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Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, brings a sharp pain in the chest. Her daughter, aged 13, was murdered in a terrorist attack, when a suicide bomber exploded in 1997, at the Ben Yehuda Street, near the Christian quarter of the Old City.
Several Israeli families have experienced tragedies of this kind, throughout all these years of conflict. It is usual and understandable to react with hatred towards the enemies and to blame the Palestinians. The wounds of war, in fact, are part of the explanation for severe security measures, which progressively limited mobility and rights in the occupied territories.
Mikhail Frunze/Opera Mundi
After the death of her daughter, Nurit founded an institution with relatives of victims of terrorist acts
But Nurit reacted against the common sense. Her speeches, writings and interviews denounce Zionism’s hardest factions as promoters of the anger and despair that lead to the suicide violence of 1997. She helped found the association “Bereaved families for peace”, which brings together relatives of Jews and Palestinians victimized by state or individual terrorism.
The educator, however, created controversy when she released, last year, a study in which she classified the textbooks used in Israel as “racist and anti-Palestine”. To Nurit, Arab people are always represented in such works as “Ali Baba on a camel, terrorists with their faces covered, people of primitive and dangerous cultures.”
Her point of view was strongly criticized by other experts. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, for example, claims that the educator focused on a very limited number of books, leaving aside those who did not prove her thesis.
Mikhail Frunze/Opera Mundi
But she but does not give up her interpretation. “The educational system and its didactic instruments are arranged in an ethnocentric purpose”, she says. “Though decadent, the Israeli education is very sophisticated. Even in jails teaching is amazing. But the system’s logic is forging a racial culture against Arabs and Palestinians.”
Her analysis is based on texts and photos. “Only the Zionist narrative is taught to all Israelis”, she says. “There are no pictures of Palestinians in these books, their story is not studied, their culture is not portrayed.”
The school works acquired by the Ministry of Education are issued by private companies, according to the pedagogue, and distributed to the two school systems, the Jewish network (formed by state schools, state-religious schools and private schools) and the Arab units, which are subject to the same curriculum. Only the language is changed.
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Besides the separation made to organize the system, there are also differences in the funding of the two educational chains. According to the Monitoring Committee for Arab Education, the annual spending per Jewish student is $ 1,100, compared to $192 to fund the Palestinian student. The dropout rate is 6% among Jews, a rate that is doubled among the Arab students.
A 2001 report from the Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization based in New York, found that Arab schools received inferior education compared to Jewish schools, with fewer teachers, inadequate facilities, lacking libraries and with smaller recreational spaces. Even the Ministry of Education recognized the gap and decided to adopt affirmative policies, announcing that 25% of the education budget since 2007 would be invested in the Arab system – above the 20% of the population that the Arabs represent. Humanitarian and educational organizations, however, claim that this promise is not being fulfilled.
The government announced, nevertheless, some advances that have been achieved in the Arab sector, during the century’s first decade. They state that there are 50% more teachers of computer science, 171% more for math, 25% for physics, 44% for chemistry and 81.7% for biology. But entities continue to register a deficit of 6,100 classrooms and 4,000 teachers to parallel the two systems.
But the problem is not limited to funding and logistics. The Ministry of Education circulated in April 2010 a guidance curriculum through which it stipulated that the focus on Jewish and Zionist values could not be blurred with multicultural approaches. This content discussion provokes Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s main critics.
“Jewish children, beginning in kindergarten, are traumatized by the Holocaust education”, she says. “It is not focused on a historical review; it uses pictures and facts of the genocide during Nazism to manufacture hatred and prejudice against Arabs. The strategic objective of our system is to educate good soldiers, ideologically ready for the occupation war that Israel is promoting since 1967.”
Mikhail Frunze/Opera Mundi
Nurit criticizes the ethnocentric goal of the educational system in Israel
Daughter of a general who was part of the General Staff in the Israeli Six Day War, but who later became a peace activist, Nurit also considers the Ministry of Education’s supervision in schools authoritarian and excluding. “Any violation of the curriculum, any attempt to escape the Zionist narrative, can mean confiscation of material and pressure on teachers, especially the Arabs”, she says. “The Jewish teachers have much more freedom, but the Palestinians have learned to survive through self-censorship.”
A particular case is East Jerusalem. Its inhabitants are not considered Arab Israeli citizens, which makes access to education even more complicated. Many, indeed, seek the nationality registration to get better public services. After a fierce campaign, the Palestinians won the right to use their own books in this area of town, but couldn’t eliminate the Israeli inspection. Several texts, according to the pedagogue, come with scratched excerpts or blank pages.
“Israeli education is ethnocide”, says Nurit. “Its basis is a kind of racist and colonial nationalism.”
Translation: Kelly Cristina Spinelli