How Israeli education serves the occupation and genocide in Gaza

How can they do that? Why are they like that? Where is their humanity? With each and every shocking episode of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza, with each day dawning with ever more unimaginable atrocities, there is a numbness, a paralysis and a sense that the deepest essence of our humanity is being violated.

The institutional apparatus of Israel, its media, its religious, legal and military establishments have created generations that have no empathy for Palestinians. The most insidious part of this arsenal of indoctrination is the education system, from kindergarten right up to the end of highschool when these young Israeli conscripts are unleashed on Palestinians.

In February, ignoring the devastating reality of the occupation and blockade, Netanyahu announced a post-war ‘de-radicalisation’ programme for schools in Gaza. For this, he only needs to look closer to home. Israeli schools are dominated by war and patriotism, and children instilled with “red-neck bigotry in order to prepare them at the age of 18 to go out and kill”, as reported in a New York Times piece as early as 1983.

Education exerts social control through cultural hegemony and is an important agent of socialisation, instilling values that create national consciousness. The Israeli education system is wholly a product of Zionist ideology which manufactured a common language, common culture and history to indoctrinate a homogenous identity. It also propounded an ethnic uniqueness which is indicative of Jabotinsky’s pure-blood theories which is exclusory.

Palestinians as the threat

Israeli schoolbooks are part and parcel of 76 years of this propaganda. Shlomo Sand in his book, The Invention of the Jewish People (2008) describes how, in Israel, “history lessons, civic lessons, national holidays coalesce into an imagined universe representing the past well before a person has acquired critical tools”.  Generations of Israeli school students have been inculcated to see Palestinians as the ultimate Other, the nemesis of every Israeli. “No Israeli textbook includes any positive cultural or social aspect of the Palestinian Life-world” according to Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan in her 2012 study of post-Oslo Israeli text books. Palestinians are defined as ‘non-Jews’, ‘Israel’s Arabs’ or ‘Philistinians’.

The work of Peled-Elhanan and earlier scholars such as Professor Daniel Bar-Tal  and Ismael Abu-Said show that Israeli educational discourse casts the Palestinians as a threat - a demographic threat, a criminal threat, deviant in a multitude of ways and creates a myriad of hostile stereotypes including murderers and terrorists.

In Israeli kindergartens, Palestinians within Israel and of the occupied territories do not exist. There are no photographs, no songs, no folklore. Indeed, in Israeli schoolbooks Palestinians are not depicted performing normal daily activities. In one image of Palestinian children throwing stones, the Israeli tanks and jeeps in the picture have been edited out. Another cartoon image shows a Palestinian in front of a simple house. The caption reads “Arabs refuse to live in high buildings and insist on living in one-storey land-ridden houses”. The handful of images of Palestinians are framed in long shot which de-personalises them in contrast to the close-up shots of Jewish Israelis which helps the children identify with them.

As highlighted by Peled-Elhanan and other recent studies, Israeli children grow up internalising negative and dehumanising discourses about Palestinians and come to see Palestinian life as expendable.

At matriculation level, 4% of Israeli students study Arabic but it is not taught by native speakers. Arabic is taught to students to serve the needs of the Israeli Army as intelligence officers. As Jonathan Cook points out, Israeli pupils are being “raised as good soldiers rather than good citizens”. One teacher interviewed in Cook’s report said that “if students had a good relationship with the Arabic language and saw Arabs as potential friends they may crossover to the other side”. Thus, “Arabic Studies is made free of Arabs”.

No Palestinian history

The dehumanising depictions of Palestinians in Israeli education is accentuated by the utter lack of historical context for the present reality. As Ismael Abu-Saad, notes in his study of Israeli educational policy and curriculum: “The whole period between the Second Temple and Zionist settlement is not taught at all”. The Israeli student has no idea about the country before 1948.

Sand tells how his generation was taught Israeli history which ‘followed a path directly from the Bible to national revival”. Netanyahu’s war cry against the Amalek taken up by young conscripts as a biblical crusade in Gaza is indicative of the pervasive role of the Torah in education. Later historical narratives, according to Sand, incorporated ‘Exile’ and ‘the Holocaust’ as central components of the Jewish self.

The Holocaust is a defining element of Israeli self-formation. All Israeli high school students visit concentration camp museums in Poland and Germany, which serve the identity building that sets up Jewishness as uniquely different from the rest of humanity. This also enforces the idea that everyone is against them and they must fight for survival, rhetoric that Netanyahu recently echoed when he stated that Israel must ‘live by the sword’.

What’s more, most Israelis agree with these views, as seen in a Pew Opinion Poll from last May which found that 76% of the population support the genocide in Gaza.

The retrospective construction of Jewish history within Zionist logic creates a “usable past for Israeli collective memory” according to Sand, which is a “manufactured nationhood and fictitious ethnos”.  Within such historical constructs, Palestine and Palestinians are erased.

Peled-Elhanan’s study of ten key history textbooks found no reference to Palestinian life in Palestine pre-1948. The books promoted Jewish historical rights to the land as homecoming indigenes, as direct descendants of biblical Hebrews fulfilling a destiny of national redemption.

Another shared assumption in these textbooks was the recurring theme of Arab threat and hatred, in addition to global anti-Semitism.

Erasure

One Israeli textbook entitled The 20th Century, only refers to the period of the Nakba, rather than ever naming it. “Some say the Arabs were expelled, some say they fled” the book explains. The massacres of Palestinians in Deir Yassin, Qibya and Kaffer Kassem are legitimised by their outcome for the Zionist project. The author further expounds that “the slaughter of friendly Palestinians brought about the flight of other Palestinians which enabled the establishment of a coherent state” and that the “escape of Arabs solved the horrifying demographic problem”. No empathy is expressed for Palestinians as victims of the Nakba, as this would “de-legitimate the Israeli-Zionist narrative”. Thus, in relation to the events of 1948, Peled-Elhanan says, in general, history text books “do not seek to deny the expulsion but… legitimate it and its positive results for Israel”.

Israeli geography books also negate Palestinian spatial presence. Most books depict ‘the greater land of Israel’. Arab cities and villages within Israel are missing or Palestinian villages are termed “unrecognised”. Even after the Oslo Accords, areas assigned to the Palestinian Authority were not marked on maps. Only one book in Peled-Elhanan’s study named the ‘West Bank’ whereas all the rest use the term, “Judea and Samaria” and none mentions the term Palestinian Occupied Territories.

The Association for Advancement of Civil Equality also found that there were no Arab place names in the hundreds of Israeli school books examined.

Whilst the epistemological erasure of Palestinian land is not surprising, it does show the alternative universe in which young Israelis are nurtured to become citizens of a state that negates even the physical presence of the Palestinians on their land.

Groomed to serve

In reality, the negative depictions of Palestinians create a world view among young Israelis that is fit for purpose for the IDF. However, as if this were not enough, the Israeli army is also actively involved in schools where officers go on visits. Children also go on field trips to army bases where students undertake activities such as shooting exercises, and in some documented instances, firing at targets wearing Keffiyehs.

When we ask how can young Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians so callously in Gaza, in the West Bank, bulldoze their bodies, destroy schools, mosques and universities and celebrate, pick off a ten year old child in a sniper attack, blow up ambulances and hospitals, shoot a terrified five year-old girl amid the bodies of her slaughtered family members, and brutality torture and rape Palestinian prisoners, in fact, summarily commit genocide, killing thousands with no remorse, the answer chiefly lies in their bigoted and hermetically sealed Zionist education system. It erases Palestinians and demonises them to levels of incitement.

The EU and US Congress ranted endlessly about the so called ‘incitement’ in the Palestinian education system, withholding money from the Palestinians until textbooks were changed, based on a report by Israeli NGO IMPACT-se which masquerades as an international organisation. Yet, 76 years of propaganda and indoctrination of Israelis in their education system, which negates Palestinian history, personhood and human rights in order to prepare 18-year-old Israelis to go out and terrorise as well as kill Palestinians under occupation, has never been criticised for the incitement and the downright racism it contains. No European or US body has ever asked Israel to remove the hatred or negation of Palestinians from its schoolbooks.

The genocide in Gaza is being perpetrated by a people indoctrinated by their schooling to hate Palestinians. How can they do that we ask? They teach them young.

Dr. Anna Saif is an independent researcher and formerly lectured at the Universities of Surrey, Portsmouth and Birzeit. Her principle research interests focus on textual and visual colonial discourse analysis with particular interest in the Arab world.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.