• Israel Without Borders
• Israel turns Gaza into a virtual prison
• In Israel, there are only bad people'
• See also

INCREDIBLE!

In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders!

They say that the "Zionist gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That's how they poison the minds of their children!

These blood-curdling revelations were published this week in Israel and around the world.

The conclusion is self-evident: the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for the schoolbooks, cannot be a partner in peace negotiations.

What a shock!

Truth is, there is nothing new here. Every few years, when all the other arguments for refusing to speak with the Palestinian leadership wear thin, the ultimate argument pops up again: Palestinian schoolbooks call for the destruction of Israel!

The ammunition is always provided by one of the "professional" institutions that deal with this matter. These are foundations of the far-right, disguised as "scientific" bodies, which are lavishly funded by Jewish-American multi-millionaires. Teams of salaried employees apply a fine-tooth comb to every word of the Arab media and schoolbooks, with a pre-ordained objective: to prove that they are anti-Semitic, preach hatred of Israel and call for the killing of Jews. In the sea of words, it is not too difficult to find suitable quotes, while ignoring everything else.

So now it is again perfectly clear: Palestinian schoolbooks preach hatred of Israel!

They are breeding a new generation of terrorists! Therefore, of course, there can be no question of Israel and the world ending the blockade on the Palestinian Authority!

WELL, WHAT about our side? What do our schoolbooks look like?

Does the Green Line appear in them? Do they recognize the right of the Palestinians to establish a state on the other side of our 1967 borders? Do they teach love for the Palestinian people (or even the existence of the Palestinian people), or respect for the Arabs in general, or a knowledge of Islam?

The answer to all these questions: Absolutely not!

Recently, Minister of Education Yuli Tamir came out with a bombastic announcement saying that she intends to mark the Green Line in the schoolbooks, from which it was removed almost 40 years ago. The Right reacted angrily, and nothing more was heard about it.

From kindergarten to the last day of high school, the Israeli pupil does not learn that the Arabs have any right at all to any of this land. On the contrary, it is clear that the land belongs to us alone, that God has personally given it to us, that we were indeed driven out by the Romans after the destruction of our Temple in the year 70 (a myth) but that we returned at the beginning of the Zionist movement. Since then, the Arabs have tried again and again to annihilate us, as the Goyim have done in every generation. In 1936, the "gangs" (the official Israeli term for the fighters of the Arab Revolt) attacked and murdered us. And so on, up to this very day.

When he comes out of the pedagogic mill, the Jewish-Israeli pupil "knows" that the Arabs are a primitive people with a murderous religion and a miserable culture. He brings this view with him when he (or she) joins the army a few weeks later. There, it is reinforced almost automatically. The daily humiliation of old people and women - not to mention everybody else - at the checkpoints would not be possible otherwise.

THE QUESTION is, of course, whether schoolbooks really have that much influence on the pupils.

From earliest childhood, children absorb the atmosphere of their surroundings. The conversations at home, the sights on television, the happenings in the street, the opinions of classmates at school - all these influence them far more than the written texts of the books, which in any case are interpreted by teachers who themselves have been subject to these influences.

An Arab child sees on TV an old woman lamenting the demolition of her home. He sees on the walls in the street the photos of the martyred heroes, sons of his neighborhood, who have sacrificed their lives for their people and country. He hears what has happened to his cousin who was murdered by the evil Jews. He hears from his father that he cannot buy meat or eggs, because the Jews are not allowing him to work and put food on the table. At home there is no water for most of the day. Mother tells about grandpa and grandma, who have been languishing for 60 years in a miserable refugee camp in Lebanon. He knows that his family were driven out from their village in what became Israel and that the Jews are living there now.

The hero of his class is the boy who jumped on a passing Israeli tank, or who dared to throw a stone from a distance of 10 meters at a soldier who was pointing a gun at him.

We once went to a Palestinian village in order to help the inhabitants rebuild a house that had been demolished the day before by the army. While the adults were working on finishing the roof, the local children gathered around Rachel, my wife, showing a keen interest in her camera. The conversation that sprung up went like this:


What can schoolbooks change here?

And on the Jewish Israeli side? From the earliest age, the child sees the pictures of suicide attacks on TV, bodies scattered around, the injured being taken away in ambulances with blood-curdling shrieks from their sirens. He hears that the Nazis slaughtered his mother's entire family in Poland, and in his consciousness Nazis and Arabs become one.

On every day's news he hears bad things about what the Arabs are doing, that they want to destroy the state and throw us into the sea. He knows that the Arabs want to kill his brother, the soldier, without any reason, just because they are such murderers. Nothing about life in "the territories", perhaps just a few kilometers away, reaches him. Until he is called up, the only Arabs he meets are Israeli Arab workers doing menial work. When he joins the army, he sees them only through gun sights, every one of them of them a potential "terrorist".

For a change in the schoolbooks to have any value, reality on the ground must change first.

DOES THAT mean that schoolbooks have no importance? It should not be underestimated.

I remember giving a lecture in one of the kibbutzim in the late 60s. After I explained the need for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel (a fairly revolutionary idea at the time), one of the kibbutzniks stood up and asked: "I don't understand it! You want us to give back all the territories that we have conquered. Territories are something real, land, water. What shall we get in return? Abstract words like "peace"? What shall we get tachles (Yiddish for practical things)?"

I answered that from Morocco to Iraq, there are tens of thousands of classrooms, and in every one of them hangs a map. On all these maps, the territory of Israel is marked "occupied Palestine" or just left blank. All that we need is that the name Israel should appear on these thousands of maps.

Forty years have passed, and the name "Israel" does not appear in Palestinian schoolbooks, nor, I assume, on any school map from Morocco to Iraq. And the name "Palestine" does not appear, of course, on any Israeli school map. Only when the young Israeli joins the army, does he see a map of "the territories", with its crazy puzzle of Zones A, B and C, settlement blocs and apartheid roads.

A map is a weapon. From my childhood in Germany between the two World Wars I remember a map that was hanging on the wall of my classroom. On it, Germany had two borders. One (green, if I remember correctly) was the existing border, that was imposed by the treaty of Versailles after the (first) World War. The other, marked in glowing red, was the border from before the war. In thousands of classrooms all over Germany (then governed by Social-Democrats) the pupils saw every day before their eyes the terrible injustice done to Germany, when pieces were "torn" from her on every side. Thus was bred the generation which filled the ranks of the Nazi war machine in World War II.

(By the way, some fifty years later I was taken on a courtesy visit to that school. I asked the principal about that map. Within minutes, it was brought out from the archive.)

NO, I do not make light of maps. Especially not of maps in schools.

I repeat what I said then: the aim must be that the child in Ramallah sees before his eyes, on the wall of his classroom, a map on which the State of Israel is marked. And that the child in Rishon-le-Zion sees before his eyes, on the wall of his classroom, a map on which the State of Palestine is marked. Not by compulsion, but by agreement.

That is, of course, impossible as long as Israel has no borders. How can one mark on the map a state which, from its first day, has refused, consciously and adamantly, to define its borders? Can we really demand that the Palestinian ministry of education publish a map on which all the territory of Palestine lies inside Israel?

And on the other hand, how can one mark on the map the name "Palestine", when there is no Palestinian state? After all, even most of those Israeli politicians who profess - at least pro forma - to support the "two-states solution" will go to great lengths to avoid saying where the border between the two state should run. Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister, is totally opposed to the announced intention of her colleague, Minister of Education Yuli Tamir, to mark the Green Line, lest it be seen as a border.

Peace means a border. A border fixed by agreement. Without a border, there can be no peace. And without peace, it is the height of chutzpa to demand something from the other side that we totally refuse to do ourselves.


A UN human rights expert accused Israel of turning Gaza Strip into a virtual prison under an apartheid-like occupation of the Palestinian territories.

“Gaza remains an imprisoned society in which the prison guards have made frequent military incursions, killing hundreds of Palestinians and wounding thousands in the second half of 2006,” said John Dugard, the special rapporteur on human rights for the Palestinian territories, IINA reported.

The human rights expert made the comments while he was formally presenting a report on his missions to Palestinian territories last year.The report said elements of Israel’s four-decade long occupation were akin to forms of apartheid. The South African academic pointed to the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, preferential treatment for Jewish settlers, and special permit requirements for Palestinians that were not imposed on Israelis.

Dugard called for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the Israeli occupation.

Dugard said that anyone who experienced apartheid has a similar sense of feeling when visiting the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Dugard’s account of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians echoes that of former President Jimmi Carter’s most recent book, “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.”

Dugard said that he had previously refrained from using the term apartheid “on account of the sensitivity of the issue.”

Citing the existence of separate residential areas for Jews and Palestinians in Hebron, as well as separate roads for Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank and Valley, Dugard said Israel’s actions clearly violated international conventions.

“Can it seriously be denied that such acts are committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination over another group,”he added.
 

I arrived in Jordan hoping to find a "warm" peace between Jordan and Israel; what I found was at times as cold as the snow that blanketed Amman's many hills.

Many Israelis hold affection for the late King Hussein, and respect for the incumbent King Abdullah II. I can't say I found much similar sentiment from Jordanians toward Israel. While I encountered considerable warmth as an American, and acceptance as a Jew, the general sentiment toward Israel was antagonistic.

Jordanians I met on a minibus to Madaba said, "In America, there are good people and bad people, but in Israel, there are only bad people."

I scoffed at them, and asked how many Israelis they knew. Not a single one, they answered. I did find a few Jordanians who replied to me in Hebrew when I mentioned I was a Jew. A friend's father surprised his own son as he conversed with me in Hebrew, thanks to his days studying in Jerusalem. He said he held warm affection for Israel. The range of feelings I witnessed could hardly be classified as black and white.

If peace is the absence of war, the treaty between Israel and Jordan is holding firmly, and there remain substantial ties between the countries. "We have a peace treaty since 1994, 12 solid years of peace. It is stable and important for both peoples and both sides, and helps bring stability to the region," says Lironne Bar-Sadeh, the deputy head of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Amman.

Since the peace treaty was signed in October 1994, links have expanded on many levels. In areas such as agriculture, the environment and business, there have been solid developments and considerable cooperation. Between Israel and Jordan, there are 13 Qualified Industrial Zones that host more than 50 factories, allowing Jordan to export goods duty-free to the American market. These symbols of cooperation boost Jordanian trade and employment.

Israel and Jordan have many common interests, notably regarding water. They share resources at the Dead Sea, and cooperate on the Red-Dead plan in an effort to preserve this common treasure. And MASHAV - the Foreign Ministry's development arm, is bringing a group of Jordanians to Israel for a workshop on water conservation and desalination.

Meanwhile, there are creative ideas for increased cooperation such as a shared airport that would allow tourists to land in Aqaba and take a train to Eilat. Another proposal being discussed relates to the shmita year, in which the Land of Israel is supposed to lie fallow, to allow the import of produce from Jordan.

Around 20 Israeli NGOs work with their Jordanian counterparts on areas ranging from the environment, cultural and sport exchanges, medical projects and empowerment for women; at least a half-dozen of these NGOs are involved in intimate people-to-people exchanges.

While I was in Jordan, I visited with many campers from Seeds of Peace, which I worked for as a counselor last summer. The camp brings together teenagers from across the region, as well as from India and Pakistan. They learn that the other side is not the monster they've been brought up to believe.

These Jordanians spending time with their neighbors from the other side of the Jordan River, were a wellspring of hope. Their words and sentiments were proof of the power of dialogue and the hope of better relations between neighbors. As personal connections slowly increase between Israelis and Jordanians, as well as ties on governmental and nongovernmental levels, we can hope for a more robust peace to slowly build.


See also
Israeli massacre
Israel as Satan's bastard child
We are being set up for a wider war in the Middle East
British Jews breakaway
Israel fights for its existence
Critics of Israel fuelling hatred