Teaching children to hate and kill Jews

The other day, someone hiding behind a false name and a disguised IP address challenged my statement in my column two weeks ago that Israeli schoolchildren are taught to love peace and to pursue it, while Palestinian schoolchildren are taught to destroy Israel and to kill Jews wherever they are found.

I made that statement to support my broader contention that the Palestinian Authority leadership has no interest in making peace with Israel, and it never did.

This person’s email insisted that it is “as clear as day” that Israel teaches its children to hate all Arabs and to kill them. “Why else would Israeli soldiers, who are products of Israeli schools after all, commit acts of genocide against Palestinians willingly and even gleefully, in Gaza especially?”

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This person cited a December 3 Washington Post article that reported on videos showing “Israeli soldiers posing next to dead bodies and calling for the extermination and expulsion of Palestinians.”

I do not doubt that there may be a few such soldiers serving in the Israel Defense Forces, because every army has violence-prone extremists, including the U.S. Armed Forces. At My Lai in Vietnam in 1968, the men of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th U.S. Infantry Regiment massacred between 300 and 500 unarmed men, women, and children without any encouragement from the U.S. Army or the American school system.

Israel is not engaged in a genocidal war, ignorant protesters notwithstanding, and most Israeli soldiers do not willingly and gleefully commit atrocities of any kind, much less genocidal ones. Israeli soldiers do not engage in such behavior because of their own morality, and because doing such things violates the IDF’s code of conduct.

This piece of vitriolic garbage in my inbox made me realize, however, that I should have backed up my statement with facts, so, in brief, here they are.

The reports done by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), a Jerusalem-based NGO, are widely publicized reports and are considered authoritative everywhere outside the Arab world.

Those reports are guided by the international educational standards put forth by UNESCO and augmented by U.N. resolutions. IMPACT-se uses those guidelines to monitor and analyze textbooks, curricula, and other educational material from around the world to determine whether the governments that produce them promote tolerance, pluralism, and democracy, or if instead they promote hatred, bigotry, and intolerance.

Respect tops UNESCO’s guidelines. Curricula should promote “tolerance, understanding, and respect for the ‘Other,’ his or her culture, achievements, values, and way of life.”

Next comes Individual other: Curricula should foster ways to make the Other feel accepted and appreciated.

No Hate is in the No. 3 spot, followed by No Incitement. Countries must reject curricula that encourage hating the Other, and/or that incite violence of any kind against individuals or groups.

Peacemaking is in the No. 5 slot. Starting at the lowest grades, schools should give students the tools they will need as adults to promote peace and develop strategies for nonviolent conflict resolution.

Nos. 6, 7, and 8 need no explanation. Their titles are Unbiased Information, Gender Identity and Representation, and Sexual Orientation.

The last item, No. 9, is Sound Prosperity and Cooperation, which calls for educating children on the need to promote regional and local cooperation in economic and environmental areas, which only peace can make possible.

IMPACT-se spent several years applying these standards in analyzing 107 textbooks selected randomly from the more than 3,600 Hebrew-language textbooks approved by the Israeli Ministry of Education. Textbooks included such subjects as civics, geography, Hebrew studies, history, homeland, society and civics, Israel studies, Jewish thought, and Jewish-Israeli culture.

Despite continued violence directed at it and a long-dormant peace process, IMPACT-se said in its latest report, “Israeli education [has] persisted in its commitment to peace education…. Textbooks convey the importance of understanding oneself and the Other as an integral feature of peace and tolerance. Students are invited to reflect upon [the] wrongs of … past violence and injustice inflicted on Palestinians by Israelis before and after the creation of the State of Israel. There are increased efforts to understand Palestinian perspectives and historical traumas, such as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, of 1948 [which is how the Arab world describes the establishment of the State of Israel], and the ensuing refugee condition…. [S]tudents are invited to meditate on the difficulties faced by Palestinian refugees, as well as current travail experienced by Palestinians.”

The evaluators identified three “overarching characteristics” in the Israeli curricula, beginning with this: “Textbooks place a tremendous emphasis on peace as an ideal, and peacemaking as a practice.”

The second characteristic is the way Israeli curricula “present multiple perspectives on contentious political and historical issues,” which encourages students to engage in critical thinking. “Israeli students are expected to listen to views that challenge their own…. Both moral and pragmatic arguments are given in [making] the case against indiscriminate violence.” Most importantly, every Israeli student “is expected to know the significance of a ‘blatantly illegal order’: that soldiers must not follow commands that violate military code even when issued by superiors….”

The third characteristic is how Palestinians and other Arabs are portrayed in the curricula. “Textbooks beginning in elementary school include stories and general descriptions of all types of Israeli citizens, including Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, and Bedouin. All are described in an impartial and unprejudiced manner; images of Arab-Jewish friendships, communities, and interactions are highlighted…. The textbooks depict that community as talented, benevolent, and successful.”

Students are also taught “the important statutes of the educational law,” which demand “‘a sense of respect toward human rights; basic freedoms; democratic values; obedience to the law, culture, and views of Others; and the need to strive for peace and tolerance in relationships between human beings and nations….’”

There is one outlier in the Israel education system, and the report devotes a whole section to it. It focuses on a history textbook published by a yeshivah on the West Bank that offers the state-religious curriculum, but also tries to undermine that curriculum by “confronting what it perceives as a ‘dangerous deluge’ of ‘pacifist, universalist and post-Zionist [left-wing] tendencies’ in history textbooks [in order] to save young Israelis from ‘brainwashing and disinformation….’ Nevertheless, students … learn the importance of relating to the Arab Other throughout the textbook…. A wealth of information leaves students enough room to form their own opinions.”

The report makes clear that IMPACT-se evaluators “found no parallel to this perspective in examined textbooks.” Rather, “Our findings show that momentous effort was invested to include the Palestinian experience and many historical episodes that … offer a multitude of examples expressing Palestinian and Arab points of view, and … those elements, if embraced by students, may ultimately lead to a fruitful dialogue….

“[T]here is a strong emphasis throughout the curricula that Israel … is expected to and capable of guaranteeing equality, prosperity, and respect, affording opportunities for all members of its population, including the diverse Israeli-Arab community.”

Overall, the report says, “Israeli curricula appear fully committed to peace and tolerance regarding Arabs and Palestinians…. [Curricula meet] international standards…. The vision of prospering and living together with Arabs and Palestinians is deeply entrenched.”

The lengthy and well-documented report bears out what I said about what Israel teaches its children.

In July, IMPACT-se issued its latest report on how Jews and Israel are portrayed in Arab textbooks. It bears out what I said about the ways in which too many Arab children are being taught, Palestinian children especially. There are some welcome and notable recent exceptions to the anti-Israel/anti-Jewish curricula in those countries that in one way or another are interacting positively with Israel.

The report notes, however, that those countries that are religiously or nationalistically extremist fill their textbooks and other educational materials with “the harshest anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric.” These countries “mainly adhere to the vision of ending the State of Israel promoted by Iran, the PA, and Hamas.”

Jordan is not one of those countries, but “its curriculum is extremely problematic and is quite similar to the PA curriculum in its portrayal of Israel and Jews” despite its peace treaty with Israel. “This is largely due to the significant influence of the Palestinian population in Jordan,” the report says. Qatar is another exception. While it “has removed some anti-Semitic content from its textbooks,” it “left other elements intact.”

Egypt also is an exception, but only because its education system is bifurcated. The public system “has eliminated many harmful expressions about Jews and Israel,” but the al-Azhar religious school system’s textbooks remain “inciting…, regressive and extreme.” In sharp contrast, Egypt’s Coptic minority’s religious textbooks “acknowledge the Jewish roots in the Land of Israel, with one of the textbooks referring to Judea as bilad al-yahudiyya (literally ‘Land of Jewry’ or ‘The Jewish Land’).”

Of immediate concern here is the Palestinian curriculum, which, the report says, teaches children that “Jews are the ‘enemies of Islam’ in all times and places.”

In my column, I wrote that children in PA schools are taught “to demonize Israel and Jews and praise martyrdom.” The IMPACT-se report cites an 8th-grade Arabic language textbook the PA uses to teach reading comprehension. It does so “through a violent story that promotes suicide bombings and exalts Palestinian militants…. The story describes the militants as they ‘cut the necks of enemy soldiers’ and ‘wore explosive belts, thus turning their bodies into fire burning the Zionist tank.’”

These are facts. Peace has no chance when generation after generation is taught to hate. My email challenger and everyone else who readily accepts Palestinian propaganda while ignoring these facts should be deeply ashamed.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.