reply by
Lynette
6/17/2002 (9:40) |
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Arabs engage in hate lessons and you Israeli's dont,huh?
ISRAELI SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS PROMOTE HATRED TOWARD PALESTINIANS
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2001
Israeli school textbooks as well as children's storybooks, according to recent academic studies and surveys, portray Palestinians and Arabs as 'murderers,' 'rioters,' 'suspicious,' and generally backward and
unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule, rather than the exception, in Israeli schoolbooks.
Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied 124 elementary, middle, and high school textbooks on grammar and Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. Bar-Tal concluded that Israeli textbooks present the view that Jews are involved in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy that refuses to accept and acknowledge the existence and rights of Jews in Israel.
'The early textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs
were delegitimized by the use of such labels as 'robbers,' 'bloodthirsty,' and 'killers',' said Professor Bar-Tal, adding that there has been little positive revision in the curriculum over the years.
He also pointed out that Israeli textbooks continue to present Jews as industrious, brave, and determined to cope with the difficulties of 'improving the country in ways they believe the Arabs are incapable of.' Hebrew-language geography books from the 1950s through 1970s focused on the glory of Israel's ancient past and how the land was 'neglected and destroyed' by the Arabs until the Jews returned from their forced exile and revived it, 'with the help of the Zionist movement.'
'This attitude served to justify the return of the Jews, implying that they care enough about the country to turn the swamps and deserts into blossoming farmland; this effectively delegitimizes the Arab claim to the same land,' Bar-Tal told the Washington Report. 'The message was that the Palestinians were primitive and neglected the country and did not cultivate the land.'
This message, continued Bar-Tal, was further emphasized in textbooks by the use of blatant negative stereotyping which featured Arabs as: 'unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic.' Further, according to the textbooks, the Arabs were 'tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored' and 'they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed.'
Textbooks currently being used in the Israeli school system contain less direct denigration of Arabs, but continue to stereotype them negatively. He pointed out that Hebrew- as well as Arabic-language texts used in elementary and junior high schools contain very few references either to Arabs or to Arab-Jewish relations. The coordinator of a Palestinian NGO in Israel said that major historical events hardly get a mention either.
'When I was in high school 12 years ago, the date '1948' barely appeared in any textbooks, except for a mention that there was a conflict, Palestinians refused to accept a U.N. solution and ran away instead,' said Jamal Atamneh, coordinator of the Arab Education Committee in Support of Local Councils, a Haifa-based NGO. 'Today the idea communicated to schoolchildren is basically the same: there are winners and losers in every conflict. When they teach about 'peace and co-existence,' it is to teach us how to get along with Jews.'
Atamneh explained that textbooks used by the nearly one million Arab Israelis (one-fifth of Israel's population) are in Arabic, but are written by and issued from the Israeli Ministry of Education, where Palestinians have no influence or input.
'Fewer than 1 percent of the jobs in the Education Ministry, not counting teachers, are held by Palestinians,' Atamneh said. 'For the past 15 years, not one new Palestinian academic has been placed in a high position in the ministry. There are no Palestinians involved in preparing the Arabic-language curriculum [and] obviously, there is no such thing as affirmative action in Israel.'
In addition, there are no Arabic-language universities in Israel. Haifa University, Atamneh points out, has had a steady 20 percent Arab student population for the past 20 years. 'How can that figure have remained the same after all these years when the population in the north [of Israel] has grown to over 50 percent Arab?'
Answering his own question, Atamneh rattles off statistics that reflect excellent high school scores among Arab students which he contrasts to their subsequent lower-than-average performance in Hebrew-language college entrance exams given by the state.
'No major scholarships have ever been awarded to an Arab; there are no dorms for Arabs and no college-related jobs or financial aid programs. They justify this legal discrimination by the fact that we do not serve in the army. There are numerous blatant and official methods used to keep Palestinian Arabs out of the universities.'
Dr. Eli Podeh, lecturer in the Department of Islamic Studies and Middle East History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says that while certain changes in Israeli textbooks are slowly being implemented, the discussion of Palestinian national and civil identity is never touched
upon.
'Passages from 'experts' about the existence of a Palestinian identity were introduced, but in general it appeared that the textbook authors were not eager to adopt it,' said Dr. Podeh, adding that 'the
connection between Palestinians in Israel and Arabs in Arab countries is not discussed. Especially evident is the lack of a discussion on the orientation of Palestinians to the [occupied] territories.
'While new textbooks attempt to correct some of the earlier distortions, these books as well contain overt and covert fabrications,' said Dr. Podeh. 'The establishment has preferred -- or felt itself forced -- to encourage the cover-up and condemn the perplexity.'
One Israeli public high school student told the Washington Report that the contents of the schoolbooks and the viewpoints expressed by some teachers indeed have a lasting negative effect on youngsters' attitudes toward Palestinians.
'Our books basically tell us that everything the Jews do is fine and legitimate and Arabs are wrong and violent and are trying to exterminate us,' the unidentified student said.
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/TEMPPOST/textbook.html
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Fanatical Jews in Hebron dress up their kids like Dr.Goldstein and sing his praises for slaughtering 29 Muslim worshippers as they were praying. He even killed the small boys with their fathers.
The mirror does not lie
By Amira Hass
How perfectly natural that 40,000 persons should be subject to a total curfew for more than a month in the Old City of Hebron in order to protect the lives and well-being of 500 Jews. How perfectly natural that almost no Israeli mentions this fact or, for that matter, even knows about it. How perfectly natural that 34 schools attended by thousands of Palestinian children should be closed down for more than a month and their pupils imprisoned and suffocating day and night in their crowded homes, while the children of their neighbors - their Jewish neighbors, that is - are free to frolic as usual in the street among and with the Israeli soldiers stationed there.How perfectly natural that a Palestinian mother must beg and plead so that an Israeli soldier will allow her to sneak through the alleyways of the open-stall marketplace and obtain medication for her asthmatic children, or bread for her family. (Sometimes Israeli soldiers do have the guts to disobey orders, although, generally speaking, when encountering such situations, they order the woman to return to her home.)
How perfectly understandable that the Israel Defense Forces is seizing control of an ever-increasing number of rooftops atop the homes of Palestinians in the Old City of Hebron and that Israeli soldiers positioned on those rooftops from time to time open fire on other Palestinians, while, down below, at street level, the Jewish settlers are free to show over and over again - at the expense of the windshields, windows and tires of the parked cars of Palestinians - who's really the boss. How perfectly natural that a Muslim house of prayer like the Ibrahim mosque should be shut down and declared 'off limits' to thousands of Muslim worshipers.
The ease with which a curfew has now been imposed on Hebron and the perception of that curfew as a completely natural occurrence are not the products of the past few weeks. (Incidentally, the residents of the village of Hawara, in whose vicinity and on whose lands the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar was built, have also been placed under curfew; their curfew was imposed more than three weeks ago.)
After the massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein in the Ibrahim mosque, also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the ones who were punished were the Palestinians, with the punishment taking the form of curfews, closures, 'disengagement,' the shutting-down of entire streets and the continual, hostile supervision by Israeli soldiers and police officers. And there was an additional punishment that was meted out to the Palestinians: economic disaster.
However, Hebron is only a microcosm, an illustration of the general picture. The protracted curfew imposed on Hebron and the way that this curfew has been accepted in Israeli eyes as such a natural event convey, in a nutshell, both the entire story of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land in general and the essence of the kind of Israeli thinking that has developed in the shadow of obvious military superiority. The curfew in Hebron and the ease with which it has been imposed only illustrate the entire story of discrimination and uprooting that the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Israelis - a never-ending story that unfolded as far back as the Oslo era and the period of the so-called 'peace process.'
Jews live in Hebron today either because of 'ancestral rights' or because they can show proof of Jewish ownership of a given property in the not-too-distant past. It is so perfectly natural that Jews should be able to live wherever they want in the Land of Israel - on both sides of the Green Line. It is so perfectly natural that a Jew who was born in Tel Aviv should be able to move to Hebron or to Yitzhar. And it is so perfectly natural that Palestinians cannot enjoy that right and cannot move to Tel Aviv or to Haifa - even if their families own lands and houses there.
It is so perfectly natural that, to this very day, Israel is developing and expanding the Jewish community in Hebron, just as Israel is developing all the Jewish settlements in the territories. And it is so perfectly natural that, to this very day, the Palestinians must deal with various limitations imposed on any planned development for their own communities, because most of the lands on the West Bank - which is their primary land reserve - are under Israeli administrative control. No, the Palestinians do not need the kind of legroom that Israelis do.
It is so perfectly natural that Palestinians have to obtain a travel permit from the Israeli authorities (only a minority of the applicants are granted the permit) in order to enter East Jerusalem or the Gaza Strip, within the context of Israel's closure policy, which was launched in 1991 and which continues until this very day. On the other hand, Jews are free to travel from the West Bank to Israel and back, using well-built highways that have been constructed on lands that have been expropriated from Palestinian villages.
During the summers in Hebron, sometimes days, even weeks go by without running water in the faucets of Palestinian homes. On the other hand, the Jewish neighbors of Palestinian Hebronites - in the Old City of Hebron or in the nearby Jewish quarter of Kiryat Arba - experience no problems or shortages as far as their water supply is concerned.
The same situation prevails in many Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank: Whereas the Palestinians have no water, the residents of the Jewish settlements enjoy green lawns. The reason is that Israel has, in effect, imposed a quota on the water that the Palestinians are allowed to consume - that is, on the right to use water resources that are supposed to be jointly accessible for both Israelis and Palestinians in the single land they share.
This is a tale that must be recounted over and over again - almost to the point of exhaustion - because it depicts a situation that is so self-understood in the eyes of Israelis that they cannot even see that there is any problem whatsoever. How perfectly easy to regard the Palestinians as a violent and cruel people and to ignore the cruelty that has accumulated day after day for 33 long years and which has been directed during that long period toward an entire community. This is the kind of cruelty that is characteristic of every occupation regime. This is a cruelty that intensified during the Oslo years because of the gap between the fine talk about a 'peace process' and the reality.
The curfew in Hebron and the fact that this curfew is regarded as a completely natural phenomenon in the eyes of Israeli society reflects the twisted sort of thinking that developed in the minds of Israelis during the Oslo years. According to this warped thinking, the Palestinians would accept a situation of coexistence in which they were on an unequal footing vis-a-vis the Israelis and in which they were ranked as persons who were entitled to less, much less, than the Jews. However, in the end, the Palestinians were not willing to live with this arrangement.
The new Intifada, which displays the characteristics of both a popular uprising and a quasi-military one, is a final attempt to thrust a mirror in the face of Israelis and to tell them: 'Take a good look at yourselves and see how racist you have become.
I PARTICULARY LIKE THE LAST PARAGRAPH...):-]
MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL
WE SEE RACIST NAZIS AFTER ALL.
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