8 December 2011
Alternate Focus recently conducted this interview with Israeli academic Nurit Peled-Elhanan. She is author of the forthcoming book “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education”, which I am hoping to review for EI. The interview is very much worth watching. It should give anyone deluded enough to think appropriate change can come within Israeli society serious pause for thought.
Peled-Elhanan talks about her intensive study of Israeli school books (16 of which published after the Oslo Agreement) approved by the ministry of education. She says there were some change in the 90s, but today it’s going “backwards and backwards”. Current text books are little more than “military manifests”.
Maps in Israeli text books only show the “greater land of Israel”, wiping Palestine off the map. they “never [show] ‘the state of Israel’ but ‘the Land of Israel’ ” — an important distinction she says. “We have three generations of students who don’t even know where the borders are”.
This sheds some light on the recent Israeli advertising campaign in the UK that wipes Palestine and Syria off the map (as I showed on this blog).
