The Ministry of Education sent a reprimand (Hebrew) to the principal of the ‘Ar’ara high school, which sent its pupils to the Human Rights March held earlier this month. The letter sent by the ministry complained, inter alia, that “the pupils were carrying signs against racism, house demolitions, etc., which is contrary to the Director of the Ministry’s communiqué.” The ministry further promised an investigation.

In the school’s reply, the teachers quoted Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar’s communiqué on the International Human Rights Day: “It is your duty as educators, who lead the pupils, to educate them that aside from the protection and defense of human rights, they are expected to show personal, social, civil and national involvement and responsibility. This involvement will led them to participation, and they are to believe that their participation will indeed contribute to the forging of the country’s way. Their right to participate is also their duty to show involvement and responsibility to the country and society.” Emphasis mine. One of the teachers told Haaretz that “A thousand civics lessons wouldn’t do what this one hour we were there did. The pupils came to me afterwards and said ‘We didn’t know the Jews were so kindly and good.’ Arab and Jewish pupils sang together ‘Arabs and Jews love each other’. It was amazing how they shouted together like that for human rights.”

Israeli Palestinian teenagers during the Human Rights March, December 2011 (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)

The ‘Ar’ara teachers, alas, suffer from terminal naiveté. They should have known what Jesus knew about hypocrites like Gideon Sa’ar: That they should be judged according to the rule “Do as they say, not as they do.” Sa’ar’s actions – this reprimand – exhibit his real intentions much more than an official saccharine communiqué.

Furthermore, when the teacher says that her pupils shouted “Arabs and Jews love each other” – Doesn’t she realizes this is precisely what scares people like Sa’ar? Gideon Sa’ar does a masterful job at selling himself to the public as a relatively liberal education minister, and it must be said that unlike the previous Likud minister, Limor “the slapper” Livnat, he did not spend his youth in rioting in theaters which showed plays he did not like.

But Sa’ar, it must be remembered, is first and foremost Im Tirzu’s education minister; he spoke at their convention last year, decrying the description of “values education” as indoctrination and promising much more of it (Hebrew). He is the minister under whom the ministry disqualified a book for pupils about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because it contains two articles the ministry, and the minister, can’t live with: The right of every person to convert to another religion and the right of every person to emigrate to another country (Hebrew).

At the same time, Sa’ar ratcheted up the indoctrination of pupils (oh, sorry, I meant “values education”) to a whole new level: He now forces secular students to study Masechet Avot, that concentrated volume of Jewish ignorance and credulity, which contains such pearls as “he who has many wives, will also have plenty of witchcraft,” and “Don’t speak too often with a woman; This is meant at a man’s wife, and even more so at his friend’s wife; And hence the sages have said: ‘Anyone who speaks too often with a woman, does evil to himself, and abandons the study of the Torah, and will end up in hell.’” No doubt this will help Israel’s female pupils – a marginal minority of 51% – feel better about their place in society. Sa’ar is also the minister who made it a duty for every pupil to visit Hebron. And we’re not talking about some Breaking the Silence tour: No, this is an attempt at indoctrinating (err, sorry, “providing values education”) the pupils into believing that Israel must continue to rule Hebron.

So, truth be told, it’s hard to expect a minister who rejects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because of the right to abandon your religion to show any tolerance towards human rights. Particularly when Jewish and Palestinian pupils exhibit no sense of shame over being able to overcome the walls of hatred. If we let this go on, we are in danger of educating pupils who might think – God forbid – that it’s perfectly OK for Jews and non-Jews to intermarry. And then where would we be? We must thank Sa’ar for exposing his real position towards human rights by sending that reprimand.

An empty basketball court in Israel (photo: flickr: Vadim Lavrusik)

Two Filipino boys play a one-on-one basketball game in South Tel Aviv, an area where many migrant workers and their Israel-born children live. The kids shout at each other in Hebrew as they dribble, shoot, and score. As local as they might seem, these boys are likely to be excluded from a local league due to a little-known policy that prevents many non-Jewish “foreigners” from joining basketball teams.

The rule was made by and applies to the national basketball league for seventh and eighth graders. When it was first discovered by the human rights organization Israeli Children—a group that was founded to fight Israel’s plans to deport children of migrant workers—the policy stated that only “two foreigners” were allowed on each team. But, in most cases, the kids who are excluded are not foreigners—they are children who were born and raised in Israel and who will receive citizenship when they turn 21.

After Israeli Children insisted that the cap be removed, the league tweaked the policy. Now, three “foreigners” are allowed on each team. If a team would like to have more “foreigners,” it must be made up exclusively of “foreigners.” And, if a “foreigners”-only team wins city play-offs, it is forbidden from going on to district competitions. The children must give their spot, instead, to a team that has a “local” majority.

Rotem Ilan, co-founder of Israeli Children, remarks, “It’s sad to say, but I don’t think [the policy] reflects anything different than what [the kids] hear every day on the street, what they hear from their ministers—that they shouldn’t be here, that they don’t belong here, that they’re the ‘wrong’ kind, born to the ‘wrong’ parents.”

Ilan adds that while Interior Minister Eli Yishai has taken the most flak for saying, publicly, that migrants bring diseases to Israel, a member of the Tel Aviv municipality has also remarked that migrant workers’ children and African refugees who attend local schools should have special health check-ups because they are probably ill.

And, recently, a state-funded kindergarten in South Tel Aviv announced that it will not accept “foreign” children. According to the Israeli news site Ynet, “at least two local kindergartens will be set aside to accept kids of only Israeli descent.” While Ynet reported that “the move is unprecedented in Israel,” the children of African refugees have been banned from many public schools in Eilat for several years now.

It should be noted, as well, that Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of the state have separate educational systems.

These increasingly common attitudes and policies of segregating Jews from non-Jews don’t affect only “foreign” kids. They also make an impact on Jewish Israeli youth—communicating to them powerful and dangerous messages about inclusion and exclusion and teaching them that they ought to be privileged at the expense of those marked as “others.”

Reflecting on the basketball league’s cap, Ilan comments, “It tells [Jewish Israeli kids] that the children who already got residency still don’t really belong [here]. Or, ‘you’re better than these children.’”

The basketball league’s cap on “foreigners” is noteworthy for another reason. Jewish Israelis who admit that racism is indeed a problem in the country sometimes discuss it as a top-down phenomenon—it’s the leaders and the system that are discriminatory, not the people. But, in this case, the Education Ministry actually opposes the foreigner cap. It’s the basketball league that came up with and enforces the rule.

So is it the chicken or the egg?

The father of a school-aged boy discusses how the system reinforces the separatist values many Jewish Israeli children learn, first, at home. Ray, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym and for identifying details be omitted, is British and of African descent. His wife is Jewish Israeli. When their son was just three and a half years old, a classmate in his upper middle class daycare called him an “Arab” as an insult.

On another occasion, Ray says, “the children were singing to him—in a not terribly pleasant way—a Hebrew song about a little brown child. They did it as a taunt.”

Ray is also concerned by the “febrile, patriotic air” he sees in private Jewish Israeli daycares, as well as the state-funded kindergartens and schools, where the celebration of religious and national holidays is “intertwined with a sense that Jews have been victims through the ages and now they no longer need to be victims because they have their own country and can be masters of their own destiny.”

And Ray was troubled by the fact that his son’s daycare marked Holocaust Day by teaching the children about the tragic events that befell Jews during World War II.

“It’s not my place to comment on the role of the [Holocaust] in Jewish Israeli identity,” Ray says, “but a three-year-old is way too young to begin to process the horrors of the Holocaust.”

Overall, Ray feels that the Jewish Israeli educational system is marked by a “powerful insularity” that “encourages a certain nationalistic narcissism—[the feeling] that Jewish Israelis are the center of not just theirs but every one’s world view. And it’s terribly, terribly dangerous.”

It’s the sort of thing that might mold children into adults who make rules like limiting the number of “foreigners” that can join youth basketball leagues.

So this rare, happy finding reported in Haaretz this week caught my eye:

A new study found a link between culture and tolerance: Israeli teens who watched plays about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict became more optimistic about the chances of achieving peace and viewed Palestinians more positively.

I read closely, because disappointment can set in upon finding out that the “research” involved non-rigorous methodology, or seems to be an obvious PR ploy – even if I approve of the goal, poor research taints the findings.

But the study turned out to have been conducted by an established faculty member of the School of Public Health at Haifa University, Dr. Anat Gesser-Edelsberg, and two colleagues, Dr. Nurit Guttman and Dr. Moshe Israelshwili. Dr. Gesser Edelsberg has published related research in academic journals and the three have researched/written together for y ears.

They sampled a good 540 Israeli teenagers, aged 16-18, writes Haaretz, and did a nice experiment of surveying the teens before and after the kids watched two plays  displaying the dilemmas of the conflict. One was Yael Ronen’s play “Plonter,” and while the other one was not named, both are part of the “culture basket” of cultural pieces sponsored by the Education Ministry and community centers.

The Haaretz report provides a good selection of the data, showing clear and attitudinal changes:

[Students] were shown two plays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…before watching the plays, 55 percent of the students believed the conflict would not be resolved because the Palestinians don’t want peace. Afterward, only 38 percent held these beliefs. Before they saw the plays, 47 percent of the students said they had no interest in Palestinians in the occupied territories, but only 27 percent said so afterward.

Initially, 65 percent said their feelings about Palestinians were mostly negative. This changed to 47 percent. And 78 percent initially said the checkpoint and roadblock policy should be maintained. This dropped to 60 percent.

The study was founded on the theory of “edutainment” – educational entertainment, according to which entertainment can be used to educate while not being perceived as preachy.

Some people here in the peace activist world have been searching for such techniques for a long time – perhaps part of the reason these plays are successful is that they come with a state-sponsored seal of approval, rather than through peace organizations who are being branded ‘traitors,’ and suffering de-legitimization attacks.

The study, as reported, also revealed findings that that might help explain why Israeli young people seem to avoid dealing with the conflict at all. The irony (or perhaps hypocrisy) becomes clear when it turns out that kids are deemed fit to be soldiers but not to handle knowledge about the conflict they’ll be forced to confront.

Gesser-Edelsburg said interviews conducted with educators found that they don’t know how the education system should address the conflict, and therefore prefer to avoid in-depth discussions on the subject. They also avoided holding discussions after the play – even though the researchers said this was essential – preferring instead to see them as pure entertainment.

The play authors called it paradoxical that teachers believe the students aren’t mature enough to discuss the conflict but are mature enough to be handed weapons a few months after graduation.

I was particularly pleased that the study reported on focus groups, which often provide richer illustrations of attitudes behind the numbers. This part didn’t make it into the English Haaretz, so here are a few rare and heartening free translations from the Hebrew version:

[After watching one of the plays addressing the conflict between carrying out an order and basic human feelings] One male youth in a focus group in Ashkelon said: “Of course if I am standing at a roadblock I’ll see them more as people, I’ll deal with them with greater humanity, I’ll give them water if they need it, but the situation is tough and I understand that everyone standing at a roadblock for a long time behaves like an automaton.”

At a focus group in Yehud, one of the girls said, after watching “Plonter” “We’ve always seen this from our side, how limited and scared we are. I saw the Arab as an enemy and suddenly I saw their side, their feelings towards us. Suddenly I saw how much they are human beings like us.

All this made me think how nice to have a parallel study among Palestinians. Although the conflict is not symmetrical, humanity and a nuanced understanding of the other side should be.

by Roi Ben Yehuda

Over at Tablet, Joseph Dana writes an important piece on Israel’s problematic relationship with the Nakba narrative (the expulsion/dislocation of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel) and the imperative of integrating this narrative into Israel’s public discourse. He concludes:

Including the Nakba in Israeli public discourse, newspapers, and textbooks hardly means the unqualified embrace of one version of history over another. But open discussion of competing narratives with reference to the historical record is clearly a precondition for any wider kind of social and political understanding between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel and between Israelis and Palestinians. Repressive attempts to criminalize narratives of the Nakba—however partial or wrong-headed its opponents may believe those narratives to be—block any possibility of mutual understanding and weaken critical discourse inside Zionist circles and within Israeli society as a whole. The most likely victim of such misguided attempts to shore up Zionism through attacks on free speech and the historical record is Zionism itself.

In his article Dana states that Israel’s educational system began to grapple with the Nakba narrative only as recently as 2009. This is not entirely true. Back in 1964, a novella by the name of ‘Khirbet Khizeh’, a first-person account of the expulsion of an Arab village by the IDF, was inserted into the high school curriculum in Israel. The book was written and published in 1949 by S. Yizhar, who based his story on his own experience. Last I checked, the book still remains as an optional choice for the matriculation exam.

Also, in 1999, during Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s tenure, the Education Ministry (under the direction of Yossi Sarid) introduced a textbook called “The 20th Century” written by Eyal Naveh of Tel Aviv University. The textbook, designed for Jewish Israeli ninth-graders, mentioned the Nakba (under the heading “alternative account” of the 1948 events) and asked its readers to step into the shoes of the Palestinians in question. Unfortunately, during the second Intifada the book was removed from the curriculum.

Finally, in their on-going 2009-2010 report on the standards of Israeli textbooks, IMPACT-SE (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education) concluded that although the term “Nakba” is rarely used in Israeli text-books, the hardships of the Palestinians refugees was frequently mentioned. The study did find a 2001 high-school text book (one out of 23 examined), entitled “The Era of Fear and Hope,” (1870-1970), which states:

“Because of the military defeat and the refugee problem, the Arabs refer to the 1948 war, which we call the War of Independence – as “El Nakba,” which in Arabic means: the catastrophe.”

In the same book, the students are also asked:

“The War of Independence is called different names that express a different point of view on the war: The War of Independence [...], El Nakba. Explain the meaning of every name. [...] Explain the different points of view that led to giving each of these names.”

Having said that, I believe that Dana’s larger point remains valid: Israel has yet to make meaningful efforts to officially integrate the full history – warts and all – of 1948. The longer it waits, the more obstacles its erects, the more difficulty it will encounter in the future.

Of course there are those who argue that integrating emotionally charged and exclusive narratives is unrealistic and even undesirable. For example, in a recent article entitled “Two Narratives for Two People,” published by The Forward, Hussein Ibish writes:

Palestinian and Israeli national narratives both contain elements of the truth but they are tendentious and dismiss crucial and undeniable, but inconvenient, historical facts that are crucial to the other party’s identity. It is impossible, in the foreseeable future, for these narratives to be reconciled. Jewish Israelis will not become Palestinian nationalists, and Palestinians will not become Zionists.

Be that as it may, research done on Israeli collective memory has yielded some surprising results in this regard. In a 2008 study on collective memory, conducted by Tel-Aviv university’s Rafi Nets-Zehngut and Daniel Bar-Tal, 47% of Jewish-Israelis said they believed that an expulsion of Palestinians had taken place in 1948. In contrast 41% said no expulsion had taken place. Remarkably, 46% of the respondents also said that both Israelis and Palestinians bear equal responsibility for the outbreak and continuation of the conflict.

It seems that despite all obstacles – the seemingly exclusive nature of these narratives, lack of governmental support, a hostile environment of endless conflict – almost a majority of Jewish Israelis subscribe to a critical account of their own foundation myth. That’s pretty incredible and further shows that these narratives are not zero-sum constructs.

However, we shouldn’t be overly sanguine. Bar-Tal reminds us that notwithstanding these findings, many Israeli-Jews still subscribe to a dualistic collective narrative in which Israel is portrayed as a heroic-victim and the Palestinians as villainous-aggressors. Bar-Tal explains that “holding such a Zionist narrative serves as an obstacle to peace since it promotes negative emotions, mistrust, de-legitimization and negative stereotypes of Arabs and Palestinians.” Given Israel’s current ultra-nationalist milieu, including it’s assault on the “N” word, such circumspection shouldn’t be easily dismissed.

No doubt injecting nuance and complexity into a self-serving historical narrative is difficult work. All the more so since the original conflict is still festering. While most accounts of intervention tend to favor a top-down approach (e.g. curriculum reform), we would also benefit from exploring and implementing creative strategies for narrative sharing that are not contingent on the wisdom and courage of the government. Instructive examples abound in countries that have overcome serious inter-group conflicts (e.g. South Africa, Mozambique, Rwanda, Ireland, Germany, USA, Indonesia, etc.) but, as Michael Ende once wrote, that’s another story, and shall be told another time.

Roi is an Israeli writer based in New York City, with degrees from New School University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is currently a graduate student at Columbia University and a PhD student at the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. This post first appeared on Roi’s blog, and is re-posted here with the author’s permission.

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