No institution in Europe or the United States has ever called on Israel to remove hatred or negativity toward Palestinians from its textbooks, writes Anna Saif. [GETTY]
How can they do that? Why are they like that? Where is their humanity? With each shocking episode of Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, unimaginable atrocities begin every day, numbing and paralyzing, violating the deepest essence of our humanity. There is a feeling that something is happening.
Israel’s institutions, media, religion, laws, and military establishment have created a generation that has no empathy for Palestinians. The most insidious part of this indoctrination weapon is the education system from kindergarten to the end of high school, when young Israeli conscripts are unleashed on the Palestinians.
In February, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced a post-war “deradicalization” program for Gaza’s schools, ignoring the devastating realities of the occupation and blockade. For this, it is enough to look closer to the house. As early as 1983, a New York Times article reported that Israeli schools were dominated by war and patriotism, with children being “trained as rednecks to prepare to go on a killing spree at 18.” “Prejudice” is instilled in them.
Education is an important means of socialization that exercises social control through cultural hegemony and inculcates values that create a national consciousness. The Israeli education system is entirely a product of Zionist ideology, concocting a common language, common culture, and history in order to inculcate a homogeneous identity. It also advocated ethnic identity, indicating exclusive Jabotinsky’s pure-blood theory.
Palestinians as a threat
Israeli textbooks are part of 76 years of this propaganda. In his book The Invention of the Jewish People (2008), Shlomo Sand writes that in Israel, “history lessons, civics lessons, and national holidays began to transform the past long before people had access to important tools. It explains how the objects merge into the imaginary world they represent. For generations, students in Israeli schools have been indoctrinated to see Palestinians as the ultimate other, the arch-enemy of all Israelis. Professor Nurit Peled Elhanan, in a 2012 study of post-Oslo Israeli textbooks, found that “Israeli textbooks do not include positive cultural or social aspects of the Palestinian lifeworld.” states. Palestinians are defined as “non-Jews,” “Israeli Arabs,” or “Philishchines.”
The work of Peled Elhanan and earlier scholars such as Professor Daniel Bartal and Ismael Abu Saeed has shown that Israeli educational discourses pose threats to Palestinians, including demographic threats, criminal threats, and various other threats. It deviates in some respects and shows that it positions Palestinians as a threat. A myriad of hostile stereotypes, including murderers and terrorists.
There are no Palestinians in Israel or in the occupied territories in Israeli kindergartens. There are no pictures, no songs, no folklore. In fact, Israeli textbooks do not depict Palestinians going about their normal daily activities. In one image of Palestinian children throwing stones, the Israeli tank and jeep in the photo have been edited out. Another cartoon image depicts a Palestinian man in front of a simple house. The caption reads: “Arabs refuse to live in tall buildings and insist on living in one-story houses surrounded by land.” The few photos of Palestinians consist of long shots, in contrast to close-up shots of Jewish Israelis, stripping them of their individuality and helping children empathize with them. Masu.
As recent research by Peled Elhanan and others has highlighted, Israeli children grow up internalizing negative and dehumanizing discourses about Palestinians, viewing Palestinian lives as expendable. I’m starting to think.
At university level, 4% of Israeli students study Arabic, but Arabic is not taught by native speakers. Students are taught Arabic to meet the needs of Israeli military intelligence officers. As Jonathan Cook points out, Israeli students are “raised not as good citizens, but as good soldiers.” “If students have a good relationship with Arabic and see Arabs as potential friends, they might cross over to the other side,” said one teacher interviewed in Cook’s report. Ta. In this way, “Arab studies is liberated from Arabs.”
There is no history of Palestine.
The dehumanizing portrayal of Palestinians in Israeli education is further accentuated by the complete lack of historical context of current reality. Ismael Abu-Saad, in his study of Israeli educational policy and curriculum, states that “the entire period from the Second Temple to the Zionist settlements is not taught at all.” This Israeli student knows nothing about the country before 1948.
Sand describes how his generation was taught a history of Israel that “traced the path to national restoration directly from the Bible.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s battle cry against the Amalekites, whose young conscripts joined them in a Bible jihad in Gaza, shows that the Torah’s role in education is widespread. According to Sand, subsequent historical narratives incorporated “exile” and “Holocaust” as central elements of the Jewish self.
The Holocaust is a determining factor in Israel’s self-formation. All Israeli high school students visit concentration camp museums in Poland and Germany. These museums help construct an identity that establishes Jewishness as uniquely different from the rest of humanity. This also enforces the idea that everyone is against them and must fight to survive, something Prime Minister Netanyahu recently said when he said Israel “must live by the sword.” repeated the rhetoric.
Moreover, most Israelis agree with these views, as a Pew poll last May found that 76% of the population supported the genocide in Gaza.
According to Sand, the retrospective construction of Jewish history within Zionist logic creates a “past available to Israel’s collective memory” that is “a manufactured nationhood and an imaginary people.” Within such historical structures, Palestine and Palestinians are erased.
Peled-Elhanan studied 10 important history textbooks and found no mention of Palestinian life in Palestine before 1948. These books promoted the historical rights of Jews to the land, as indigenous peoples returning to their homeland, and as direct descendants of the Biblical Hebrews, fulfilling a destiny of national salvation.
Another premise common to these textbooks was the recurring theme of Arab threat and hatred, in addition to global anti-Semitism.
erase
One Israeli textbook titled “The 20th Century” only mentions the Nakba era, without giving it a name. “Some say the Arabs were expelled, others say they fled,” the book explains. The massacres of Palestinians in Deir Yassin, Qibiya and Kaffar Qasem are justified by the consequences for the Zionist project. The author goes on to explain that “the massacre of friendly Palestinians led to the flight of other Palestinians, thereby making possible the establishment of a coherent state,” and that “the flight of Arabs created a dire demographic problem.” has been resolved.” No sympathy is shown for the Palestinian victims of the Nakba, which “delegitimizes the Israeli-Zionist narrative.” Therefore, in relation to the events of 1948, history textbooks generally “do not seek to deny the expulsion, but…justify it and bring about positive consequences for Israel,” Peled-Elhanan said. say.
Israeli geography books also deny the spatial existence of Palestine. Most books depict the “great land of Israel.” Arab cities and villages in Israel have gone missing, or Palestinian villages have been referred to as “unrecognized.” Even after the Oslo Accords, the areas allocated to the Palestinian Authority were not marked on maps. Only one book in Peled-Elhanan’s research is named “West Bank,” the remaining books all use the term “Judea and Samaria” and do not mention the Occupied Palestinian Territories. No.
The Association for the Promotion of Civil Equality also found that Arab place names were absent from hundreds of Israeli textbooks it examined.
The epistemological erasure of Palestinian land is not surprising, but it points to an alternative world in which young Israelis are raised to become citizens of a state that denies even the physical presence of Palestinians on the land. .
prepared to serve
In fact, negative portrayals of Palestinians create a worldview among Israeli youth that suits the IDF’s purposes. But as if that wasn’t enough, the Israeli military is also actively involved in the schools visited by its officers. The children also go on field trips to army bases, where students engage in activities such as target practice, and in some recorded instances wearing keffiyehs and firing at targets.
Killing Palestinians so mercilessly in Gaza, the West Bank, bulldozing their bodies, destroying schools, mosques and universities and holding celebrations, robbing a 10-year-old with a sniper, blowing up ambulances and hospitals. When we asked him if he could shoot a frightened 5-year-old girl surrounded by the bodies of her brutally murdered family members, brutally torture and rape Palestinian prisoners of war, and commit genocide, he showed no remorse. They killed thousands of people without realizing it, and the answer lies mainly with the Zionists, who are sealed off by their bigotry. education system. Eliminate the Palestinian people and demonize them to the level of sedition.
The EU and US parliaments have rammed on and on about the so-called “incitement” in the Palestinian education system, withholding funds from Palestinians until textbooks are changed, based on a report by IMPACT-se, an Israeli NGO masquerading as an international organization. he yelled angrily. But 76 years to Israelis in an education system that denies Palestinian history, character, and human rights in order to prepare 18-year-old Israelis not only to kill occupied Palestinians, but also to go on acts of terrorism. The propaganda and brainwashing has never been done. It was criticized for its incitement and the overt racism it contained. No group in Europe or the United States has called on Israel to remove hate and negativity toward Palestinians from its textbooks.
The genocide in Gaza is being perpetrated by people who have been indoctrinated in school to hate Palestinians. How can they we ask? They teach young people.
Dr Anna Saif is an independent researcher and previously lectured at the University of Surrey, the University of Portsmouth and Birzeit University. Her main research interests focus on textual and visual colonial discourse analysis with particular interest in the Arab world.
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