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In Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s (a Professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a human rights activist 300) book “Palestine in Israeli School Books Ideology and Propaganda in Education” it gives a good insight into the propaganda that is taught to the Israeli citizens at a young age. Similar propaganda is portrayed by the western media.
She states “In Israel, school books are written for youngsters who will be drafted into joining compulsory military service at 18 years of age and carry out the Israeli policy of occupation in the Palestinian territories”.
They are taught that the only democracy in the Middle East is Israel. “Israeli schools books serve as relays of the Zionist ideology and its explicit message about the historic rights of the Jews to the Land of Israel/Palestine.” 301
The education system uses the Bible as an authoritative historical source to assert a Jewish ancient presence and dominance in the land.
Stories of biblical characters in the bible are associated with the Jewish settlement in the West Bank, convincing the Jews of their historical right to all of Palestine. 301
Since the Jewish ethno-nation is a mixture of people from all over the world with nothing in common, the important tasks of Israeli school books is to reproduce a narrative that would connect the Jewish students to their ‘origins’ in the land of Israel. 301 The Palestinians that were and are living there are labelled as “Arab invaders”.
She then states “In this grand narrative of return and redemption, the hero is the ‘New Jew’ who returned to reclaim his homeland and retrieve it from the Arab Invaders.”
Previous and current generations of children in school have a “Tree day”, where they go out and plant trees in forests and they are told they are restoring the biblical forests the Arab invaders destroyed with their herd while “they were away”. 301
The word ‘expulsion’ is replaced with the word ‘fled’ with regards to the expulsion of Palestinians from 78% of Palestine (1948) 302 and Syrian farmers from Golan Heights (1967). 301
Israeli authorities have banned the teaching of the Nakba in Palestinian schools. 303 The ‘Nakba’ is the Arabic word for ‘catastrophe’. Palestinians use this term to describe the events just before 1948 and after i.e. the invasion by Jewish Militants and the expulsion of Palestinians. 304 President Netanyahu argued that using the word Nakba is school is spreading propaganda against Israel. 303
E. Peled-Elhanan states “One of the aims of the Israeli-Zionist narrative … is to create a homogeneous identity to all the Jewish ethnicities in Israel, while attempting to erase, physically and spiritually traces of a continuous Palestinian life on the land, so that both Israeli and Palestinian memory of it would die. … Israeli school books serve as relays of the Zionist ideology and its explicit message about the historic rights of the Jews to the Land of Israel/Palestine” 301
Besides the “Jewish” historical rights to Palestine, the school books teach that the Arabs are a threat to them and they live in a world of “anti-Semitism”. Unless the Palestinian population is controlled, an increase in them can cause a demographic threat to the Israel. Palestinians in occupied territories are a constant threat and must be controlled otherwise they would slaughter the Jews.
Israeli geography maps show that current Israel is just a small part of “Greater Israel”. 301 Greater Israel contains large parts (in some cases all) of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. 305
According to E. Peled-Elhanan “the label Palestinian is rarely mentioned and the Palestinian citizens are called ‘Arabs’, ‘Arab minority’ or ‘Israel’s Arabs.’
She states “Palestinians deaths in massacres or wars is reported like the death of animals, by approximate numbers or quantities.” Unlike the details of Israeli deaths.
Oren Yiftachel, Israeli professor specializing in political geography 306 states “Israel never sought to achieve equal citizenship between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, nor did it seek the consent of its Arab citizens for the forceful ideological imposition of a Jewish state.” 307
According to Israeli Professor Daniel Bar-Tal, one of the world’s leading psychologist and Rafi Nets-Zehngut recent study: “Israeli Jew’s consciousness is characterized by a sense of Victimization, a siege of mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering.” 308
Daniel Bar-Tal in his book with Yona Teichman state “Israeli public discourse is characterized by a continuous negative stereotyping of Arabs in general and of Palestinians in particular, with the use of delegitimizing labels.” 309
School books depict the Palestinians as ‘others’, far away strangers and “foreigners” who are alien to them, beneath them. They are represented as objects for scrutiny rather than individuals. At school, children are taught to keep away from these far away strangers. 301
Peled-Elhanan concludes with “Both right wing and Labour ministries of education have continued to produce and recommend books where Palestinians hardly exist except as terrorists and a demographic threat, may point to a nation-wide consensus regarding the need to inculcate ignorance and hostility towards the subjugated neighbours and the discriminated fellow-citizens”
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