faszyzm w jarmulce
- From: Bolek i Lolek Wasner <rca.cdr@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 15:52:20 -0800 (PST)
Nurit Peled-Elhanan on education, racism and murder
By Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Jerusalem ,
Hebrew original
http://www.mahsanmilim.com/NuritPeledElhanan.htm
I would like to dedicate my words to the memory of the Palestinian
children who are regularly murdered in cold blood, not because of
human error and not because of technical errors, as is alleged in the
media, but in accordance with correct procedures, children for whose
systematic, routine murders nobody will ever be found guilty.
I would like to dedicate my words to the mothers of those murdered
children, who continue to bring children into the world and to raise
families, who prepare sandwiches as they see the bulldozers
approaching to demolish their houses, who accompany their children
every day to school over many kilometres of devastation and pollution,
in front of the levelled rifles of casually brutal soldiers, and who
know that those soldiers, the murderers of their children, will never
be brought to justice and if they are brought to justice will never be
found guilty, because the murder of Palestinian children is not a
crime in the Jewish and Democratic State of Israel. And lastly, I
would like to dedicate my words to the memory of the writer and poet
Prof. Izzat Ghazzawi, with whom I had the honour of sharing the
Sakharov prize for human rights and freedom of thought. A few months
before his death from humiliation he wrote to me, about the soldiers
who were breaking into his house at night, breaking furniture and
windows, polluting, and scaring the children, "it looks to me like
they are trying to silence me." Izzat Ghazzawi asked me to appeal to
the Foreign Ministry and ask them to correct the mistake. But his
heart knew the truth and stopped beating a short time afterwards.
The cruelty that cannot be expressed in words, the orderly, ingenious
abuse, that the best Jewish brains have been put to work planning and
perfecting, did not emerge from a void. It is the fruit of basic,
deep, total education.
Israel 's children are educated within an uncompromisingly racist
discourse. A racist discourse that does not stop at checkpoints, but
governs all human relations in this country.
Israel 's children are educated to see in the evil that they are
destined to implement immediately after the end of their schooling, a
necessity of the reality in which they are called to fulfil their
roles.
Israel 's children are educated to see international resolutions,
human and divine laws and orders as empty utterances that do not apply
to us. Israel 's children do not know that there is an occupation.
They learn about the "settlements". On the demographic maps in
geography textbooks the occupied territories are shown as part of
Israel or are left without colour and marked as "areas without data",
which means areas devoid of human beings.
In no geography textbook in Israel is there a map of the borders of
the State, because Israel 's children learn that the real geographical
entity that belongs to us is the mythological entity called The Land
of Israel, of which the State of Israel is a small and temporary
part.
Israel 's children learn that in their country there are Jews and non-
Jews: a Jewish sector and a non-Jewish sector, Jewish and non-Jewish
agriculture, Jewish and non-Jewish cities. Who are these non-Jews,
what are they doing? What do they look like? Does it matter?
When they are not called non-Jews, the Others in this country are
given a sweeping label: Arabs, for example.
In the book " Israel : Man and Space" published in 2002, it is
stated:
P. 12: "the Arab population [...] within this population group are
members of different religions and different ethnic groups: Muslims,
Christians, Druze, Bedouins, Circassians, most of whom are Arabs -
henceforth, throughout the whole book, members of these groups will be
referred to as Arabs or the Arab population."
In the same book the Palestinians are referred to as "foreign workers"
and their shameful conditions of work, says the book, are
"characteristic of developed countries".
The Palestinians - whether citizens of the State of Israel or those
who live in the occupied territories - are not represented in any
textbook as modern, urban people who are occupied with creative or
valuable work, or in positive `ethnic` activities. They are
represented in stereotypical iconic pictures: the Arabs who are
citizens of Israel are referred to by the humiliating term "Israel`s
Arabs" and are represented either in racist caricatures like the Arabs
from the Thousand and One Nights, with a moustache and a keffiye,
pointed clown shoes and a camel plodding along behind ("Geography of
the Land of Israel" 2002), or in typical racist images that represent
the Third World in the West - the pre-technological peasant who walks
behind a primitive plough attached to a pair of oxen ("People in the
Region" 1998). The Palestinian residents of the occupied territories
are represented with pictures of masked terrorists ("Modern Times
II"), or groups of barefoot refugees walking from no- place to no-
place with mattresses on their heads ("Journey to the Past", 2001).
The adjectives applied to those stereotypes in the textbooks are
"demographic nightmare", "security danger", "developmental burden" or
"a problem that has to be solved".
Even though the Palestinian areas are not indicated on the maps, the
Palestinian Authority is an enemy. For example, in the book "Geography
of the Land of Israel " from 2002, there is a subsection that is
headed: "The Palestinian Authority steals water from Israel in
Ramallah".
But above all, racism is given expression in books that are considered
to be non-racist, that are perhaps unaware of the racist discourse
that they have adopted. Books that are called by scholars
"progressive, bold, politically correct", books that aspire to
"historical truth" and peace. For example:
"The Twentieth Century" by Eli Bar Navi, p. 244:
Chapter 32: "The Palestinians, from refugees to nation"
"This chapter examines the development of the Palestinian problem [...]
and the Israeli public's attitudes towards the problem and the nature
of its solution"
If I were told that that heading was taken from somewhere else, a
little more than sixty years ago and instead of the Palestinian
problem was written "The Jewish Problem" I would not be surprised.
How was that problem created?
"Modern Times II" by Eli Bar Navi and Eyal Naveh explains:
P. 238: "[...] in the misery, the idleness and the frustration that were
the lot of the refugees in their wretched camps, 'the Palestinian
problem' was incubated".
What does that problem do?
P. 239 "[...] the Palestinian problem has been poisoning Israel 's
relations with the Arab world and with the international community for
a generation and more."
The identity of the Palestinians according to this book is based on
"the dream of return to the Land of Israel " and not to Palestine (p.
238: "The Palestinians ... based their identity on the dream of return
to the Land of Israel").
How was Palestinian nationalism created?
"Modern Times II": "Over the course of years the alienation and
hatred, propaganda and the hope of return and revenge turned the
Palestinians into a nation [...]"
And the book also explains that the presence of the Palestinians among
us is liable "to convert the Zionist dream into a nightmare along the
lines of South Africa " (The 20th Century p. 249).
Those words were written after the victory of Nelson Mandela but the
book still identifies the Jews in the State of Israel with the Whites
in South Africa for whom the native population is a nightmare.
The murder of Palestinians by Israelis always have positive
implications according to these textbooks:
"Modern Times": Eli Bar Navi and Eyal Naveh
228: "The Deir Yassin massacre did not in fact inaugurate the mass
flight of the Arabs of this country, which had started before, but the
news of the massacre greatly accelerated it."
"Inaugurate" is a festive word. And immediately after that, on p. 230:
"The flight of the Arabs solved, at least in part, a horrifying
demographic problem, and even a moderate man like Chaim Weizmann spoke
of it as a 'miracle' ".
Thus Israel 's children learn that a land devoid of Arabs is nothing
less than the realization of the Zionist ideal. They learn that the
killing of Palestinians, the devastation of their land and the murder
of their children are not a crime; on the contrary, the whole
civilized world is indeed afraid of the uterus of the Muslim woman and
every party in power that wants to prevail in elections and to prove
its commitment to Zionism, to democracy, or to progress, stages a
surprise exhibition slaughter of Palestinians.
This despite the fact that Jewish schools in the State of Israel are
full of slogans like "love the Other, get to know those who are
different". The "Others" and the "different" of those slogans are
certainly not natives of the place where we live.
Israel 's children know more about Europe - their imagined homeland
and the heart's desire of the rulers of the country - than they do
about the Middle East in which they live and from which more than half
of the Israeli population derives its origins. Jewish children in the
State of Israel are educated in humanitarian values that they do not
see being realized in any place around them.
On the contrary. They see them being violated at every turn. And a
witness to this confusion (Haaretz 13/3) is a student who identifies
herself as "a spoiled Tel Avivian from the middle class" who expresses
astonishment that "soldiers of my people, who are defending me and
want what is best for me" have abused a Palestinian father and his son
without batting an eyelid.
The expression "soldiers of my people, who are defending me and want
what is best for me" in this context is expressive more than anything
else of the ideology of racism: abuse of the Other is interpreted as
defence of members of our camp. That abuse is what defines us and
creates solidarity, all of us abuse them, that is what makes us one
people, one heart, one mind and we have to look out for each other.
Who are those whom this `spoiled Tel-Avivian` refers to as members of
our people? The word "people", like the word "us", is one of the most
loaded words that exists in the language. It is a word that is
represented as if it were not subject to choice, as a stroke of fate,
as an act of nature. Death compelled me and my family to examine that
word to its depths. When a journalist asked me, a few years ago, how I
could accept condolences from the other side I immediately replied to
her that I am not prepared to accept condolences from the other side,
and the proof was that when Ehud Olmert, the mayor of Jerusalem, came
to express his condolences I left the room and did not agree to shake
his hand or to talk to him. He and those like him are the other side
in my eyes.
That is because my "us" is not defined in a national or racial way. My
"us" is composed of all who are willing to struggle in order to
conserve life and to save children from death. Of mothers and fathers
who are not consoled over the murder of their children by the murder
of other people's children.
It is true that in our country this camp contains more Palestinians
than Jews, for they are the ones who are trying at all cost and with
strength that I cannot understand but can only admire, to continue to
build lives under the hellish conditions that the occupation regime
and Jewish democracy dictate for them. Nevertheless, we too, the
Jewish victims of the occupation, who are trying to eschew the culture
of force and destruction in the war of civilizations that is taking
place here, have a place in it.
My son Alik is a member of a new and growing movement called
"Combatants for Peace" http://www.combatantsforpeace.org/
That is because we are a part of the people who live in this place,
and we believe that the country belongs to those who live in it; not
to people who live in Europe or in America . We believe that it is
impossible to live in peace without living in the place, with its
residents. That genuine fraternity is not based on national and racial
criteria but rather on a shared life in a specific place, a specific
landscape and shared hardships. We believe that those who do not cross
the borders of race and religion and do not connect with the people of
their homeland are not people of peace. To my dismay there are many
people in this place who call themselves people of peace, but when
they see the people of their country locked up in ghettoes and in
enclosures, starving to death, they do not protest, and even send
their children to serve in the army of occupation as sentinels on the
walls of the ghetto and at its gates.
I am not a politician but it is clear to me that the politicians of
today are the schoolchildren of yesterday and the politicians of
tomorrow are the schoolchildren of today. For that reason it seems to
me that those who raise the banner of peace and equality need to
interest themselves in education, to examine it and critique it, to
warn against the racialization of the educational and social
discourse, to propose or to renew laws against racist education and to
set up alternative frameworks within which there will be possibilities
of education for a true, profound knowledge of the Other, that will
bar any possibility of mutual murder. Such education needs to hold
before our eyes the pictures of little girls, who are lying in their
festive school clothes covered in filth, blood and dust, their small
bodies perforated with bullets that were fired at them in accordance
with correct procedures, and to ask every day and every hour the
question that Anna Akhmatova, who herself lost her son to a murderous
regime, asked: "Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of your
cheek"?
.
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