Posted by Sadie from D006173.N1.Vanderbilt.Edu (129.59.6.173) on Tuesday, August 19, 2003 at 8:57PM :
In Reply to: Curriculum reform should start in the U.S. posted by 3shtar from ? (68.166.240.66) on Tuesday, August 19, 2003 at 12:02PM :
: Not to be outdone, Israel follows a similar model of curricular planning. It is not that ideologically driven and/or poor European Jews came to colonise Palestine with the financial assistance of Jewish philanthropist bankers and later with the support of the British Empire, and that their evicting Palestinian peasants off their lands led to resistance against their colonisation efforts. Rather, it is oppressed European Jews who were seeking to "return" to their "ancestral land" fleeing anti-Semitic oppression who were faced by "Arabs" who fought them out of "anti- Semitic" motives. The history of the Palestinians is obliterated from the picture except as primitive savage folks who refused the peaceful civilising call of the Jews and decided to kill them instead. While colonisation is rendered "redemption of the land" in Israeli school curricula, and the 1948 Zionist conquest becomes the "war of independence", Palestinian resistance to these foreign invaders becomes savage "terrorism". The history of Arab Jews who were abducted into the Zionist project late in the game is in turn irrelevant to the curricula of Israeli schools, wherein only the history of white European Jews is taught as the relevant history of all Jews. Images of the dangerous Arab punctuate Israeli children's books as it does Israeli Jewish culture more generally. It is not the numerous massacres of the Palestinians by the Israeli army and other Jewish terrorist groups that Israeli Jewish kids learn at school, rather it is the acts of Palestinian resistance (which sometimes were terrorist in nature and sometimes not) dubbed as "Arab terror", against the colonial settlement that they memorise. It is not the names of Palestinian villages and towns destroyed by the Israeli army that Israeli Jewish pupils learn by heart but the names of the Jewish colonial settlements built on the ruins of the destroyed Palestinian villages. Palestinians appear in such textbooks, as they do in Israeli films and novels, as criminals, liars, terrorists, and primitives, in line with the popular Israeli Jewish racist epithet that renders all Arabs "dirty".
xxx That part of the article is sooooo true. I met this Jewish boy who thought I was Jewish (& once, someone confused me for a "mix" (that's the word he used), & I have NO idea why people do this - perhaps it's all projection... ANYWAY). So, I thought I'd talk with him about politics, because I wanted to see how he felt about the attack on Iraq. Oh my GOD, he was so horribly racist about the "Arabs".... I sent him an email with a bunch of Israeli peace websites (I never told him I wasn't Jewish), & maybe he'll wake up someday. But, I get this feeling that a lot of Jews, even in America (e.g. those in the ADL especially), think of the Palestinians as below animals, in the natural order of things. & now I see how this is perpetuated.... Of course, I have Jewish friends who are not that way, who are not racist (though, I don't think that's the right word, as Palestinians & Jews are genetically related), but now I see how the right wing Israeli parties get so much backing.
-- Sadie
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