Israeli Schools Seed Genocide: an interview with Nurit Peled-Elhanan
JVL Introduction
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a distinguished Israeli academic who has written much on how Israeli schoolbooks are full of virulent anti-Palestinian racism.
The ability of a nation to commit genocide depends upon its citizens regarding the victims of genocide as less than them, indeed less than human. Peled-Elhanan describes how Israeli school textbooks spent years teaching children that Arabs were primitives who could not adapt to modern civilisation before eliminating them from the narrative altogether except as agents of terror.
The books present only one model for an Israeli: a Jew of European descent. The histories of all other Jewish Israelis, Mitzrahi and Ethiopian, are discounted and they must adapt to the Ashkenazi model. By definition Israelis of Palestinian descent cannot do this and can never be a full part of Israeli society. Palestinians are no part of this humanity at all and can thus be discarded.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan has herself been victimised for paying attention to Palestinian suffering
MC
This article was originally published by Truthout on Sun 15 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
How Does Israel Justify Genocide? It Starts in the Schools.
Palestinian history and geography were scrubbed from Israeli schoolbooks a decade ago, scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan says.
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“Even the pictures you see, all the photos of people in schoolbooks are blonde with blue eyes. In reality, most Israelis are not blonde. ”
There is for me something of a psychological puzzle here as to how working class Mizrahi or black Jews who form a good part, if not the majority, of the shock troops committing the genocide in Gaza see themselves in relation to those they are murdering. (Only some 45% of Israelis self-identify as Ashkenazi). Despite all the propaganda it is hard to believe that they see themselves as physically whiter than the Palestinians since in many cases the reverse is true. However much they have absorbed the implicitly colour based racist paradigm of their schooling, the fact that their hatred of the Palestinians must be, at least for them, based on differences other than skin colour, must produce a considerable cognitive dissonance.
I have noted a curious related phenomenon amongst some naive UK ‘antiracist’ supporters of Palestine in the UK who tend erroneously to assume that, because Zionist supporters here typically have a colonial white racist mentality, the Israelis actually supporting and implementing the genocide must be of white European descent and culture.
Antiracist academics frequently emphasise that ‘whiteness’ is an ideological social construct, but the popular anticolonial vernacular largely ignores that observation. It is not however an observation which socialists concerned with education can afford to ignore.
This interview reminded me horribly of Apartheid South Africa’s “education” system for black South Africans (which was similarly designed to buttress racism and the power of the government). The blacks’ schooling was to be limited to what they’d need as subservient adult “hewers of wood and carriers of water”. The schooling and aspirations of white and “Cape Coloured” children were entirely different.
Any inward-looking society that’s been effectively controlled for generations by state-wide indoctrination isn’t going to recover its thinking ability unless forced by necessity to do so. So a snippet from the “Guardian” about
Israel’s Business Forum having urged Netanyahu to keep Gallant in his position encouraged me.
“The forum, which consists of 200 heads of Israel’s largest companies that employ many private sector workers, said Netanyahu should stop “messing around with petty politics” during a time of war …. The firing of the minister weakens Israel in the eyes of her enemies, and will further deepen the division in the people of Israel… THE PRIME MINISTER KNOWS BETTER THAN ANYONE THAT ALL THE ECONOMIC INDICATORS ALSO PROVE THAT ISRAEL IS DETERIORATING INTO AN ECONOMIC ABYSS AND SINKING INTO A DEEP RECESSION”.
Israeli hostage families, humanitarians, parts of the IDF and some political figures demand realignment of national politics and a ceasefire. Israel’s 200 largest companies have added their support to a call for change. The ICC are allegedly within days of charging Netanyahu and others. Hopefully a better tomorrow is underway, even though I (for one) can’t see it.