Nurit Peled-Elhanan discussing her new book Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education:
Peled-Elhanan: I didn't know I would fall on so much racism.....
Palestinians are, if they are represented, usually they're are not represented at all..........they don't exists, nothing of their culture/customs nothing only as problems..and to represent people as problems is racism. Visually you don't see even in all Israel books....in none of them can you find a photograph of a Palestinian person..a teacher a doctor whatever nothing you only find racists icons of Ali Baba
Clark: Cartoons?
Peled-Elhanan: Cartoons with the camel and the primitive farmer. All these icons when you look at the literature of racist representation they are there....the most racist icon or the representation of the 3rd world. It exists in other countries too regarding the 3rd world but in Israel it is crucial to understand that becasue this is all the children know about their Arab neighbors.
Clark: Because they don't meet them?
Peled-Elhanan: They never meet them they are drafted into the army right after school. ..they know they are a problem that should be solved, eliminated, that they are intruders, that they are deviant, criminal, primitive, shouldn't be here.
Clark: Enemy?
Peled-Elhanan: And of course enemy...whole..industry, and a very sophisticated one that, really make them disappear. Because if you see graphs or diagrams you don't suspect they are not objective. You don't expect scientific representations not to be scientific so you always have this little asterix saying that the graph represents only the Jewish population which is unscientific not only racist. Or maps.....none of the maps in Israel, if you go to post offices and hospitals and banks and schools and school books, show the children the real borders of the state..they don't know the real borders of the state, they don't know there is occupation. People here think the whole, what is called 'greater land of Israel' is ours and if it is not it should be and they present it as a geographic entity with the use of the bible and archeology and all these tricks and I really think the whole discourse in Israel..is very racist..but children are initiated and then they are educated in discourse to an extent they don't even know it's racist. They are not equipped to distinguish between racism and tolerant kind of speech, they don't know anything is wrong with that.
Racism doesn't stop with the Arabs it goes into Jewish ethnicities too like Jews who came from Arab countries are discriminated in the state but also in education, they are not represented anywhere. They never see anything wrong with it , integration means they must loose themselves to commit cultural suicide.
Have not watched your video yet Annie. But certainly will.
Check this out not only is Doug Feith on of Perry’s main men…Bill Luti is on the Perry bus. These are two individuals who should be on trial at the Hague for war crimes.
link to raceforiran.com
“ForeignPolicy.com reports, see here, say that Perry’s foreign policy and national security briefings are being organized by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and feature such Iraq war masterminds as Doug Feith and Bill Luti. Dr. Paul has his work cut out for him.”
Retired Lt Colonel Karen Kwiatowski has a few things to say about Feith and Luti her “The New Pentagon Papers”
link to dir.salon.com
“To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed me into the fold. I knew little about him. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common assumption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years and had completed his Ph.D. at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. While his Navy career had not granted him flag rank, he had it now and was not shy about comparing his place in the pecking order with various three- and four-star generals and admirals in and out of the Pentagon. Name dropping included references to getting this or that document over to Scooter, or responding to one of Scooter’s requests right away. Scooter, I would find out later, was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff.’
“I didn’t know I would fall on so much racism…..”
Hard to take this credibly. The zionist space covers Israel and the territories . Within this space there is a caste system that is organised as follows :
Ashkenazi Jews - full freedom of movement and economic rights, full citizenship
Mizrahi Jews - less money but full freedom of movement and citizenship
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship - restricted citizenship less money
PA officials - limited travel , some economic rights
East Jerusalemites - some social welfare benefits, no citizenship
West Bankers - limited movement , alien, zero economic rights
Gazans - live in a prison , alien status, food aid dependent
Refugees – PFO
You don’t run such a system by teaching Jewish kids about equality.
did you watch the video seafoid? i know the info you presented but i didn’t know there was as much racism in the school system as Peled-Elhanan presents here. cartoons of alibaba? not one photo of an arab teacher or professional?
Interesting, I guess from her comments that she is the sister of Miko Peled, the author of The General’s Son, and the daughter of General Matti Peled.
There has been a pitched battle in Israel between the various political camps over the way Palestinians and the Nakba are portrayed in their own or Israeli textbooks and over the way the Holocaust is portrayed in one another’s textbooks. Avi provided some info on that subject here.
link to mondoweiss.net
Starting in the Rabin years the views of the so-called “New Historians” were incorporated in textbooks and Palestinians were portrayed for the first time as victims of an injustice. Material about that watershed event, from authors including Ethan Bronner, Neil Caplan, & Elie Podeh, appeared in newspapers, professional journals, and a few book-length treatments. The trend was reversed by the Sharon government. More recently a ban was entrenched in the Netanyahu regime’s Nakba law. For background on the New Historians and Israeli textbooks see Caplan in the Journal of Contemporary History
link to jstor.org
Elie Podeh, in History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System: The Portrayal of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in History Textbooks (1948-2000)
link to muse.jhu.edu
link to books.google.com
Ethan Bronner in the NY Times
link to nytimes.com
Note: Ethan Bronner, was “the education editor of The Times”. To avoid being charged with poisoning the minds of the children ala Socrates, he claimed the New Historians had an “agenda” in a subsequent review of the books written in response by the “New New Historians”.
link to nytimes.com
In the occupied territories it isn’t merely the international community that monitors the content of Palestinian textbooks. Military Order Nº 107 concerns the use of textbooks. It established a list of 55 books which cannot be taught in schools. The list includes books on Arabic language, history, geography, sociology and philosophy. Military Order Nº 50 (1967) provides that all written material published in the West Bank, or imported into the West Bank, must be approved by the Israeli military authorities. Military Order Nº 101 (1967). Prohibits publications with any type of political content. Military Order Nº 1079 Prohibits video and audio materials of a political nature.
RE: “I guess from her comments that she is the sister of Miko Peled” ~ Hostage
FROM YouTube:
SOURCE – link to youtube.com
P.S. HAPPY FERROGOSTO, EVERYBODY!!!
Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di Ferragosto) (2008) – link to movies.netflix.com
I haven’t seen it yet, annie, but they run a brutally racist system and there is no decent way to make an entire people invisible and sub human . Israel is rotten to the core and it starts just after birth.
And what did you expect to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically over the plains …?”
well ok i suppose you think this interview is a waste of time then, along w/ her book. but people in academia sometimes don’t stand up and take notice unless someone collects data and lays it all out. maybe that’s been done before w/the israeli school system. but collecting graphs, maps and specific data to prove a point and scouring literally hundreds of school books has it’s value imho.
Of course it has value. Seafoid has a point that one should expect something like this to be the case, but there’s no substitute for someone actually willing to do all the work of collecting the data and demonstrating it.
sorry sorry, if course seafoid has a point and i should have acknowledged that and not been so quick to find offense.
SORRY SEAFOID!
it takes a degree of stick with-it-ness to transcribe the text from videos and present them and i think they have value even if some think the material is repetitious.
plus the first link leads to barghouti’s introduction of peled-elhanan last week and that thread got lots of attention so i assumed people might be interested in the follow up video.
plus i found the end very interesting when she talks about her parents, her dad and how they were completely shut out of society. it’s very interesting imho. really worth the time to watch. i had to watch it several times to catch the text. especially typing w/only my two fingers which i am actually getting better at. one of these days maybe i will incorporate those other fingers, peace will come much faster!
I have just watched it. I really like her. The eyes. Noor al ain is what the Palestinians say. Light in the eyes. She’s a thinker. The Peleds are exceptional. But so few Israelis follow that line of thinking.
All opposition is crushed. Which is why the crash will be brutal.
Even she got the Finkelstein treatment and was denied tenure.
I thought the background of the Palestinian hills said so much. It will always be Arab land for the neighbours. Israelis have to find a way to share the land otherwise they will wake up one day to find they have no choice in the matter.
BTW Annie I didn’t mean to be rude with the Fawlty Towers quote but I have zero expectations of the Israeli machine at this stage . More such videos please!
Seafoid
If you click thru to youtube, there’s a whole series of Kelly James Clark interviews done under the heading “Abrahams Children” with various significant people. This was one of them.
Yes, it is important that this stuff is meticulously documented and made available. How many times do we hear the hasbara about Palestinian textbooks? Yet Israel keeps very quiet about its propaganda in schools. It doesn’t matter whether you are aware of it, every brick in the argument is important, reaching more people, and building a solid, evidential wall of research which the endless propaganda can’t tear down. Jews meticulously documented the Holocaust, for good reason, Palestinians should do the same for their Nakba and the ensuing mountains of injustice they have suffered.
I don’t think it’s a waste of time, Annie. Anything that gets the message out is worthwhile. I have been reading Beyond Repression by Hever and my conclusion is that the whole system is evil.
That starts before kids go to school. That people like Gush Shalom and Zochrot come through all the Zionist garbage they get fed is a wonder. How many Jews in Israel actually think ? 5% ?
I work with Israelis and for them there is no question. The Palestinians do not exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
This is why I find Israel so fascinating. It’s a real car crash.
oh thank you seafoid. i apologized to you up thread before i read this.
I work with Israelis and for them there is no question. The Palestinians do not exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
i was just (this morning )reading don neff circa ’95, time magazine’s jerusalem bureau chief in the 70′s.
at the beginning of the essay he explains his zionist sympathies when he first arrived in israel.
“not represented at all as if they don’t exist”
“private industry”
“no photographs of Palestinians”
“icons”
” a problem to be eliminated”
“a very sophisticated industry”
Hope to hear more from Nurit..brilliant
She slams Hillary Clinton
I think we are entering a very dark time and that what Israel has done to the Palestinians will be attempted on the poor in the United States. Especially if people like Bachmann get anywhere near power.
SEAFOID- “I think we are entering a very dark time….”
Indeed we are, thanks in no small part to Barack-the-Knife, a lawyer whose primary client is Wall Street, and who is aggressively and effectively pursuing their perceived best interest. Now that Obama has a Republican House majority that he can triangulate off of, he is implementing US neo-liberal structural adjustment as fast as he can. Bush could never have done what Obama is doing.
“Especially if people like Bachmann get anywhere near power.”
In a capitalist society, one can debate how much power for good or evil a President actually has. A President who aligns with the business and financial elites will have power, one who goes against them won’t. Besides, I doubt that any Republican can win. Obama has been so exceptionally effective in giving away the country to Wall Street that he will have a huge funding advantage over any Republican. People like Bachmann exist to scare liberals into supporting Obama, which they will in spite of disastrous economic conditions which will be blamed on the reckless tea party Republicans, Obama depicted as a bastion of sanity, our last line of defense against the Republican crazies.
link to progressive.org
Hedges:The disappointment with Obama comes from people who don’t understand the structure of power. The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn’t really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic. The imperial projects will continue, Wall Street will be unimpeded in its malfeasance and criminal activity, social programs will continue to be cut, maybe not at the same speed as under a Republican Administration, but it’s all headed in the same direction.
the full interview is here:
link to flagindistress.com
Annie
link to khaleejtimes.com
Outrage after Palestinian camp attacked in Syria
(AFP)
15 August 2011, 7:57 PM
Syrian forces killed three people on Monday a day after gunboats pounded Latakia forcing thousands of Palestinians to flee a refugee camp in the port city.
link to moveoveraipac.org
CODEPINK files complaint with Congressional Ethics Committee against AIPAC-funded junkets to Israel
On August 15, 2011, in Latest News, by Move Over AIPAC!
CODEPINK files complaint with Congressional Ethics Committee against AIPAC-funded junkets to Israel
Calls for end to loophole that allows front group to act as conduit for Lobby trips
The peace group CODEPINK has filed a formal complaint with the Congressional Ethics Committee, calling for an investigation of the junkets to Israel paid for by the powerful Israel lobby AIPAC but channeled through their educational front group, The American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF). This summer recess, a staggering 81 Congresspeople—one out of five members—are participating in these trips.
Some more background on the interviewer in the piece and future plans of Nurit Peled-Elhanan. The interview by Dr. Kelly James Clark was part of a conference that will culminate with a multi-faith service at the National Cathedral on 9/11. Dr. Clark as well as Calvin College where he is on faculty are sponsoring the conference on Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict.
link to berkleycenter.georgetown.edu
Through my involvement on issues of faith and science I have a number of connections with Calvin College. Both Dr. Clark who is in the philosophy department and Dr. Steve Matheson in the biology department have long debated the Intelligent Design movement from an evangelical perspective.
link to nytimes.com
In addition to the issue of Intelligent Design, Kelly is also interested in the issues of tolerance and religious liberty. Kelly James Clark will be editing a book by the title “Abraham’s Children: Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Conflict” to be published by Yale University Press in 2012. Nurit Peled-Elhanan will be in this book.
link to yalepress.yale.edu
At the conference, Nurit Peled-Elhanan will be a keynote speaker and panelist representing Judaism. There will be others representing Christianity and Islam. Given the timing of the conference and the excellent participants from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam this should be a helpful antidote to the Peter Kings of the world who will be using the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to promote intolerance and hate.