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14-12-2023
JERUSALEM/ GAZA CITY: In November, Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, uploaded on its official X page a video of Israeli children singing a song celebrating their country’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The broadcaster deleted the video clip after a huge online backlash.
Even after the video was silently erased from social media, however, the song remained a subject of discussion and controversy. Many across the world were shocked to see children sing happily about “eliminating” an entire people “within one year”. Yet a closer look at Israeli literature and curricula shows this open celebration of genocide was the only natural outcome of Israel’s persistent indoctrination or brainwashing to be blunter of its children to ensure that they do not view Palestinians as human and fully embrace apartheid and occupation.
There is myriad evidence of Israel’s brainwashing of its citizens to erase the humanity of Palestinians spanning many decades.
Israeli scholar Adir Cohen, for example, analyzed for his book titled “An Ugly Face in the Mirror National Stereotypes in Hebrew Children’s Literature” some 1700 Hebrew-language children’s books published in Israel between 1967 and 1985, and found that a whopping 520 of them contained humiliating, negative descriptions of the Palestinians.
He revealed that 66 percent of these 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52 percent as evil; 37 percent as liars; 31 percent as greedy; 28 percent as two-faced and 27 percent as traitors.
Such persistent negative descriptions dehumanized Palestinians in the eyes of generations of Israelis, established them as dangerous “others”, and paved the way for children to celebrate their genocide in a video produced by the state broadcaster in 2023.
Towering Palestinian academic and literary critic, Edward Said, also elaborated on the issue in his 1979 book The Question of Palestine, noting that Israeli children’s literature “is made up of valiant Jews who always end up by killing low, treacherous Arabs, with names like Mastoul (crazy), Bandura (tomato), or Bukra (tomorrow). As a writer for Haaretz said on September 20, 1974, “children’s books ‘deal with our topic: the Arab who murders Jews out of pleasure, and the pure Jewish boy who defeats ‘the coward swine!’”
Israel has also used the painful memory of the Holocaust to desensitize Israeli children to the suffering of Palestinians and support without question Israel’s treatment of them.
In his 1999 book, One Nation Under Israel, historian Andrew Hurley explained how Israel weaponises the Holocaust education it provides to Israeli children against the Palestinians. (Int’l News Desk)
