‘Abraham and moses were entrepreneurs’: the making of the entrepreneurial-Zionist citizen in Israeli education

Education is a key site for nation-building and fostering citizenship across the globe. Historically, Israel’s state education system has promoted ethno-national Zionist values. In the past two decades, Israel has undergone processes of neoliberalisation with the entrepreneurial ethos gaining prominence, emphasising future orientation, personal autonomy, and individualisation in service of the neoliberal state. How is the global entrepreneurial discourse, which encourages autonomous and individualistic citizens, assimilated and translated within a state education system aiming to establish ethno-national citizenship? Drawing on qualitative data including in-depth interviews with state education policymakers and educators, observations of schools’ educational spaces, and content analysis of ministerial official publications, the findings reveal a hybrid entrepreneurial-Zionist ideal citizen reflected in current educational discourse, merging neoliberalism and ethno-nationalism, combining future orientation with Jewish-Israeli narratives. This research contributes to citizenship studies by showing how entrepreneurial and national ideals of citizenship can be mutually reinforcing, rather than merely coexisting. The study demonstrates how in Israeli state education a hybrid model of citizenship integrates global neoliberal discourses of individualism with national narratives of collective ethno-national belonging.