[Music] neried pellet alpha non is a professor of language and education at the hebrew university of jerusalem following the death of her 13 year old daughter and suicide bombing in 1997 she became an outspoken critic of the israeli occupation pellet at Lenin's book due out in November 2011 is entitled Palestine in Israeli schoolbooks ideology and propaganda in education she argues that the textbooks used in the Israeli school system marginalized Palestinians and are designed to prepare Israeli children for military service she analyzed Israeli textbooks studying their use of images maps layouts and language in the subjects
of history geography and civics tutty's alternate focus spoke with Murray Pella del Hahn on about her research we first asked how she became interested in studying Israeli textbooks when I started I saw that the question of the representation of Palestinians seems quite important to study how our Palestinians were presented in Israeli textbooks and I think the the overarching question was how come Israeli boys and girls were educated on supposedly very enlightened humanistic values end up being such horrible monsters in the army and I thought that some of the answer can be found in textbooks because
textbooks are books that students must read for the examination whether they like it or not so and I don't think they there are many students that are interested in getting information about history and things like that in others from other sources this is not in their interest so the only thing they know is what they find in textbooks what they are taught in class so I thought it would be very interesting to see how Palestinians are represented because Israeli students are drafted to the army right after high school a month after high school year but
right after high school so they go with this knowledge into the army and since they never or hardly ever meet Palestinians face to face or speak to them and although they may live 50 200 meters from them this is what they know I read a lot about the way the third world is represented in other textbooks in there in the world in Europe or here like Indians First Nations etc etc and I came across the strategies of racist discourse and what caught my eye was that all these categories really applied to Israeli textbooks first of
all not to represent them at all for example visually Palestinians are not represented at all in Israeli textbooks now Israeli textbooks are our trade books it's a private industry so you have a lot of them they have to be authorized by the Ministry but they are not issued by the Ministry so you have a lot that not and lots of books so in all these books tens of books that I looked at you cannot find one photograph of a human being who is a Palestinian and if you think that we have twenty percent of Israeli
citizens are Palestinians not to speak about the Palestinians in the territories in the occupied territories who are about five Millions it's a bit old University a Palestinian doctor or teacher or child and the only way they are represented are as the problems and threats Israel II consider them to be for example as terrorists so you see face covered figures or it's primitive farmers you see farmers behind the primitive plow with oxen or in racist cartoons that really look like Alibaba sort of cartoons that were painted on by by European artists in the eighteen or 19th
century which don't represent anybody who really lives in Israel but wherever they speak about the citizens of the state of the Arab what they call the Arab citizens this is what you see in these images so they're in the refugees primitive farmers terrorists or absent for example you can see I don't know in a chapter called the refugee problem they show you an over flooded street in a poor neighborhood with no people and they tell you this is the Palestinian problem or you can see an aerial photograph of some shanty town and they tell you
this is a Palestinian refugee camp but you never see people you'll never see human beings so this is one thing not to show them at all the other thing is to show them or to speak about them as problems they usually speak about the Palestinian problem which is quite shuddering you know in a Jewish state when you remember that the Jews were labeled the Jewish problem about 60 years ago so it's always in a group it's always as a collective and it's always a problem threat and even poisonous problem and all this is part of
what is called the categories of racist discourse this is how racist discourse acts both visually and verbally so this is something that really here was very surprising to me then I wanted to see for example in maps so most books when they show the map of Israel they don't show the real borders of Israel they include Palestine in it they show you what is called the greater land Israel if you see even the names of the books are never in geography never the State of Israel but the Land of Israel which is which is different
so I think we have like three generations of students who don't even know what the borders are and the people who live in the territories the non-jews they are there they are always labeled non-jews so this is another racist way to label people as not us not what they are but what they are not and these non Jews who live in the territories are either presented as foreign labor that coming into the into Israel to work so like from Thailand or China not people who really live in place or they are not represented at all
some maps tell you for example there are population maps in geography textbooks where the whole what you should call Palestine is is a blank blank spot no color nothing and they tell you for this area we have no data so in a population map if you have no data it means there are no people there and if it's colorless it means that it is not inhabited it's waiting to be inhabited tonight for or a map of employment so you see the Israeli factories and plants in the occupied territories in the colonies but you don't see
one Palestinian city or one Palestinian factory or one Palestine and Institute or whatever university all these things are absent I must say that I studied very profoundly very deeply 16 books all published after the Oslo agreement I wanted to save those some change and there was some change in the 90s but today it's going backwards and backwards and backwards and the most recent history school books are really you can say military manifests you have no data you have no Maps you have no numbers no statistics just an overall declaration of look how we killed more
of them and they killed less of us or something like that you know and color for example is very very very important whenever they show Palestinian villagers or Israeli Arab villages you see them in natural colors which is olive green dirt yellow you know and these colors are the colors that arouse fear and alienation in Israelis the natural colors of their of the country whenever they show Jewish settlements they show them like Swiss villages you know saturated green and flowers even if it's in the Negev in the desert and there's a lot of literature about
that job in geography how you what you do with colors how you gain sympathy or antipathy towards the picture and authors represented in the picture and it is very clear that in Israel the natural colours of the country and convey primitivism and non progress and the European Western color is brought by the Jews artificially are what you may see you may label progress you know I also was very interested in in in seeing and studying the concept of death how is death presented to these children because Israelis are really educated to to worship death to
sacrifice themselves for the country or for whatever and to see nothing wrong in the death of Palestinians or maybe not to not to seen anything wrong but to see it as the lesser evil if it brings any good consequences to us so I wanted to see into that and I studied how for example massacres are represented how they are described I studied the jars of representation of of this this kind of description and it always in a sort of very simplistic narratives that have what I should call mythological logic like you know Oedipus killed his
father but he saved the city something like that so yes unfortunately many people were killed but it was the guarantee for a Jewish state with the Jewish majority for example the massacre of Cuba which was headed by Ari and so on and his notorious unit of killers and the hundred and one killers a unit that we went to keep yard to avenge a murder of a Jewish woman and her two children in yahood yahood was a cleansed Palestinian city re inhabited by Jewish immigrants mostly from Arab countries and after she was killed it just went
to the nearest village little nothing to do or maybe has something to do I don't know one but they didn't come from there and kill the whole village just demolished all the houses on their own the families and this after describing this the schoolbooks say that this and other such reprisals it was not the only one restore the dignity and the morale to the army and the confidence to the Jewish citizens so you always have this kind of mythological logic yes unfortunately and they give you some reasons like which the soldiers didn't know the people
were hiding in their houses that night where would they be or the loudspeaker didn't work so they didn't hear us calling them to leave their houses which is exactly the same argument they gave in Gaza now and then the last I don't know massacre of Gaza yes we told them to leave but they didn't leave so you always have these kind of excuses and this kind of presentation which says that any evil done to them is condoned as long as it saves the greater or an equal evil to us and with this message they go
to the enemy and you see this is the kind of argumentation they always have have there [Music] how is the history dealt in current Scoble well it's it's a just war for the it is a just war we came there we offered them partition they didn't talk they did not accept it and so on and so forth as some myths are broken for example that we were less and they were more these things are a little bit you know clarified but I think there are studies that show that it doesn't matter when after the children
read these books they they go back to the same myths that that prevailed before it's it's yeah it's very hard to change myths by school books it's I think it's quite easier to reinforce them but very hard to contradict them and the war was necessary in order to create a Jewish sequence so you had to cleanse some villages and cities and to create a Jewish state with a Jewish majority this is the main thing you must keep our Jewish majority the demographic problem is a deadly problem and for example Darius in massacre that was the
incentive for what they call in all the books the panic flight of the Palestinians really enabled us to create a Jewish state with the Jewish majority that's why it was you know positive so the war is a war of victories and it was necessary again for Jewish sequence and a Jewish state with the Jewish majority and then those who stayed they always say that they were allowed to stay we don't know some books that are modern Matic and more right-wing they say we don't know why they moved they just left we we told them they
can stay and so on so for other than those who stayed received their rights and so on and so forth they don't tell you about land confiscation Equal Rights or the fact that since 48 not even one house was allowed to be built by Palestinians not to mention a village or a city but they do tell you in geography books that they build without a license because they don't want to pay did they are clannish and they are unwilling to give any land for the public good unlike the Jews they are presented as people whose
the inferiority and disadvantage is their own doing or in their nature because if you say they are unwilling to give anything or they're clannish and so on and so forth and it's their nature and what can we do in geography textbooks for example when you have graphs or diagrams about progress or progress being expressed in less children more education etc etc you all you have these asterisks that tells you the graph does not contain the non-jewish population and the thing is that these books especially geography are presented as scientific and therefore objective and neutral and
you don't suspect that they are not objective or that this is not a way to do it and so on so forth and the whole thing is to to really present them as some out group now because they don't call them Palestinians they call them Arabs they make them part of the great Arab nation which is of course our enemy and it's a trap but also they convey the idea that since they are part of the Arab nations they have so many other countries they can go to why should they live with us they always
say Palestinians when it has to do with terror but not with the people you see so they don't show them as people like us and they don't show them as belonging to the place and we have a very generous that we put up with them something like that the whole education everything that has to do with the holidays with Memorial days we have like three or four the literature the songs the programs everything is oriented towards the army the army is like the peak of your education the high point of what it's all about in
high school they actually bring military people to lecture to the children and to kind of learn them into joining the elite units of fighters and combatants this is the role more than the world models the combatant is the aerial show on type and they do it they come to school and they do these lectures and they also have during high school whole weeks that they spend in military camps and they get military education to get a feel of it and this is the aim of their life to be good soldiers and preferably combatants I mean
I would say killers but you know there was this book now where that was published and according to the probe to the curriculum they had to give two points of view for something so regarding the refugee problem they gave two points of view and usually you seek two points of view so structurally this is what you see but when you go into it you see that the gate this Jewish historian against this Jewish historian but they're right on top Arab point of view or Palestinian point of view now this book really brought the Palestinian point
of view of wallet holiday and it was completely the authorized immediately collected off the shelves ground and the condition to get it back to a newer version was to put in the arrow point of view and Israeli story anybody can write a book most books are not written by professional historians some are like a an of AOL burn away these people but some are written by teachers or people in the we just want to you know history teachers or the geography teachers and so on and so forth now they can write a book and then
they have to put it up to authorization and you have committees you have four to seven committees sometimes to approve the book for example I used to get books to approve of literacy so they give me form and I have to fill up the form and say oh I recommend it or not recommend it although I recommend to grind it something like that but there are certain things that they have to comply with for example Zionism and one book that was deauthorized every time a Labor Ministry is replaced by a right-wing ministry they grind some
books what at least and one that was ground was by Dania Coby who is a history teacher and they said that he does not emphasize enough Zionism as the redemption of the Jewish people but I saw other things that he does that I think made his verdict first of all he calls the conflict the Zionist Palestinian conflict and not the Jewish Arab conflict at the others he puts some Palestinian names on places for example he said the village of an hood that turned into the Jewish village of an hood you don't find it in other
books and he puts his the only one who put a map of the route of escape of Palestinian refugees so I think these are the reasons it was deauthorized taken off the shelves ground I think the protein machines and they grind eight I don't know because I asked for the ground book the second one and the in in the in the in the publishing house and they said it's it's no more we don't have it even one copy I don't think that I think that language but then I found out that one of the writers
was a student of mine so I got the PDF and I could I could see the changes that were made but yeah they grind it and the stores are not allowed to sell it anymore one newspaper in Jerusalem a local newspaper said you know what you know the famous phrase where were you burn books you'll end up burning people and showing the crystallite Nazi crystallite and so on so forth it's very very dangerous and I must say that I have students you know from all parts of society but I had one student who was a
settler and very Orthodox Jew and very right-wing and she came to me with this with this item and she said this is horrible we have reached a horrible port if we grind books you see it's horrible really it's a everybody thinks that even people who don't agree with a book far as I know they have ground two books one which is called the world of change by Dania copy 2001 and one that is called building the nation in the Middle East that was published by the shaza Institute for Jewish Studies it was ground 9 2009
in July and was republished in a new version September so they didn't lose the the academic year you say they wanted to sell it to high schools this was the main thing so they they complied very quickly very quickly and I know personally some of the writers of the books and sometimes I challenged them and say how could you write that and he said because I had to be authorized because I had to be authorized how can you write the kibbeh Massacre restore the confidence of of the citizens so this is this is what you
have to do the future looks very bleak I should say for everything in this place I think right wing is the state is approaching fascism in a speed that you would believe it I mean I think only this year we had 16 racist laws and so on and so forth people don't see any or anything wrong with this this is the main thing and I don't see any progress anything that I would consider progress really I don't maybe if we have a revolution now you know there is a sort of revolution in Israel very polite
very well done but there is maybe will have but I teach that I think you know in Israel there's a lot of academic freedom that even here you don't have because here a lecturer can be fired for saying the things that I say about Israel and there I can teach it and students were teachers when they see that they cannot ignore it anymore you say and I see from the term papers how they really see the things and I believe that change comes from below you know because every teacher has at least worked for classes
or 40 people that's a lot so I believe in that kind of revolution politically things are very bad and very frightening very frightening not only for Palestinians this is for Israel is too and also you know in these books what I didn't talk about because this is not the book that I am going to publish now but this sort of racist representation does not stop with the Palestinians the way they represent Jews from Arab countries the way they represent the Ethiopians all kinds of groups that came after it's quite the same except for the threat
you know security threat but they they're not there so you have a lot to talk about racism and racist discourse in Israel before right and I think people don't realize they live in such a racist discourse they don't realize it they don't know it they don't know the there's anything wrong with asking somebody are you Jewish or not and if you're a Jew are you an Arab Jew or Occidental - and this is small talk and so the atmosphere and the discourse and the tension it all has to do with racism increasing racism not only
towards Arabs but of course mainly mainly towards ARBs for example in the college where I teach they used to put Christmas tree every year for the Arab students were Christians it's gone for the last two or three years I didn't see it you say things like that this you suddenly realize and yeah it's very frightening I think it's frightening what's happening there [Music]
