Peres calls to spend gas revenue on education

President Shimon Peres, speaking at a Thursday conference honoring the top school teachers in the country, said that Israel should take the revenue from the newly discovered natural gas fields in the Mediterranean and invest it in education, Ynet News reported.

“We’ve now found gas, let’s invest in the most important thing, in children,” Peres said.

“We need to invest in children and education,” the president said. “People ask how to get out of poverty. The first step today is to learn English. Today someone who doesn’t know two languages — the language of his country and the language of the digital world — is condemned to be poor.”

Israel’s education budget — especially for higher education — has been threatened by austerity measures proposed by the Finance Ministry designed to deal with Israel’s ballooning deficit. In April, Education Minister Shai Piron acknowledged that some programs would have to be cut but pledged said that the new budget wouldn’t greatly affect the education system.

In recent months, several huge natural gas fields have been discovered in Israel’s territorial waters in the Mediterranean, leading to speculation that Israel could become a gas exporter. Some experts, however, advocate that the gas shouldn’t be sold abroad and warn that the reserves might not be as large as commonly believed.

On Tuesday, the government said it was lowering the amount of gas that could be exported, from 50 percent to 40-45%, Globes reported.