Studies have consistently shown that Israeli school textbooks denigrate and dehumanise Arabs, sowing the seeds of hatred and violence, writes Stephen Lendman* The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines racism as "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race." This was the basis of South-African apartheid and the Nazi "master race" superiority above others, especially Jews. Israel has no constitution. Basic Laws substitute for one, including statutes affirming exclusive rights for Jews. One of these laws is the right of return, granting automatic citizenship to Jews. Goyim, or non-Jews, are denigrated and not wanted, especially Arabs. Former Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion once said, "this is not only a Jewish state, where the majority of the inhabitants are Jews, but a state for all Jews, wherever they are, and for every Jew who wants to be here... This right is inherent in being a Jew." It applies to no one else. Israel's Law of Citizenship, or Nationality Law, establishes rules so stringent against non-Jews that many Palestinians in 1948 were denied citizenship, despite family roots going back generations or longer. On 5 May, 2007, an article by professor Joseph Maddad on the Palestine Remembered.com website headlined, "Israel's Right to Be Racist," discussed what he called a "new anti-Semitism". Maddad wrote that "anti-Semitism is no longer the hatred of and discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group; in the age of Zionism, we are told, anti-Semitism has metamorphosed into something that is more insidious. Today, Israel and its western defenders insist genocidal anti-Semitism consists mainly of any attempt to take away and to refuse to uphold the absolute right of Israel to be a Jewish racist state." Israel will do anything to convince the Arabs of why it deserves to be racist, he said. It also makes peace provisional on "Palestinians 'recognising its right to exist' as a racist state," meaning, at best, that they will be tolerated as lesser beings provided they accept inferiority and remain submissive and relinquish all their rights in return for nothing. By any standards, racist, xenophobic and supremacist notions are abhorrent. They have no place in civil societies, especially ones claiming democratic credentials. Tolerance is the very essence of democracy, being the acceptance of beliefs other than one's own. Gandhi once said that "a democracy that is prejudiced, ignorant and superstitious will land itself in chaos and may be self-destroyed... The truest test of democracy is in the ability of anyone to act as he likes, so long as he does not injure the life or property of anyone else... If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy, we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays a want of faith in one's cause." Democracy, he said, is "impossible until power is shared by all." TEACHING RACISM: "You've got to be Carefully Taught" is a memorable Rogers and Hammerstein song from their 1949 musical South Pacific. The lyrics read in part: "You've got to be taught to hate and fear. From year to year, it's got to be drummed in your dear little ear... You've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade. You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught before it's too late. Before you are six or seven or eight. To hate all the people your relatives hate. You've got to be carefully taught!" Tel Aviv University professor Daniel Bar-Tal has studied dozens of Israeli elementary, middle and high-school texts on grammar, Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. They justify Israel's "right" to wage wars against Arabs who won't accept or acknowledge exclusive Jewish rights. The early textbooks tended to describe the acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral and unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the state of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were delegitimised by the use of such labels as "robbers", "bloodthirsty" and "killers", and little positive revision occurred in later years, with mischaracterisations like "tribal", "vengeful", "exotic", "poor", "sick", "dirty", "noisy", "coloured", being used, as in "they burn, murder, destroy and are easily inflamed." At the same time, Jews are called industrious, brave and determined to handle the difficulties of "improving the country in ways they believe the Arabs are incapable of." Moreover, the professor writes, "this attitude served to justify the return of the Jews, implying that they cared enough about the country to turn the swamps and deserts into blossoming farmland. This effectively delegitimises the Arab claim to the same land." Israeli children are well taught. In an article in the Winter 2007 issue of the Arab Studies Quarterly, Ismail Abu Saad's article entitled, "The portrayal of Arabs in Textbooks in the Jewish school system in Israel," notes that approved Israeli textbooks use certain primary themes to portray Arabs. These are orientalist attitudes in that there is a politically loaded, derogatory characterisation of eastern, as opposed to superior western culture. On the other hand, "the Zionist mission to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine" is emphasised, as is "an Israeli-Jewish frame of mind determined as a victim or siege mentality." Zionists believe Palestine belongs exclusively to Jews, based on biblical notions of their having been its original inhabitants despite the lack of logic and falseness of such a premise. Israeli textbooks teach about a "land without people for a people without land." They say that Jews arrived and made the desert bloom and that God promised Israel solely to Jews. Hebrew University's Eli Podeh describes "a tradition of depicting Jewish history as an uninterrupted record of anti-Semitism and persecution." Moreover, Arabs are portrayed as violent. As a result, dehumanisation, denigration and the use of Israeli force against Arabs are legitimised. So is teaching children to hate, starting when they are too young to understand how their minds are being manipulated. Israel's Ministry of Education sets curricula guidelines and content, reflecting Jewish ethnocentrism and superiority over Arab society and culture. As conflicts erupt, Arabs are called the enemy in a way that Yoram Bar-Gal describes: a "negative homogeneous mob that threatens, assaults, destroys, eradicates, burns and shoots." These are the "haters of Israel, who strive to annihilate the most precious symbols of Zionism: vineyards, orange groves, orchards and forests. Arabs are viewed as ungrateful. Zionism brought progress to the area and helped to overcome desolation, and thus helped to advance Arabs as well as Jews, but instead of being thankful, the Arabs respond with destruction and ruin." From the state's establishment in 1948, Jewish textbooks have taught these notions, portraying Arabs negatively and saying they are "illegal intruders" who have no place on Jewish land. "The 'mythologising' of the historical curriculum perpetuates the image of the Arab, and the Palestinian Arab in particular, as an ahistorical, irrational enemy." Such mythologising has been "instrumental in explicitly and implicitly constructing racist and threatening stereotypes and a one-sided historical narrative that is internalised in the Jewish Israeli psyche" from a very young age. Truth and balance are totally absent. Arabs are vilified for not being Jews, a superior people. Logic and tolerance are not parts of the equation. In November 2001, an unnamed Netanya Jewish newspaper wrote about an elementary-school celebration under the headline, "Arabs are used to killing." Textbooks and children's literature are filled with stories about violent, dirty, cruel and ignorant Arabs wanting to harm Jews. They vilify and dehumanise the Arabs as thieves, murderers, robbers, spies, arsonists, criminals, terrorists, kidnappers and the "cruel enemy". Dozens of books use delegitimising labels, including "inhuman", "war lovers", "monsters", "bloodthirsty", "dogs", "wolves of prey" and "vipers". Israeli children are taught such ideas. They do not realise that they are hateful and false, and they internalise and act on them later as adults. One characterisation portrays Bedouins as "primitive beings, at home in the untamed natural setting of the fearsome desert". They are "exotic figures, full of mystery, intrigue, impulsive violence and instinctive survival". Noted Israeli literary figures, such as Amos Oz, also write this way. In his 1965 book Nomads and the Viper, Oz describes how Bedouin nomads bring devastation to a kibbutz, including foot-and-mouth disease, the destruction of cultivated fields and theft. He presents a chasm separating lawful agricultural settlers from primitive Bedouins. Trying to cross it would be dangerous or fatal. In other words, associating with Arabs risks contamination for Jews. Abu Saad concludes his study by writing that, "one can only question whether the currently delegitimising, discriminatory and antagonistic stance of the State of Israel vis-à-vis its Palestinian Arab citizens is indeed in the long-term interest of the state, which, ideology and mythology notwithstanding, is in fact a multi-ethnic state, with an indigenous minority that makes up nearly one-fifth of the population." Israel's curriculum must change. Hate must be expunged. Arabs must be allowed to represent themselves and their culture rather than accept dehumanisation and vilification for not being Jews. PALESTINIAN TEXTBOOKS: In November 2001, professor Nathan J Brown's Adam Institute explained in a piece entitled, "Democracy, History, and the Contest over the Palestinian Curriculum", that "the Palestinian curriculum is not a war curriculum; while highly nationalistic, it does not incite hatred, violence, or anti-Semitism. It cannot be described as a 'peace curriculum' either, but the charges against it are often wildly exaggerated or inaccurate." First-generation Palestinian national education textbooks, published in 1994, said practically nothing about Israel, and, with a few exceptions, they were not pejorative. Beginning in 2000, second- generation books have touched on sensitive areas, but not with the stridency that critics claim. Virtually all charges of incitement stem from the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, which claims to "encourage the development and fostering of peaceful relations" through tolerance and mutual respect. In fact, the real purpose of this organisation is to attack the Palestinian Authority (PA) while ignoring incendiary Israeli textbooks. It is linked to extremist, racist Israeli groups that advocate settlement expansion, land theft, dispossession, hate-mongering and violence. A June 2004 Israel/Palestinian Centre for Research and Information (IPCRI) report entitled, "Analysis and Evaluation of the New Palestinian Curriculum", concluded that "there is... no indication of hatred of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition or the values associated with it." In fact, "the textbooks promote an environment of open- mindedness, rational thinking, modernisation, critical reflection and dialogue." They also "promote civil activity, commitment, responsibility, solidarity, respecting others' feelings, respecting and helping people with disabilities, and... reinforce students' understanding of the values of civil society, such as respecting human dignity, religious, social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and political pluralism, personal, social and moral responsibility, and transparency and accountability." Palestinian enmity stemmed from the harshness of the occupation, including the denial of peace, self- determination, freedom, equity and justice and other basic rights. Yet textbook-expressed anger was still moderate compared to Palestinian suffering and vilification, the study found. The difference between this and the Israeli textbooks is stark indeed. FINAL COMMENT: It's a short leap from demonisation to calls for extermination. Yet, extremist pro-settler rabbis advocate it, according to a January 2011 article in the Orthodox Fountains of Salvation. This suggests that Israel create death camps to solve its Palestinian problem, eliminating them as Amalek or Amalekites, code for Palestinians and other perceived Jewish enemies. The offending paragraph states, "it will be interesting to see whether [the rabbis] leave the assembly of the Amalekites in extermination camps to others, or whether they will declare that wiping them out is no longer historically relevant. Only time will tell." Right-wing Orthodox rabbis are behind this publication, founded by the former Safed chief rabbi, whose son circulated the above material. Also involved is Ramat Gan's chief rabbi, as well as Rabbi Avinar, suspected of abusing a woman who sought his spiritual advice. Each holds paid Israeli government sinecures, showing the link between official zealotry and extremist calls for genocide. * The writer is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalisation.
