decree that girls couldn’t wear pants to school. ACLU lawyers claimed this violated Title IX because the dress code “discriminated against female students by limiting their ability to fully participate in school activities, such as using the playground.” The U.S. Supreme Court later declined to take up a case challenging the lower court’s ruling.

Check with your school to see what the dress code is, as they can be fairly specific. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, the dress code prohibits :

• Symbols, mottoes, words or acronyms that convey crude, vulgar, profane, violent, death-oriented, gang-related, sexually explicit, or sexually suggestive messages.
• Symbols, mottoes, words or acronyms advertising tobacco, alcohol, or illegal drugs or drug paraphernalia.
• Symbols, mottoes, words or acronyms identifying a student as a member of a secret or overtly antisocial group or gang or that identifies a student as a member of an organization that professes violence or hatred toward one’s fellow man.
• Visible and permanent tattoos/brands incompatible with the standards set forth herein shall be covered to prohibit their display.
• Excessively large or baggy clothes

What’s a uniform?

School uniforms worldwide can widely range from nondescript to bizarre. (Extreme examples from China, Australia, and the UK on this YouTube video ) Most public school outfits in the USA are quite casual, with a “ common type ” for boys often a polo shirt in a solid color, with pants in khaki, black, or navy blue. A girl’s uniform is often a skirt and a white buttoned-up shirt. Dress shoes are frequently required for both genders.

In the United States, low-income families spend an average of $249 on a child’s school uniform annually, far less than the typical Australian student’s $578. But still, the cost is sometimes viewed as unfair because public education is intended to be free, paid by tax dollars, not “a stress for families on lower incomes.” The ACLU believes that public schools should provide free school uniforms , because the expense is unconstitutional, and it increases wealth inequity.

What research says about school uniforms

In 2006, Virginia Draa, professor at Youngstown State University, reviewed the impact of school uniforms at 64 public high schools that had larger percentages of economically disadvantaged and minority students than other urban schools. Her conclusion surprised her: “I really went into this thinking uniforms don’t make a difference, but I came away seeing that they do… I was absolutely floored.” Her analysis determined that the schools with uniforms improved their students attendance, and graduation rates rose an average almost 11 percent.

In 2022, Ohio State University and University of Pennsylvania researchers reached a contrary opinion in their report titled “ School Uniforms and Students Behavior: Is There a Link? ” Their view was that, in general, evidence that school uniforms improve social skills in the students was “inconclusive.” The solitary praise they provided to uniform-wearing was noting there was “some indication that low-income students in schools that required uniforms demonstrated better school attendance than low-income students in schools that did not.”

What to believe? Jury is still out.

What do students think about uniforms?

A student discussion: pros and cons of uniforms

Editor’s note: This video is part of our high school milestones series about communication skills. The students in this video discuss the pros and cons of school uniforms.

A University of Nevada, Reno, survey of 1,848 middle school students, published in 2022, revealed that 90 percent did not like wearing a uniform to school . Only 30 percent believed the uniforms “might reduce discipline issues, a mere 17 percent thought the uniform helped them focus at school, 34 percent believed their school was safer due to the uniforms and 37 percent said, “I worry less about my appearance” due to the uniform requirement.”

An earlier study, also in Nevada, displayed similar unpopularity with newly instituted uniforms among middle school students. However, when the researchers looked into school discipline and local police records and compared them to the prior year’s data, discipline referrals were down 10 percent, there were 63 percent fewer police log reports, and incidences of graffiti, fights, and gang-related activity were all down.

It’s a big issue

A new trend is the mounting pressure to establish dress codes for teachers. Apparently, the same casual mindset toward revealing outfits is cropping up in the ranks of our teachers.

The debate over uniforms in public schools encompasses many larger issues than simply what children should wear to school. It touches on issues of school improvement, freedom of expression, and hot-button culture wars. It’s no wonder the debate rages on.

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12+ School Uniform Pros and Cons (For and Against Debate)

Have you ever wondered why some schools require uniforms while others let you wear whatever you want?

It's a hot topic, and people have been arguing about it for a long time. Today, we're not just talking about whether uniforms look cool or not, but we're diving into the psychological impacts they can have on students.

Your school clothes might be doing more than just covering you up; they might be affecting your brain in ways you didn't even think about.

School uniforms are not just about what you wear; they can also influence how you think! In this article, we'll talk about:

• How uniforms can make everyone feel more equal but also less special
• Why they might make it easier to choose what to wear but harder to show who you are
• What psychologists and research tell us about this big school debate

So, put on your thinking cap—uniform or not—and let's explore what experts and studies say about the pros and cons of school uniforms.

School Uniform History

Around the 16th century in England, the first school uniforms weren't even for everyday students like most of us. They were made for charity schools, which were for kids who didn't have much money.

The uniforms were there to help everyone know which kids were from those schools. They were simple and plain, and they made sure everyone looked the same. But as time went on, more and more schools started using uniforms, not just the charity ones.

By the 19th century, the uniform trend had caught on in many other places, including the United States. But the reasons for wearing them started to change.

Schools started thinking: "Hey, if everyone's wearing the same thing, then no one can make fun of someone else's clothes." Or: "If everyone looks neat and tidy, then it's easier to focus on studying." It was around this time that schools began to see uniforms as a way to help students feel more equal and keep distractions away.

Now, fast forward to today. The idea behind school uniforms is kind of like a big salad with lots of ingredients. Some people think they're super helpful for keeping schools safe. Others believe they make it easier to get dressed in the morning without fussing over what to wear. And some just like how they look.

But not everything is rosy. Some folks argue, "Hey, I want to show who I am with my clothes. Why should I wear the same thing as everyone else?" This is especially visible in the way different cliques fit into stereotypes , such as the popular kids wearing bright colors and the goths wearing all black.

Others worry about how much these uniforms might cost, especially for families that might not have a lot of money.

As you can see, the school uniform journey is full of twists and turns, like a wild roller coaster ride. But one thing's for sure: it's not just about fashion; it's also about feelings, thoughts, and how we see ourselves and others.

The whole debate about uniforms also has some big brain stuff behind it. For example, psychologists—those are people who study how our minds work—have had a lot to say about how uniforms might make us feel. Some think they help create a team spirit, while others think they squash our creativity.

No matter which side of the fence you're on, there's no denying that the simple school uniform carries a lot of weight. From its early days in old England to its role in modern schools, the uniform has been a source of comfort for some and conflict for others. As we dig deeper into the pros and cons, we'll uncover even more about this age-old debate.

School Uniform Pros

1) psychological equality.

First on our list is the idea that uniforms can make everyone feel more equal. When you see a whole bunch of kids wearing the same thing, it's tough to know who's got the coolest or most expensive clothes.

Dr. David Brunsma, a sociologist who has written extensively about school uniforms , suggests that this kind of equality can help lower the chances of kids getting picked on or bullied for what they're wearing.

Imagine you're playing a team sport. If everyone's wearing the same jersey, you're all focused on the game, not on who's got the flashiest gear. This is sorta what uniforms do in schools. They can help students focus on what really matters, like learning and making friends, instead of worrying about who's wearing what. This could make it less likely for students to get bullied for their clothes.

2) Reduced Decision Fatigue

Next up is a psychological idea called " decision fatigue ." Ever felt tired from just picking your outfit in the morning? Well, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister talks about how making too many decisions can actually make your brain tired . Having a uniform takes away one choice you have to make, helping you save that brainpower for more important things like schoolwork.

3) Sense of Belonging

Here comes a heartwarming point: uniforms can make you feel like you're part of a team.

Dr. Angela Wright, who has studied the psychology behind uniforms, says that this sense of belonging can make students feel more connected and secure in school. Some research even shows that when kids feel like they fit in, they're more likely to be nice to each other and do well in their classes.

4) Fostering Discipline and Focus

Last but not least, let's talk about discipline. Dr. Alex Rentz, who has researched how uniforms impact student behavior, believes that wearing a uniform can help students focus better. It's like when a firefighter puts on their uniform; they know it's time to get serious and do their job. The same can go for students. That uniform is like a signal to your brain saying, "Hey, it's time to learn!"

So there you have it! These are some of the top reasons why people think school uniforms are a win. But hold your horses! It's not all sunshine and rainbows. In our next section, we're gonna look at why some folks think school uniforms are not so great.

School Uniform Cons

It's time to switch gears and talk about the reasons some people and experts give school uniforms a big thumbs-down. Trust us, it's not just about wanting to wear the latest fashion trends; it's a lot deeper than that, and it has a lot to do with how we think and feel.

1) Suppressing Individuality

Let's kick things off with one of the biggest arguments against school uniforms: they can squash your individuality. Dr. Christopher Lubienski, an education expert, says that uniforms can make it harder for students to express their unique personalities.

When you're stuck wearing the same thing as everyone else, you can't show off your personal style or let the world know a little bit about who you are.

2) Financial Strain

Next, we have to talk about money. Uniforms can cost a lot, and for families that are already tight on cash, this can be a big burden.

Dr. Elaine Schwartz, an economist who has looked into the financial aspects of school uniforms, points out that some families might struggle to pay for these mandatory clothes. And let's not forget about growth spurts; kids can outgrow uniforms quickly, leading to more expenses.

3) Contradicts Freedom of Expression

Now, let's get into some serious business: freedom of expression. This is something that psychologists like Dr. Alan Hilfer have talked about. He says that being able to choose your clothes is a way to express yourself and your opinions. In a country that values freedom, making everyone wear the same thing can feel like a big step backward.

4) Potential for Rebellion

Last on our list, believe it or not, is that uniforms can actually make some students act out. Dr. David L. Brunsma, who we mentioned earlier, also points out that some studies show wearing uniforms can make students feel like they're being controlled too much. And when people feel controlled, they sometimes do the opposite of what's expected, just to show they can.

So there you have it! These are some of the key reasons why some people aren't so hot on the idea of school uniforms. As you can see, it's a debate that brings out strong feelings and arguments from both sides.

Up next, we'll dive into what some important studies and theories have to say about all this.

School Uniform Theories

Let's move on to some studies and theories that have tackled the school uniform debate. These studies help us understand the nitty-gritty of why uniforms can be good or bad.

1) Social Identity Theory

First up, let's talk about something called Social Identity Theory . This was developed by psychologist Henri Tajfel, and it explores how people identify with groups.

When students wear uniforms, they're all part of the same "group," at least in appearance. This can create a sense of unity, but it can also make students feel like they're just one of many, losing their personal identity.

This theory helps us understand the balance between belonging and individuality that uniforms bring into play.

2) Self-Determination Theory

Another important theory is the Self-Determination Theory by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.

This theory explains that people need to feel some control over their actions to be happy and successful. For some kids, being told what to wear every day might go against this need for personal control, which can lead to feeling unhappy or even acting out in rebellion, like Dr. David L. Brunsma mentioned in the previous section.

3) Empirical Studies

On the research front, there have been many studies, but let's focus on one by Dr. Jafeth Sanchez and Dr. George Mitchell. They conducted a study on school uniforms and concluded that uniforms didn't seem to significantly impact academic performance, but they did note some improvements in school climate, like fewer fights and less bullying.

4) Cost-Benefit Analyses

Last but not least, economists have done what's called cost-benefit analyses, where they weigh the good and bad sides of uniforms.

Economists like Dr. Elaine Schwartz, who we mentioned earlier, have said that the financial strain of buying uniforms might not always be worth the benefits they bring, especially for low-income families.

So there you have it, folks! From theories that dig deep into our need for belonging and control, to studies that look at how uniforms actually play out in real life, the uniform debate is chock-full of interesting angles. What we've learned is that there's no easy answer. Like a seesaw, the pros and cons keep tipping the scale back and forth.

School Uniforms According to Kids

It's good to know the formal theories, but let's hear from the real experts—kids themselves! After all, they're the ones wearing these uniforms day in and day out. What they say may surprise you!

They Like Being Treated Equally

Many kids actually like wearing uniforms because it levels the playing field. They say it stops "clothing competition" where some kids might show off expensive or fashionable items. In a way, uniforms can act as a great equalizer, making everyone appear the same at first glance.

But it's important to remember that while uniforms might match, accessories or technology, like iphones and laptops, might not. So uniforms don't completely eliminate competition.

They Want to Show Their Style

On the flip side, a lot of kids feel uniforms cramp their style. They want the freedom to show who they are through their clothes. For them, being made to wear the same outfit every day feels like their personal identity is being stifled.

Comfort Matters

Let's not forget about comfort! Many students point out that some uniforms are just not comfortable to wear for a whole school day. Whether it's stiff collars or itchy fabric, comfort is a big deal when you're sitting in class, trying to focus on learning.

A Mix Would Be Nice

Interestingly, some kids propose a compromise: uniforms on some days and casual clothes on others. They think this would blend the best of both worlds—maintaining a sense of equality and discipline while allowing room for personal expression.

It's clear that kids have a lot to say on this topic, and their voices are an important part of this ongoing debate. After all, school is for them, so shouldn't they have a say in what they wear there?

School Uniforms in Media

You can't talk about school uniforms without mentioning how they're portrayed in movies, TV shows, and even books. These media portrayals can shape our views, and they tell us a lot about how society feels about this hot-button issue.

The Classic Image

Think about classic movies or TV shows that feature private schools; you'll probably recall scenes of students in crisp uniforms. This image often portrays uniforms as a symbol of privilege, discipline, or academic excellence.

Shows like " Gossip Girl " or movies like " Dead Poets Society " have ingrained this view in our minds.

The Rebel Stereotype

Then there's the rebellious student, often seen trying to "hack" their uniform. Whether it's by rolling up their skirt, loosening a tie, or adding flashy accessories, this portrayal taps into the idea of uniforms stifling individuality.

It's like the media is saying, "You can't keep young people from expressing themselves."

A Tool for Storytelling

In literature and film, uniforms can serve as a powerful storytelling device. Take "Harry Potter," for example. The Hogwarts robes do more than just enforce equality; they signal belonging to houses and help create the magical atmosphere of the wizarding world.

Social Commentaries

In some instances, media uses uniforms to make a statement. Shows or movies that depict uniforms in a dystopian setting may be commenting on issues of conformity or loss of personal freedom. These portrayals often reflect societal concerns and fuel discussions about the role of uniforms in schools.

Reality TV Insights

Don't forget reality TV! Shows that focus on schools or young people often highlight the uniform debate. Whether it's students discussing their likes or dislikes, or parents grappling with the costs, these shows give us a real-world look into the practical challenges and benefits of uniforms.

The media, through its varied lenses, gives us a rich tapestry of perspectives on school uniforms. It adds another layer to the complex emotional and psychological landscape we've been exploring.

School Uniforms Around the World

The debate about school uniforms isn't just happening in one place; it's a hot topic all around the world. Different countries and regions have their own unique views and rules, and trust us, it's pretty interesting to see how diverse opinions can be.

United States

In the United States, the issue of school uniforms is mostly a local decision. That means individual school districts or even single schools make the choice.

While some schools swear by uniforms, saying they improve discipline and equality, others champion a student's right to self-expression.

United Kingdom

Hop across the pond to the United Kingdom, and you'll find that school uniforms are much more common. In fact, they've been a tradition for centuries. Psychologists like Dr. Angela Wright, who we mentioned before, point out that the British generally see uniforms as a way to foster a sense of community and discipline.

In Japan, school uniforms are not just clothes; they're deeply rooted in culture. Uniforms are a social norm .

The uniforms aim to instill a sense of discipline and are often seen as a rite of passage. Dr. Hiroshi Ota, an expert on Japanese education, notes that the uniform practice in Japan aims to prepare students for a society that values conformity and group harmony.

Down under in Australia, uniforms are pretty common in both public and private schools. The debate there often centers around comfort and the appropriateness of certain uniform items in various weather conditions.

Researchers like Dr. Michaela Pascoe have discussed how the physical comfort of uniforms can impact a student's ability to focus and learn.

France takes a different approach. Uniforms are generally not required in public schools, reflecting the country's emphasis on individual liberty and personal expression. French psychologists often point to the importance of allowing students the freedom to choose as a way to develop their identity.

Whether it's promoting equality, fostering discipline, or encouraging personal freedom, each country has its own reasons and experts weighing in on the matter.

School Uniform Trends and Future Directions

Now that we've taken a good look at the pros, cons, theories, and global perspectives, let's talk about what's trending. Are schools moving toward or away from uniforms? And what cool new ideas are people coming up with?

Trending Toward or Away?

Interestingly, the trend seems to be a bit of both. In the United States, more public schools have started to adopt uniforms, especially in urban areas.

They're following the lead of private schools, which have often required uniforms. But there's a growing voice for more freedom of expression too, which has led some schools to move away from strict uniform policies.

Uniforms with Options

One of the coolest new trends is something called "uniforms with options." This is basically a middle-ground approach that allows students to pick from a range of approved clothing items.

For example, a school might have a color scheme and let students choose any shirts or pants that fit within those colors. Dr. Michelle Birkett, a researcher who has looked into the psychological impacts of such choices, says this allows students to adhere to a standard while still expressing a bit of personal flair.

Tech-Enabled Uniforms

Yes, you heard that right. In some countries, schools are experimenting with uniforms that have tracking devices for safety reasons. However, this has opened up debates on privacy and autonomy.

Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, an expert on surveillance capitalism, warns that this might go against the principles of personal freedom and privacy.

Dress Code Reforms

There's also a trend toward reforming dress codes to be more inclusive, especially for students who don't identify with traditional gender roles.

Schools are starting to allow more flexibility, like letting girls wear pants or boys wear skirts, to be more accommodating. Psychologists such as Dr. Kristina Olson, who studies gender diversity, say this can have a positive impact on mental health and inclusion.

So, the future of school uniforms is anything but dull. With new ideas and trends popping up, it seems like we're headed toward a more balanced and thoughtful approach to what kids wear to school.

One thing's for sure: the debate about school uniforms isn't a simple one . Whether it's psychologists discussing the impact on our minds, or economists weighing the costs, or even kids and parents sharing their everyday experiences, there are a lot of opinions to consider.

What have we learned? Well, for one, uniforms can help with equality and focus, but they can also stifle individuality and put a financial burden on families. Different countries have their unique views, and the future is shaping up to offer more balanced options for students to express themselves while maintaining some level of uniformity.

The conversation about school uniforms is far from over, and it's a debate that will likely continue to evolve. But no matter which side of the fence you're on, it's crucial to keep listening and learning from each other. Because in the end, the goal is the same: to create an environment where every student has the chance to shine, both in and out of their school clothes.

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Expert Commentary

School uniforms: Do they really improve student achievement, behavior?

This updated collection of research looks at how mandatory school uniforms impact student achievement, attendance and behavior as well as the presence of gangs in public schools.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource April 20, 2018

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/education/school-uniforms-research-achievement/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Decades ago, uniforms were mostly worn by students who went to private or parochial schools. But as local school boards have focused more on improving standardized test scores and campus safety, a growing number have begun requiring school uniforms — typically, a polo shirt of a particular color paired with navy or khaki pants, skirts or shorts. Nearly 22 percent of public schools in the United States required uniforms in 2015-16 — up from almost 12 percent in 1999-2000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Proponents argue that students will pay more attention to their classwork if they aren’t preoccupied with fashion, and that they’ll be better behaved. Meanwhile, school administrators say uniforms help eliminate gang-related styles and logos. They also make it easier to spot a stranger on campus.

Despite their reported benefits, mandatory uniforms are controversial because a lot of parents and students don’t like the idea of forcing children to dress alike, which they say suppresses freedom of expression. Some families complain about the financial burden of purchasing uniforms in addition to their kids’ other clothing. Years ago, parents also complained that it was difficult to find uniforms, but that ceased to be an issue after large chain stores like Target and Wal-Mart began selling them.

As public schools debate the merits of uniforms — some school boards have been bouncing the idea around for years — it’s important for journalists to know what the research says on this topic. School officials do not always consult academic research before they put a plan on the table.

To help journalists ground their reporting and fact-check claims, Journalist’s Resource has rounded up several academic studies worth reviewing. Reporters may also want to examine reports on uniform use from the NCES, which collects and reports data related to school uniforms, dress codes and book bags in public schools.

——————————–

 “School Discipline, School Uniforms and Academic Performance” Baumann, Chris; Krskova, Hana. International Journal of Educational Management , 2016. DOI: 10.1108/IJEM-09-2015-0118.

Summary: This study examines test scores and student behavior in the United States, Canada and 37 other countries to determine whether uniforms affect student discipline. The researchers found that the highest-performing students are the most disciplined. In addition, “for countries where students wear school uniforms, our study found that students listen significantly better, there are lower noise levels, and lower teaching waiting times with classes starting on time.”

“Dressed for Success? The Effect of School Uniforms on Student Achievement and Behavior” Gentile, Elizabetta; Imberman, Scott A. Journal of Urban Economics , 2012, Vol. 71. doi: 10.1016/j.jue.2011.10.002.

Abstract: “Uniform use in public schools is rising, but we know little about how they affect students. Using a unique dataset from a large urban school district in the southwest United States, we assess how uniforms affect behavior, achievement and other outcomes. Each school in the district determines adoption independently, providing variation over schools and time. By including student and school fixed-effects we find evidence that uniform adoption improves attendance in secondary grades, while in elementary schools they generate large increases in teacher retention.”

“Uniforms in the Middle School: Student Opinions, Discipline Data, and School Police Data” Sanchez, Jafeth E.; Yoxsimer, Andrew; Hill, George C. Journal of School Violence , 2012. DOI: 10.1080/15388220.2012.706873.

Summary: Researchers asked students at an urban middle school in Nevada what they thought of having to wear uniforms. Their public school had adopted a uniform policy after staff members became frustrated with the earlier dress code policy, which resulted in girls wearing revealing clothing and boys wearing shirts with inappropriate messages and images. The study’s main takeaway: The vast majority of students said they dislike uniforms, although some agreed there were benefits. “For example, in reference to gender, more than expected females than males indicated students treated them better with uniforms. Also, fewer females than males got detention for not wearing a uniform or for wearing a uniform inappropriately.”

“Are School Uniforms a Good Fit? Results from the ECLS-K and the NELS” Yeung, Ryan. Educational Policy , 2009, Vol. 23. doi: 10.1177/0895904808330170.

Abstract: “One of the most common proposals put forth for reform of the American system of education is to require school uniforms. Proponents argue that uniforms can make schools safer and also improve school attendance and increase student achievement. Opponents contend that uniforms have not been proven to work and may be an infringement on the freedom of speech of young people. Within an econometric framework, this study examines the effect of school uniforms on student achievement. It tackles methodological challenges through the use of a value-added functional form and the use of multiple data sets. The results do not suggest any significant association between school uniform policies and achievement. Although the results do not definitely support or reject either side of the uniform argument, they do strongly intimate that uniforms are not the solution to all of American education’s ills.”

“Effects of Student Uniforms on Attendance, Behavior Problems, Substance Use, and Academic Achievement” Brunsma, David L.; Rockquemore, Kerry A. The Journal of Educational Research , 1998, Vol. 92. doi: 10.1080/00220679809597575.

Abstract: “Mandatory uniform policies have been the focus of recent discourse on public school reform. Proponents of such reform measures emphasize the benefits of student uniforms on specific behavioral and academic outcomes. Tenth-grade data from The National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 was used to test empirically the claims made by uniform advocates. The findings indicate that student uniforms have no direct effect on substance use, behavioral problems, or attendance. Contrary to current discourse, the authors found a negative effect of uniforms on student academic achievement. Uniform policies may indirectly affect school environment and student outcomes by providing a visible and public symbol of commitment to school improvement and reform.”

“School Uniforms, Academic Achievement, and Uses of Research” Bodine, Ann. The Journal of Educational Research , 2003, Vol. 97. doi: 10.1080/00220670309597509.

Abstract: “School uniforms are being advocated for a range of social, educational, economic, and familial reasons. In 1998, The Journal of Educational Research (The JER) published an article by D. Brunsma and K. Rockquemore that claims that uniforms correlate negatively with academic achievement, but data presented in this article actually show positive correlation between uniforms and achievement for the total sample, and for all but 1 school sector. Examination of structure of argument reveals that the erroneous claim results from misleading use of sector analysis. Simultaneous with The JER article, and on the basis of the same National Education Longitudinal Study: 1988 database, an Educational Testing Service article reported that no correlation exists between uniforms and achievement. The two articles are contrasted in this study. The effect of new communication technology in amplifying political uses of academic research is discussed.”

“Public School Uniforms: Effect on Perceptions of Gang Presence, School Climate, and Student Self-Perceptions” Wade, Kathleen Kiley; Stafford, Mary E. Education and Urban Society , 2003, Vol. 35. doi: 10.1177/0013124503255002.

Abstract: “This study attempts to clarify the relationships between public school uniforms and some of their intended results: student self-worth and student and staff perceptions of gang presence and school climate. The instruments used in the study included a questionnaire on gang presence and identity, the National Association of School Principals Comprehensive Assessment of School Environments, and the Harter Self-Perception Profile for Children. Participants consisted of 415 urban public middle school students and 83 teachers. Findings indicate that, although perceptions did not vary for students across uniform policy, teachers from schools with uniform policies perceived lower levels of gang presence. Although the effect size was small, students from schools without uniforms reported higher self-perception scores than students from schools with uniform policies. Student and teacher perceptions of school climate did not vary across uniform policy.”

“The Effect of Uniforms on Nonuniform Apparel Expenditures” Norum, Pamela S.; Weagley, Robert O.; Norton, Marjorie J. Family & Consumer Sciences , 1998. doi: 10.1177/1077727X980263001.

Abstract: “The uniform industry has grown steadily the past 20 years with increased attention from employers trying to create a professional image among workers as well as school administrators considering uniforms to curtail school violence. Although an important part of human dress for centuries, uniforms have received little attention from researchers of the clothing market. This study examines the impact of uniform purchases on household expenditures for selected nonuniform apparel subcategories based on an economic model of conditional demand. Expenditure equations are estimated using the 1990-1991 Consumer Expenditure Survey. The results suggest that, on average, consumers do not substitute uniforms for other apparel purchases. Rather, uniforms and nonuniform apparel appear to be complements in consumers’ purchases, resulting in greater household expenditures on nonuniform apparel. These results are a first step in understanding the economic effect that uniform purchases, mandated by employers, schools, or others, have on household clothing expenditures.”

Looking for more research on student achievement? Check out our write-ups on how teacher salaries , school vouchers and school shootings impact learning.   

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Denise-Marie Ordway

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The Downsides of School Uniforms

By Mark Oppenheimer

My daughter’s school uniform, required by the public magnet middle school where she began sixth grade last week, is perfectly nice. It’s not so much a single uniform as a broad wardrobe of coördinated prep-wear: skirts or pants, paired with piqué polo shirts, all in “goldenrod yellow,” navy, or white, topped off by a fleece zip-up (on which the school crest is optional). For her first day, she chose the navy skirt with the white polo. As she walked to the corner to catch the bus, I was reminded of a time when our schools were orderly, our teachers respected, and our children all above average.

That was an imaginary time, of course, but nostalgia for it has helped to create the modern school-uniform movement, which has won the kind of broad—indeed, nearly uniform—support that exists for no other educational policy, or social policy, that one can think of. Although there isn’t a scholarly consensus that uniforms do anything to improve student achievement or school climate, about one-fifth of all public-school students now wear them. They are one of the few interventions on which charter-school advocates and anti-charter activists agree.

Even the students have gone along, in one of the great surrenderings of liberty in modern history. For, although we think of uniforms as a reclamation of the olden days, they are relatively new in this country. Against British Commonwealth traditions, we were the free and easy New World, the country where children dressed themselves. For the most part, the appearance of students was governed only by the nagging of parents (“Get a haircut!”); informal norms (T-shirts were for athletics, not the school day); and deference to teachers and principals, who had wide discretion to tell a boy that he looked like a hoodlum, or tell a girl that her hemline was inappropriately short.

In the sixties, students fought for more autonomy in dress, to signal allegiance to a particular band or clique or general attitude toward the world. They saw dress as a mode of expression in schoolyard politics, and in world politics: in 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court upheld high-school students’ rights to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. That case was the capstone for an emerging jurisprudence of freedom-in-attire, coming after court decisions in New York and Idaho striking down bans on women wearing pants, and a decision in New Hampshire ending a ban on bluejeans. These cases helped solidify a trend toward more freedom for young people to dress how they wished. And so it was, from the nineteen-seventies into my childhood, in the nineteen-eighties.

Then Bill Clinton happened. In 1996, Clinton, running for reëlection and eager to shore up his conservative credentials, championed mandatory school uniforms “as the kind of small-bore, low-cost, common-sense policy initiative that might appeal to a broad cross-section of voters,” as the legal scholars Deborah M. Ahrens and Andrew M. Siegel write, in their forthcoming paper “Reconsidering the Constitutionality of Student Dress Restrictions.” Clinton plugged uniforms in his State of the Union address that year and had his Department of Education issue a manual for schools that were transitioning to require uniforms. While some schools had experimented with uniforms in the eighties and nineties, it’s clear, Ahrens and Siegel argue, that “the modern enthusiasm for uniforms can be traced pretty directly to the 1996 Clinton administration initiative.”

Expecting some pushback, the Department of Education issued guidelines for making the new uniform policies able to withstand lawsuits. Except the free-expression lawsuits never came. As with other policies favored by conservatives, such as law-and-order policing and mass incarceration, Clinton’s support gave cover to liberals, desperate for any policies that might help the inner cities, to join the act. As one might expect, school uniforms, while growing in popularity everywhere, have really become a feature of poor schools. According to a 2016 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, school uniforms are required at fifty-three percent of schools where three-quarters of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. But, of schools where fewer than a quarter of students are so eligible, only four per cent require uniforms.

These uniforms have become a rich revenue source for kiddie-clothing companies like French Toast, which has a verbose Web site dedicated to their magical properties. One typical section makes the argument that “school uniforms bring an image of success to students and teachers.” But that depends how one defines success. In Silicon Valley, on Ivy League campuses, and even in a growing number of white-shoe firms, the rule is to dress down. While once upon a time each profession had its uniform—the gray-flannel suit, the white coat—today, the most successful people wear what they want, especially in the more creative industries.

On the Web site for my daughter’s school, the hyperlink “Click here for more information about student uniforms!” redirects to Lands’ End. Once known for its middle-quality oxford button-downs, Lands’ End has become a major player in the school-uniform game, and not by accident. It has aggressively formed partnerships with school systems, often becoming their main uniform purveyor, and it has helped fund some of the questionable research adduced to show that uniforms improve schools. In 2013, Lands’ End helped pay for a survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals that found that eighty-five per cent of principals “and other school leaders” believed that uniforms improved classroom discipline.

Many school leaders believe that uniforms help, although they can’t seem to agree on why. It’s student achievement, or “school pride,” or a perceived reduction in fighting. When independent researchers have tried to quantify such claims, they have had mixed results. One widely cited study, on schools in Long Beach, California, showed a decrease in school crime after the introduction of uniforms, but the city had taken many other measures to reduce violence at the same time, so it’s hard to tease out how much uniforms mattered. Many studies show no change in school culture, and some even show negative results: in one 2007 study , the introduction of uniforms accompanied an increase in the average number of assaults in one district’s violent schools.

One good friend of mine, a superintendent of a charter-school network, who spoke to me off the record, swears that introducing uniforms where he works changed the culture overnight, increased respect, and improved students’ ability to learn. He may be right. And, if uniforms are viewed positively by students, parents, and administrators alike—as they are—then it can seem precious to object to them. To some extent, enthusiasm about school culture is a good in itself; even if it doesn’t yield higher test scores or graduation rates, perhaps it leads to better teacher retention or recruitment. Maybe the aesthetics of color-coördinated order just make everyone in the building happier. One 2002 study of Texas middle-school students found that those in uniform had a stronger sense of “belonging” in their school community. That’s worth something.

But, so long as the evidence for these claims is thin, I am more concerned about what we know to be true: that uniforms are yet one more way that the surveillance of the un-powerful—the poor, people of color, and that great unheard group of the young—has become increasingly acceptable. “Campuses increasingly subject students to police surveillance techniques, including drug-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, random sweeps for contraband including bag searches, and drug tests,” Ahrens and Siegel write. As students become “proper subjects for policing,” they argue, it’s no surprise that we presume to tell them what to wear.

Uniforms can be liberating, in the way that the absence of choice is. My daughter is only a few days into her school year, yet she already says that uniforms simplify her morning. But, as our society reckons once more with the costs and burdens of free expression, we should remember that not so long ago teen-agers fought for their right to black armbands. While in theory the right to such overt political expression—the armband, the political button or patch—would still be upheld by courts, the spirit behind that freedom has disappeared. We’ve stopped thinking of our sons and daughters as citizens whose independence we want to cultivate by, as much as possible, getting out of the way.

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By Louis Menand

Educ 300: Education Reform, Past and Present

an undergraduate course with Professor Jack Dougherty at Trinity College, Hartford CT

Controversy: The True Effectiveness of School Uniforms

In history, students were not always required to wear a school uniform. When the school system started, most students were only required for students clothing to be appropriate for the learning environment, meaning no sexual, gang-related, or distracting clothing. If students did have to wear a uniform, they did not attend a public school. For many years now, it has been an argument of whether or not school uniforms should be options or should be removed out of schools. Many advocates think that school uniforms allow students to stay safe in schools, reduce crimes, increase attendance, and improve students performance in the classroom. Many people who are opposed to school uniforms are saying by putting kids into school uniforms, we are allowing them to have limited ways to express themselves. Low-income parents are concerned with trying to pay for these uniforms that can be very pricey. Despite this, school officials and school boards believe that uniforms are golden. When and why did school uniforms become widespread in public schools, and did they deliver the results that advocates promised?

The school uniform movement began a lot of cases that were set on student were wearing. Then a local community school in Long Beach, California became what advocates looked like an example school; however, the movement became more popularized after Bill Clinton gave his State of the Union address in 1996. Advocates, school official and school boards, hope that by having school uniforms would decrease in distractions, leveled socioeconomic barriers, and less student worried or concerned that they do not have the best clothes. Over time, school officials saw the change in students; however, researchers do not see the same correlation across many school districts.  

In 1969, there was a supreme court case Tinker v Des Des Moines Independent Community School District. This case was a very important case for U.S school system. In this case, some students of the Des Moines school wanted to protest the Vietnam War, and they did this by wearing black armbands. The principal of the school learned about what was going to happen, and she required students to be removed from the schools if they are wearing the armbands. Students would also be suspended and would not be able to attend school until they agreed to not wear the armband. The Tinker family had a big issue with that because they felt that the school violated their first amendment right. They sued the school district saying that violation. The school simpled argued that they are violating school policies. According to Dress Code in Public Schools: Principals, Policies, and Precepts, “But, a closer look at Tinker may reveal less support for an expansive view of students’ rights to wear any clothing of his or her choice”( DeMitchell, Todd A.; Fossey, Richard; Cobb, Casey 35 ).  The Tinker case is how we see school officials dictating what students wear.  

There was a public school, Jackie Robinson Academy, in Long Beach, California that President Clinton recognized for wearing school uniforms. After leaving the school, he recalled a conversation that he had with his wife about school uniforms. He recalled her mentioning to him that school uniforms would make things better in school in terms of student behaviors. He made Jackie Robinson Academy the face for school uniforms in 1994. There begins to be a large wave of school districts in Long Beach that turns over to school uniforms being the solution to their problems, “uniforms [became] mandatory for all 58,500 students in its elementary and middle schools”(Mitchell “Clinton Will Advise Schools on Uniforms.” ). The school district found that by enforcing students wear polos and blue pants or plaid skirts decreased crime in schools by 36 percent. Many people argue that it takes away from children individuality. He defined advocates by stating 

“‘I think these uniforms do not stamp out individuality among our young people,” he said at the rally.”Instead, they slowly teach our young people one of life’s most important lessons: that what really counts is what you are and what you become on the inside, rather than what you are wearing on the outside’” (Mitchell).

In this, the President is recognizing the problems that are going on; however, he is making it clear that adding uniforms will make things easier and more practical for school boards.

By January 23, 1996, President Bill Clinton became the first president to mention anything about school uniforms in the United States State of the Union address. When talking about the state of our public school system, Clinton stated “I challenge all our schools to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship. And if it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms” (Clinton “State of the Union Address”) It was surprising to having the president mention something like this during his address; however, it sparked up some conversation. The New York Times article talks about how the President stated that he believed incorporating school uniforms will better the community of the school, “ If it means that the schoolrooms will be more orderly, more disciplined,” Mr. Clinton said, “and that our young people will learn to evaluate themselves by what they are on the inside instead of what they’re wearing on the outside, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms” (Mitchell). Despite his ideas, he left it up to the school officials on that change.

In 1997 there was the case of an appeal, Phoenix Elementary School District No. 1 v. Green, that had parents stating that they did not agree with the previous ruling in March of 1995 that they would be enforcing school uniforms all over,

“Testimony was presented at trial that the uniform policy reduced clothing distractions, increased campus safety, improved school spirit, leveled socioeconomic barriers, ensured that students dressed appropriately, and reduced the staff and faculty time required to enforce the dress code. The court concluded that the dress code was reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical purposes, including promoting a conducive learning environment and securing campus safety”(Geddis “School Uniforms Reduce Distractions, Aid Safety).

The statements that they address as improvements were also improvements that advocates wanted as well. The biggest improvement that they wanted to see decreased in distractions to promote academic achievement, leveled socioeconomic barriers, and less student worried or concerned that they do not have the best clothes. This is something that the researcher is looking into to see if there were actually any growth on any of these topics.

An Education Weekly article, “Uniform Effects?”, covered how the researcher, as well as school officials, felt about some of the pros and cons surrounding school uniforms. There are many different arguments that school officials at Stephen Decatur Middle School give about school uniforms; nonetheless, researchers dispute what the school officials are saying. David L. Brunsma is a researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He spent time studying the effects of school uniforms in school using the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. He made sure to look at the effects that uniforms had on the whole school and the individual students. He found that about 27 percent of elementary school by 2000 had some type of school uniform rule. Majority of those school are in areas with minority or disadvantaged students, which are like the students in Stephen Decatur Middle School.

School Official verse The Researcher

The principal of Stephen Decatur Middle School, Rudolph Saunders, stated that the student tends to behave better when they have on a uniform,” ‘It’s like night and day,” Saunders says. “We have ‘dress down’ days, and the kids’ behavior is just completely different on those day” (Viadero “Uniform Effects?”). Although these school districts are convinced that uniforms have an impact on students’ discipline, Brunsma findings showed that “uniform policies don’t curb violence or behavioral problems in schools”(Viadero ).  In fact, his research shows how dermal having a uniform can actually be to students. The school is just based on what they are seeing without making sure this is really the cause. This is a factor of correlation does not imply causation. This is shown even clearer when Betty Mikesell-Bailey, “the school-improvement resource teacher at Decatur”(Viadero ), says that test scores have increased since the school required students to wear uniforms. However, Mikesell-Bailey could not prove how this was a correlation. Despite this, she still claimed that “[s]he’s fairly certain, though, that the policy has cut down on the teasing to which middle school children subject one another.” Brunsma made it clear that there was no correlation between uniforms and test scores. Brunsma further his argument by saying that uniforms do not “cultivate student self-esteem and motivation [or] balance the social-status differences”(Viadero). Uniforms actually cost a great deal of money, and kids can still bully other kids over the smallest thing, such as a hole in a shoe or even the type of pants they are wearing compared to others’. Brunsma argued that the uniform industry has been taken over by large clothing names like Land’ End Inc, which lead the school uniform industry since 1997, and French Toast, which Decatur middle school got their uniforms from. Students were clearly not a big fan of uniforms. They are arguing these uniforms can be uncomfortable and the have students lost individuality, “‘People can’t be who they are if they have to wear the same thing every day,’ says Alexis Richardson, who’s also in 7th grade”(Viadero). Despite this, school officials would say that uniforms help with being togetherness and recognizable to the school. Mikesell-Bailey stated that it was easier to recognize their students when they are outside, “‘When I see the uniform, I always stop, because I know it’s one of my children,” she says”(Viadero). Brunsma argues that the school should take into account the students’ point of view. He believes that if they looked into the history of uniforms, you can see how students would feel less than other kids without uniforms, “Some of his historical research suggests, for example, that school uniforms originated in England in the 16th century as a way to signal the lower-class status of some children”(Viadero).

They looked into a school with an optional school uniform policy in New Hampshire, the school, Highland-Goffe’s Falls Elementary School, stated that the few students that did not wear uniform, had a harder time being able to transfer the students into other schools where they could wear what they wanted, “We had seven very negative parents out of 454 families,” says Paul. “Those seven children never wore uniforms, which, from my point of view, kind of derailed us” (Viadero ). The school had to stop wearing school uniforms, even though it decreases the about of bully going on in the school. Brunsma was very unsure as to how these facts were even put out. He felt that the school district’s arguments were very problematic for two reasons. He felt that it was wrong for them to look at just one school district because some schools can be the outlier. Furthermore, he believed that the school failed to mention the dynamics changed that happened in this school, “Brunsma says newer case studies looking at uniform-adoption efforts in schools in Baltimore, Denver, and Aldine, Texas, a suburban Houston district—all of which also point to positive effects—have an additional shortcoming”(Viadero). These were some of the schools that he was able to look at in his research.

Overall, it could be said that school uniforms work for different schools. In some school, we see that school uniforms changed what advocates hoped that they would. In other schools, we don’t quite see the correlation. Because there is not a clear answer, researcher and advocates disagree on this topic all the time. The key ideas that they disagree on are uniforms are less costly for low-income households, uniforms promote academic achievement, and having uniforms does not hinder student views on themselves. We see these ideas being pushed at the forefront when President Clinton gave his address and school began to look into the effects it had on their school. Nonetheless, research like Brunsma looks across school districts. This big difference that has been shown here is how over time, who are school districts focused on and who researcher focused on.

Work Cited 

Clinton Bill “State of the Union Address.” National Archives and Records Administration , National Archives and Records Administration, 23 Jan. 19996, clintonwhitehouse2.archives.gov/WH/New/other/sotu.html.

DeMitchell, Todd A.; Fossey, Richard; Cobb, Casey. “Dress Codes in the Public Schools: Principals, Policies, and Precepts,” Journal of Law & Education vol. 29, no. 1 (January 2000): p. 31-50. HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/jle29&i=41 .

Geddis, Carol. “School Uniforms Reduce Distractions, Aid Safety – Education Week.” Education Week , https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/03/02/25letter-1.h24.html. Accessed 3 May 2019.

Mitchell, Alison. “Clinton Will Advise Schools on Uniforms.” The New York Times , 25 Feb. 1996  NYTimes.com , https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/us/clinton-will-advise-schools-on-uniforms.html.

“Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.” Wikipedia , Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Apr. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independent_Community_School_Distrit.

Viadero, Debra. “Uniform Effects?” – Education Week.” Education Week , Jan. 2005. Education Week , https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/01/12/18uniform.h24.html.

Mandatory School Uniforms: Pros and Cons Essay

The issue of whether wearing school uniform should be compulsory or not has been discussed by many educators, academics, and scholars. Given all the perspectives on this question that have been formed over time, two polar views can be identified as the main ones. Thus, on the one hand, mandatory uniforms are believed to be a highly advantageous standard to implement at schools. On the other hand, many people consider them pointless and, to some extent, even disruptive for students’ academic performance and personal self-expression. It is also important to note that there is a significant difference between the concepts of a dress code and a mandatory uniform. While dress codes “state what should not be worn, uniform policies state what must be worn” (Anderson, 2002, p. 5). Arguments for and against mandatory school uniforms will be presented in this essay, which will aim to achieve a compromise between these polar views.

The implementation of mandatory school uniform policies is usually justified by a number of relatively similar arguments. First, school uniforms are believed to be useful in ensuring that there are no class barriers between the students (Anderson, 2002). Wearing the same uniform limits students’ ability to demonstrate economic advantage. Another argument is based on the fact that fewer differences in students’ appearance lead to increased focus in the classroom, as students are not distracted by brands, colors, and other clothing choices of their classmates. Finally, school uniforms are believed by some to have a positive effect on students’ sense of community, increasing the perceptions related to academic proficiency.

Those who consider school uniforms as a disadvantage of the modern education system also present a number of convincing arguments. First, they claim that school uniforms do not always eliminate class barriers, because they are often expensive, and many students’ parents cannot afford to buy uniforms with specific logos, embroidery, and accessories, required by schools (Deane, 2015). As a result, mandatory school uniforms can put a financial strain on lower-income families. Another argument often used by the opponents of school uniforms is that there have been no studies that make reliable claims on the connection between school uniforms and successful academic performance (Deane, 2015). Finally, opponents of school uniforms claim that the ‘sense of community’ that is believed to be an advantage is, in fact, imposed on students and borders on some form of extreme uniformity. This, in turn, can limit students’ freedom of self-expression, which is a significant drawback.

Despite the differences between these viewpoints, common ground can still be found. Both points, for instance, consider academic performance to be an important aspect. In addition, both of them seem to take into account students’ possible financial limitations. As a result, one of the possible solutions that can be suggested to address the concerns of both sides is introducing dress code policies instead of mandatory uniform rules or complete freedom of clothing choices. These dress codes can involve a set of rules which are unanimously considered important to follow by schoolchildren (Deane, 2015). For example, clothes should not display inappropriate pictures and writings, and they should not expose body parts that are considered inappropriate, such as the front and back midsection.

Given the fact that the opposing points presented above have a number of similar objectives, it can be concluded that the compromise on the issue of mandatory uniforms at schools is establishing dress codes. While limiting some inappropriate clothing choices that students can make, this solution would still provide them with self-expression opportunities. In addition, it will increase the variety of options for families with financial challenges, unable to afford one type of special-ordered uniform.

Anderson, W. (2002). School dress codes and uniform policies (4). Web.

Deane, S. (2015). Dressing Diversity: Politics of Difference and the Case of School Uniforms. Philosophical Studies in Education , 46 , 111-120. Web.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — School Uniform — The Benefits of School Uniforms

The Benefits of School Uniforms

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Promoting equality, improving academic performance, enhancing school safety, instilling a sense of pride and belonging.

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The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.

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This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

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Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.

The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.

This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.

Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”

And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.

Separate and Unequal

The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are most apparent.

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”

How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.

Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.

The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance, hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations where the security authorities have reliable and credible information indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)

According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

In this system, even the question of what behavior is being investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror” attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the harshest methods at their disposal.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands . Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks, were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”

Birth of a Movement

With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex. The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and, at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for preventing the spread of illegal settlements.

Whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank, and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push. Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” — and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.

Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies — had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state, had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized Israel’s political right.

By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director, recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his first interview for this article in 2016.

One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore, however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy .22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric.

Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims, and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.”

A Buried Report

In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel. Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were moving closer to the mainstream.

Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land? Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full support of the state?

It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”

At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.”

Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.

The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”

The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.

As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even submitting them.”

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.

It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30 years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right. “But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he wanted us to drop it.”

Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says. When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the problem.

A Wave of Violence

On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle, standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”

The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description, and we don’t know who we are looking for.”

The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an “egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet ready.”

“You have to understand why all this is important now,” Ami Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are discussing the failure of Israel.”

Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet, despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the street. So everything starts with the street.”

By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream. When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year, an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements policy.

But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel, which was then, as now, central to the country’s security arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them, saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a recurrence of Jewish terrorism.

In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.

In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice” that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs.”

Operational Failures

In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation, which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.

In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the settlement in Hebron.

Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff, and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his account is published here for the first time.)

In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man. Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t have the honor of killing the Arab.”

Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released after only three.

Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light sentence.

Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst, he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.

Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.

In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is “rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.

Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983 immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.

In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was none of my business,” he said.

‘Clean Hands’

On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver. According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.

That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting , firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a result of the lack of essential resources.”

In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against “chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were rarely issued.

The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

A Curse of Death

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens.

After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time. “I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by without the shedding of blood.”

The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat, and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They threatened Jews.

The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura , and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef .

Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.

Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the mid-1990s.

Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead.

Conspiracies

Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had heard Amir talking about the justice of the din rodef judgments, but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger. “No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.”

Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir at the detention center where he was being held after the assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect Israel.

Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to Akerman, “I succeeded . I was able to do something that many people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage to do it.”

The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.

Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.

Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”

The Sasson Report

In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two years.

The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate. For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave conclusions.”

It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with most of my questions.”

Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense Ministry had issued demolition orders.

Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me utterly insane.”

Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.

“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,” Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of “various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support and encouragement.”

This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular, flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement agencies are unable to act against government departments that are themselves breaking the law.”

But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office, found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he had helped to build.

All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top job.

The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says, in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.

When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009, he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.” Netanyahu moved on.

A NEW GENERATION

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either not trying or very stupid.”

The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder — and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians before settling on a target. The police could have begun an investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask her the names of the people plotting the attack.

In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection against a government that “prevents us from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”

During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing between women, men and children.”

This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave burning tires in the entrance to the house.”

The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified. “It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in it.”

Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members, including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure applied frequently against Arabs.

The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014; Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the murder of Arabs.

The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their 18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.

It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders, administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”

Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers, even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested, right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”

American Friends

The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian state unresolved and off the table.

If there were any questions about the new administration’s position on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El. On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s “alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of Israel.”

This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force with authority over U.S. counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on Middle East experience.

But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank: settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics, including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next intifada.

Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman, his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F. officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”

Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz, he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.

Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to various projects in the settlements.

During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.

A Settler Coalition

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to office.

The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently hawkish.

Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with authority over the police.

Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that executed Hitler’s Final Solution.

In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022, Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said, was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”

Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank. Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”

It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or “destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much more important than the formal.”

The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.

In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.” The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police — who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the Israeli police.”

And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs.

‘Only One Way Forward’

When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them. The judges agreed to wait.

The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any law-enforcement efforts to stop them.

The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no order preventing them from doing so.

The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the consequences of their own actions.

Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”

In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply. Or if it will comply.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after, saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West Bank.”

The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an American administration, was met with a combination of anger and ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others “utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for them,” it said.

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

Additional reporting by Natan Odenheimer.

Top photograph: A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which seeks to tear down Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish rule.’’ Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times.

Read by Jonathan Davis

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by David Mason

Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer who has been covering Israel and Palestinian territories since 2012. He is a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

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