“At the base of the modern state there is the professor, not the executioner,” writes Nurit Peled-Elhanan at the end of her new book, “for the monopoly of legitimate education is more important than the monopoly of legitimate violence.” A professor of education and linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who also works at the David Yellin Academic College of Education, Peled-Elhanan is well known in Israel as an activist and co-founder of Bereaved Families for Peace.
As part of her work, Peled-Elhanan teaches courses on textbooks to the nation’s current and future schoolteachers. “Nobody is critical of what textbooks say,” she explains. “People don’t doubt the subtexts or look for ideology in textbooks. They don’t even remember the names of the authors and assume that they just give ‘the facts’. I teach my students to read critically. I give them analytic tools and they reach conclusions themselves.”
According to Peled-Elhanan’s Palestine in Israeli School Books, based on “the methods of multimodal and discourse analysis” applicable to ten history books, six geography books and one on ‘civic studies’, all of them published in the years 1996-2009, non-orthodox Jews and Palestinians are presented in the most obviously racist terms.
“Arabs and Palestinians don’t do much in Israeli school books except for lurking, attacking in all sorts of ways and multiplying. The few transitive verbs I came across regarding this unanimous group of people included ‘poison’, ‘attack’, ‘refuse’, ‘evade tax payment’ and ‘thank Israel for the progress it has brought into their life’.” Illustrations include an Israeli Arab “wearing Ali Baba pants and shoes, kaffiyeh, a moustache followed by a camel” and the common “Oxfam image” of “the primitive farmer who follows a primitive plough pulled by oxen or donkeys”.
Much of this is, of course, ridiculous as well as offensive to Arab-Israeli teachers and students who don’t come from families of primitive farmers and who find no doctors, lawyers or any “positive cultural or social aspect” of Palestinian life in the textbooks. “Students leave high school knowing nothing about the history and borders of the state, and seeing Palestinians as intruders, and then have to go out and control and sometimes kill them. Furthermore, the country is very small, but education can fence off neighbours and prevent them from having any real contact,” she says.
Highly pessimistic about where Israel is going, Peled-Elhanan sees no hope of convincing the authorities to change tack. And her book concludes with the gloomy reflection that “the past three generations of Israelis are, for the most part, not aware of the geopolitical or social realities of their country”, given that most schoolchildren “do not run to libraries to verify the facts (in their textbooks) and fill in the gaps”, and that “most teachers were brought up on similar books”.
Yet she retains a strong faith in the potential for education to help move things forward gradually. When her students start to analyse the textbooks, she observes: “They often say ‘we’ve been blind’ and feel empowered at being able to read what’s behind the texts. They are usually happy to learn these things, which may affect their teaching later on. Once you know something, you can’t un-know it,” she says.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)