How Does Israel Justify Mass Killings? It Starts in the Schools.

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

In The Black Image in the White Mind, historian George M. Frederickson writes, “In the years immediately before and after 1800, white Americans often revealed by their words and actions that they viewed [Black people] as a permanently alien and unassimilable element of the population.” Within the context of white American domination, anti-Black racist stereotypes framed Black people as inherently unfit, innately problematic and divorced from the category of the human, a category that is synonymous with whiteness.

The French-Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, understood these racist rationalizations as a series of negations, observing: “The colonized is not this, is not that. [They are] never considered in a positive light; or if [they are], the quality which is conceded is the result of a psychological or ethical failing.” Within these racist binary regimes, it is necessary that a specific group functions as “other.”

Throughout the world, there are groups that are deemed “other,” and their “otherness” is imposed by those who control dominant forms of discourse — those who have the representational power to demean, to marginalize and demonize. Historically, schools and religious institutions have helped to underwrite such dehumanizing discourse.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a retired lecturer in language education at Hebrew University and at the David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem, and the author of several books. In this exclusive interview, she discusses how Israeli schoolbooks (and by extension, Israeli schools) powerfully frame anti-Palestinian discourse and inculcate Israeli children with suspicion, fear and hatred of Palestinians. Peled-Elhanan’s work provides a powerful analysis of the relationship between Israeli state pedagogical power and racist, anti-Palestinian ideology.

George Yancy: Provide a few examples of how Palestinians are portrayed in racist ways through the medium of Israeli schoolbooks.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Schoolbooks always, not only in Israel, are meant to legitimate the state and its actions. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have schoolbooks, they would just be books. So, the raison d’être of schoolbooks is to legitimate the state, and especially the controversial actions of the state such as what are called the founding crimes, and so on. In Israel, what must be legitimated is the colonization of Palestine and the ongoing occupation. Israel must justify its policies. So, like all colonizers, Israel portrays the colonized as primitive, evil or superfluous. Israel portrays them as a racialized group that cannot change and never will change.

For instance, in one geography schoolbook, there is a passage about factors that “inhibit” the development of the Arab village. So, they say that Arab villages are far from the center, the roads to them are difficult, and they have remained out of the process of change and development. They say they are hardly exposed to modern life, and there are difficulties connecting them to the electricity and water networks. You would think we’re talking about somewhere the size of Australia. But Israel is smaller than New Jersey. So where are these remote villages that have stayed out of development? Or, they say that the Arab society is traditional and objects to changes by its nature, reluctant to adopt novelties. Modernization seems dangerous to them, and they are unwilling to give anything for the general good. They also are portrayed as a problem and a demographic threat, as a security threat. And because they are deemed a demographic threat, this legitimates the massacres and their elimination. One schoolbook says one of the massacres, the Deir Yassin massacre that caused the panicked flight of the Palestinians, solved a frightening demographic problem. And even Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, called the flight of Palestinians a miracle. The idea is that Israelis must outnumber Palestinians. If we outnumber them, then we shall be safe.

They compare the numbers of Arabs versus Jews all the time in the schoolbooks, in every subject, especially multiplication. Schoolbooks refer to Palestinians as Israel’s Arabs or the non-Jewish sector. You never find the label Palestinian except when attached to terror. The Bedouin community, for example — the Bedouin tribes that have been on the land for thousands of years — are called the Bedouin diaspora, to give the impression that they don’t belong. The maps in schoolbooks completely ignore the existence of Palestine and Palestinians. Even in a map that shows the Arab population, you don’t find one Arab city, not even Nazareth.

They justify racist laws, such as the law of citizenship, which does not allow a couple — one of which is an Israeli citizen, and one of which comes from the occupied territories — to live together. They justify this kind of racist and illegal and unconstitutional law by quoting the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, who said Palestinians’ “human rights shouldn’t be a recipe for national suicide.”

So, the whole image is that you know they are a threat, and therefore they should not be treated as people. So, the whole discrimination and elimination and confinement of Arab citizens is legitimated by this excuse — the need to be a majority, to maintain the Jewish character of the state. Once there was a policy to encourage four children for every family in the Jewish sector to outnumber Arabs. There were rewards for families. They called them “blessed families.” Today, this policy no longer exists. When Benjamin Netanyahu became the finance minister, he stopped the allowances that big families receive. But it was a policy, one designed to outnumber them.

How early are these books introduced to Israeli children?

It is from kindergarten. Schoolbooks reflect the discourse. It’s as linguist Gunther Kress said: Texts are a punctuation of semiosis or meaning-making, that is, at a certain point of time. That’s why schoolbooks change from one government to another. So, this is the discourse, the social discourse. It is reflected in schoolbooks; schoolbooks don’t invent this kind of discourse.

What your work shows is that schoolbook pictures are not benign, inconsequential or just meant for sheer entertainment. What you show is that racist images have deep existential implications. The dehumanization of Palestinians through Israeli schoolbooks enables their decimation. After all, if Israeli children are raised accepting the “unconditional truth” of what is written or portrayed through pictures in their books and pedagogical spaces, then to kill Palestinians through collective punishment doesn’t carry the same ethical weight as the loss of Israeli lives.

In Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, you write, “Palestinian non-citizens in the occupied territories are often depicted as terrorists, and this depiction reinforces the policy, presented in schoolbooks as an agreed-upon necessity, of constant control, restriction of movement and even extra-judicial assassinations.” There is a certain deep irony here. We know that Jewish people were subjected to dehumanizing propaganda spread by Nazi Germany. Jewish people were depicted as “parasites” that had to be removed, exterminated from the purity of the “Aryan race.” Palestinians are clearly the out-group. How do you specifically see Zionism as an ideological force that creates an in-group that must not be “sullied” by the out-group? After all, Zionism as a form of nation-building means not just the use of racist stereotypes, but also the control of geographical space. Could you discuss how you see these two forms of violence working in tandem through the very project of Zionism?

Israeli identity is a territorial identity. National and territorial identity are one. And so, of course, territory is a very important factor of our identity. We are of the land, and we must occupy the land. But I think the way they treated, since the beginning of Zionism … is the way all colonialists treated Indigenous populations — they are said to be primitive, and we bring progress. And they are said not to exist. They’re considered part of the landscape. I think all colonialist powers treated the local population in the same way. So, Zionism was a European national movement. Like all European national movements, Zionism defined who is human and who is “other.” And the other is the Eastern one, the “Oriental” one. All they wanted was to get rid of the East, because Jews were called Easterners in Europe, as if they were an “Oriental” race, and they wanted to get rid of it. They wanted to Westernize themselves.

And this is one of the things that is emphasized greatly in the schoolbooks: We are the West. The history of Jews in the East or in Muslim countries is not even mentioned, although they had very harmonious and enriching lives in Muslim countries for thousands of years. But it’s not even mentioned. So, they wanted to Westernize themselves and to erase the history of the country to reproduce the myth of continuity, as if the Jews who come from Europe are coming home to their land. So, the history and the culture, and everything that existed before on the land of Palestine or Arab Israel was erased. They did it in archaeology, too. You hardly have any archaeological findings from Palestine or from Ottoman time. The Ottomans ruled here 600 years, but you hardly have anything. If you go to a park in Israel, they tell you this was such and such place for the Romans, for the Byzantine, for the Crusaders, for the British and for the Zionists. Two-thousand years of history are erased. So, all these things together can explain the Israeli attitude. And of course, like all colonialists, Zionist leaders use racist discourse to vilify the Indigenous populations, and to legitimate its discrimination and its elimination.

Ethiopian Jews might be said to be a group that experiences a kind of “otherness” within Israel. In your book, Holocaust Education and the Semiotics of Othering in Israeli Schoolbooks, you discuss how Arab Jews and other non-European Jews are themselves also victims, as a result of Zionism. In your book you characterize non-European Jews who settled in Israel as “the victims of the victims.” How do Zionist narratives contribute to the “othering” of non-European Jews?

The maps in schoolbooks completely ignore the existence of Palestine and Palestinians. Even in a map that shows the Arab population, you don’t find one Arab city, not even Nazareth.

As I mentioned, the Zionist movement was a European movement. Ever since they came to Palestine, they wanted to Westernize themselves and Indigenize themselves at the same time — as if they’re coming back. The idea was to create a homeland for European Jews. They were not interested in other Jews, especially not from Arab or African countries. But after the Holocaust and the extermination of European Jews, they needed people to populate the future state of Israel. So, they looked for them in other countries, and they found them in Muslim countries. But the idea was that they were barbaric and primitive, and full of germs and illnesses, and so on, and that they should be confined in camps until they could integrate. They should give up their culture, their Arabness or their Africanness, and their language, their music, their customs, their religion, and adopt this other religion, this other Judaism that was developed in Eastern Europe. There are many people who write about it — Ela Shohat, and others. So, they turned them into the victims of the victims, because the ones who treated them this way were really the victims, the survivors.

They were held in what is called inner colonialism or internal colonialism. To this day, four generations after they came to Israel, their grandchildren are still called Moroccans, or even “dirty Moroccans.” They are called by their ethnicities — the Ashkenazi Jews, however, are the norm, the unmarked. They are not called an ethnicity. But the non-Ashkenazi, although they’ve been on the land for four generations, are still called by their ethnicities. The gaps in education, in employment, in wealth, are growing, not diminishing.

Now that was a horrible thing, and the way they were treated has ruined them. It ruined the family; it ruined the community. It was a disaster. In fact, Israel didn’t want the Ethiopians to come for many years. The Ethiopian Jews, or Beta Israel (the house of Israel) as they call themselves, wanted to come to Zion, for religious reasons. The Arab Jews were largely not Zionist either, although some of them were in Zionist movements, but mainly their motives were religious, not political. They wanted to come to Jerusalem, and that’s all. And the Ethiopian Jews, who thought they were the only Jews in the world, wanted to come to Zion. When they heard that there was a possibility, they began to ask to come. But Israel didn’t want them. It was only after the UN General Assembly, in 1975, declared Zionism a racist movement that they decided to bring them to prove that they allow Black people in. But it took more years until they started to come.

The way they brought them was disastrous. They made them walk to Sudan and then wait in Sudan in no living conditions at all for months and months on end. The death toll was in the thousands. And then they defined it, or crowned it, as a wonderful underground operation of “our brave soldiers.” They brought them in, and they were put in these camps, which they called absorption camps, absorption centers. They were completely dependent on the Israeli bureaucracy. They couldn’t make decisions regarding their own welfare. They had to give up all their customs, their religious leaders, their religion because they went by the Bible and not by the Halachah which was developed in Eastern Europe — they didn’t even know about it. And they could not choose schools for their children.

Schoolbooks reproduce this even today by treating Ethiopian Jews as a “problem” that the state had to cope with. And today, over 40 years after their arrival, they’re still treated as a problem. They must study all kinds of texts that were written by Europeans in the last century, in the ‘60s, about life in Ethiopia and hear that they are patriarchic, and they are primitive, and they marry their daughters off at the age of 9, and so on. Nothing is mentioned about their contribution to the country. There are artists, singers, dancers, scientists, everything. They are only mentioned when they are “good soldiers.” All the books mention that. They are separated into special programs for Ethiopians, even if they were born in Israel, even at the university, nursing school, the army. These special programs are meant to Westernize them the way Israel is Western, which is nonsense. And yet they must read these texts. All texts about them are written by Ashkenazi Jews. There isn’t one Ethiopian text in all the programs, although they have writers (and sociologists and psychologists) that have received awards. And today, Ethiopian Israeli intellectuals have begun to object and to refute the narrative of rescue. Today, there is a movement of resistance to all of this. But it’s very hard.

The police treat them as the police treat Black people in America and in England. They shoot them in the streets. Recently, a trial was brought to completion. A policeman shot an Ethiopian Israeli 18-year-old, and the policeman was acquitted. For the whole trial, the judges treated the policeman as if he was the victim and treated the parents of this kid as if they were an obstruction. The chief of police said: Yes, what can we do? They’re Black. And this comes into the schoolbooks. The schoolbooks tell you that they cannot integrate, or they find it hard to integrate, because they have all kinds of customs for which we are not used to, such as respect for elders, parental authority! Horrible things like that. And skin color. So, the schoolbooks replicate the racism of the state. They always show them, in photographs, slouching on the ground in some desert and you don’t see their faces even.

I always ask my students, where did the Ethiopian Jews live in Ethiopia? And they say, in the desert, which is false. They lived on top of hills because they needed water for the herds. During COVID, an Ethiopian lecturer in David Yellin Academic College gave a lecture to the staff and she asked the same question: “Where do you think they lived?” The lecturers all said, “in the desert,” because this is the only picture of Ethiopian Jews that we see. This is horrible.

I used to volunteer with children in an absorption center near my house. The living conditions were awful, and so was their treatment at school. The racism in schools excludes them from participating in all the activities that the white kids get to do. Of course, they were wonderful and brilliant children, and I’m in contact with some of them to this day. And one of them was in the Israeli Air Force working as a technician. Well, me and my husband went to her wedding and there wasn’t a single white person at this wedding, not any of her former military peers, not any of her present peers, not even one. But how can this be? I’m sure she invited everybody. This is an anecdote, but I mention it to show you the attitude towards Ethiopian Jews. I heard teachers say that they stink. I heard teachers say that they are not sacred because they slaughter the cows themselves.

This reminds me of the horrible reality of the Stolen Generation, where white Australians forced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their parents. The objective is to erase any signs of their cultural identity.

Yes. In this case, the whole education of Ethiopian Israeli children is meant to change them, not to get to know them, not to learn from them, or to recognize their contributions to a multicultural society. I asked a teacher if she thought that these changes would disconnect them from their culture and their community and their family. And she said, yes, I hope they teach their parents, too. So, yes, it was the same colonial processes that took place in Australia and in Canada. It is the same “civilizing mission.” It is the white man’s civilizing mission. And Ethiopians were shocked when they came because they thought they came to “Jerusalem of Gold” and suddenly they were treated like non-Jews, which caused a lot of suicide cases. They were treated as beasts, which has not changed to this day.

What do you envision as an effective way of dismantling the anti-Palestinian stereotypes in Israel that do so much violence? How might rethinking education and a radical rethinking of the curriculum in Israel make a difference?

One could have an entirely new curriculum if one wanted. I’ve been talking about books until around 2014, because after that you don’t find Palestinians in the schoolbooks at all, and you don’t find Ethiopians in the schoolbooks at all. You have some abstract problems of terror, but nobody speaks about them as people. There was some change at the end of ‘90s when new historians talked about the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but today there’s nothing; it is as if they don’t exist. These books are like evangelistic pamphlets. Even the pictures you see, all the photos of people in schoolbooks are blonde with blue eyes. In reality, most Israelis are not blonde. And I asked one graphic designer, who designed a schoolbook, why he did that. He said, “Well, it looks good.” These books are really propaganda books.

Every year I check to see if there are new things in these books, but there are no “others” in them at all, not even as others. So, it’s getting worse. But of course, if you want to mandate, you have to construct a new curriculum, which will not only be what is called the pedagogical narrative, but the performative narrative, the narrative of the people who are never included within the pedagogical narrative or the official narrative, the people whose voices are not heard — narratives written by the Bedouins, the Circassians, the Druze, the Palestinians, the Ethiopian Jews, the Arab Jews, the Russian Jews — because Israel is a place with so many languages, so many groups of people who have nothing in common, by the way. It’s not multicultural, but it has a lot of cultures within it. The only way forward is to have a narrative of the liminal people, what Indian scholar and critical theorist Homi Bhabha calls the performative narrative, the one that matters, the one that really affects the lives of people. In Israel, nobody has history except Zionist history. We don’t know anything, even about European Jews. We don’t know anything, except that they were exterminated.

The Palestinian Lebanese writer Elias Khoury wrote a book called Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam in which he tells the story of a Palestinian man’s journey of pain and sorrow. In the book there is the story of a man who was brought to bury and burn the cadavers after the massacres. Khoury calls these people Sonderkommandos. He tells the story of one of them, makes him an individual human being who has a story. And when you read this story in contrast to the Israeli story told in the history books, this is the difference from a pedagogical or official narrative, it is the narrative of the marginalized, the narrative of the people who have become collective objects. And that’s the way you should do it, to give voice to the voiceless. But you don’t have the history of Ethiopian Jews written by Ethiopian Jews. It’s all anthropological, and it’s all from a Eurocentric point of view, a racist point of view. I think the only way to do it is not to confront the two official narratives, Palestinian against Israeli. This has been done. Neither Israel nor Palestine allow it to be used at school. But we must take the narratives of all the people, and that’s where you’ll find fascinating things about the common life that was in this place during the Ottoman period and before, which was rich and harmonious culturally, economically, agriculturally. People were so cosmopolitan. Everything was together without anybody losing their identity and their religious affiliation. I would like to see that.

We tried to do it before the 2009 onslaught on Gaza. We tried to form a group of experts who would start writing this curriculum. A wonderful group came, all volunteering. But then Israel attacked Gaza, and the Palestinians didn’t want to and couldn’t come anymore. But I think there are many people who would love to do it, because it’s always so much more interesting than all this political propaganda that you get in the schoolbooks, which is all about pogroms and wars and the massacres of Jews.

Today, the idea that unites the people here is that we are all victims of the Holocaust, and we can be victims of the Holocaust again, if we’re not careful. That’s the idea. You must traumatize the children to make them loyal, so they don’t leave the country. And it’s written in all the books. What happened in Europe to the Jews happened because they did not have a state and an army. You compel people to stay, young people, you frighten them to death. You know, people say, “Don’t go to Turkey, they hate us.” What do you mean? They hate us. They love me when I come to the market and buy rugs. I remember when I took my son to Greece when he was 8, his cousin said, “Don’t go there! They exterminated us.” Five-thousand years ago, they destroyed the temple. And that attitude is very strong in Israel. Don’t go to Athens. They are antisemitic. Don’t go there, there are Arabs there. So, the Holocaust is what unites everybody, and hovers above us all the time, along with a contempt for the real Holocaust victims because, you know, they didn’t fight back.

This sounds like a process of Nazification of Arabs.

Yes! Ever since Israel befriended Germany in 1953, and accepted the reparation money, the role of the potential exterminator passed to the Arabs, otherwise we have no reason to be here, and to be armed to our teeth. The Arabs received the role of potential exterminators with no reason, with no cause. I mean Arabs never exterminated Jews. Muslims rarely pogromized Jews. There were some incidents, yes, but they never thought of a Final Solution. And David Ben-Gurion said, in 1953, I’m taking German reparations money so that we can defend ourselves against the Nazi Arabs, and that coined it — the “Nazi Arabs.” And then they said, we live in Auschwitz borders. And Menachem Begin said the attack on refugee camps in Lebanon saved us from “another Treblinka.” This is the discourse. And even today they call Palestinians in Gaza Nazis. What happened on October 7 was immediately compared to the Shoah, to the Holocaust. Immediately. And it works. We are a nuclear power, and they have nothing, but they are depicted on one hand as primitive, superfluous human beings, and on the other hand, as almighty Nazis. And it works.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. A post-publication correction was made to clarify that one Israeli schoolbook described the Deir Yassin massacre as solving rather than resulting from a “frightening demographic problem.”