[News] It’s not shocking to see Israeli children celebrate the Gaza genocide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 It’s not shocking to see Israeli children celebrate the Gaza genocide

*Israel has long been indoctrinating its children to believe Palestinians
are less than human, and thus not worthy of empathy or compassion. *

   - [image: Rifat Audeh] <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh>
   Rifat Audeh <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh>
   Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, and
   freelance journalist.

Published On 13 Dec 2023
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/13/its-not-shocking-to-see-israeli-children-celebrate-the-gaza-genocide

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Video Duration 02 minutes 07 seconds 02:07

In November, Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, uploaded on its official X
page a video
<https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/11/21/israeli-state-tv-video-shows-children-singing-about-gaza>
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 more
blunt – 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, analysed 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 dehumanised 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 desensitise
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.

“The mind of a child (or of anyone else for that matter) cannot absorb the
horrors of the Holocaust without finding someone to hate,” Hurley argued.
“Since there are no Nazis around against whom vengeance can be sought,
[Former Israeli Prime Ministers] [Menachem] Begin, [Yitzhak] Shamir and
[Ariel] Sharon have solved this problem by calling the Arabs the Nazis of
today and a proper target for retribution.”

Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appears to be eagerly
continuing with this tradition and has even claimed that it was a
Palestinian who gave Adolf Hitler the idea for the Holocaust.

Israeli professor Meytal Nasie strongly corroborates Hurley’s view above on
the ramifications of the way the Holocaust is taught. In her 2016 study,
Young Children’s Experiences and Learning in Intractable Conflicts, she
found that 68 percent of Israeli children suggested “beating,” “fighting,”
“killing,” or “expelling” the Arabs as a solution. Nasie states that
imparting these beliefs at such an early age, in a frequent and intense
manner, leads to inculcation of these conflict-related narratives deep
within the children’s socio-psychological repertoires.

Of course, the Israeli state’s brainwashing of its citizens against the
Palestinians is not limited to ridiculous lies about history told by
political leaders or to children’s literature. This propaganda effort is
highly systemic and at the very core of Israeli education.

Just take a look at Israel’s official textbooks.

For his 1998 research paper, The Rocky Road Toward Peace: Beliefs on
Conflict in Israeli Textbooks, Israeli academic Daniel Bar-Tal analysed 124
Israeli textbooks on various subjects and for various age groups approved
by the Israeli Ministry of Education to be used in religious and secular
schools across the country.

To map out the ideological content transmitted to Israeli children in the
education system, he looked at which “societal beliefs (society members’
shared cognitions on topics and issues of special concern for their
society)” received the most coverage in state-approved textbooks. He found
that overall, the societal beliefs relating to (national) security received
the most emphasis, followed by those concerning a positive self-image of
Jews, and those that present Jews as the victims of the conflict. A
majority of the analysed books were also found to include negative
stereotypes about Arabs, portraying them as “cruel, immoral, unfair” and
determined “to annihilate the State of Israel”.

The widespread demonisation of the Palestinian “Other” in textbooks,
coupled with the emphasis placed on the positive representations of Jews
and the claim that they are the “victims” in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and supported by overarching narratives about the importance of
national security and survival, created the perfect conditions for
generations of Israelis to leave the education system convinced that any
and all aggression against Palestinians – including ethnic cleansing and
genocide – are at least justifiable, if not necessary.

This is because when children are thought that they belong to an inherently
good “chosen people” and that they are being attacked and victimised by a
demonic and inhuman “Other”, they easily accept the oppression,
displacement or mass killing of those who belong to this “Other” (ie, the
Palestinians) without any moral qualm or hesitation.

Bar-Tal’s study is from over 20 years ago, but more recent studies show
that the situation is hardly any different today.

For example, for her 2013 book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology
and Propaganda in Education, Israeli scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan analysed
Israeli history, geography and civic studies textbooks for grades 8-12 and
reached a conclusion rather similar to Bar-Tal’s: That in Israeli school
books, Palestinians are still represented as evil “Others”, and Israelis as
innocent victims of history and circumstance.

But there was another, important dimension to Peled-Elhanan’s study. Since
all Israelis are drafted into compulsory military service at 18 years of
age, she designed her study around the specific question of “How are
Palestine and the Palestinians against whom these young Israelis will
potentially be required to use force, portrayed in school books?”

She found that the books commonly label Palestinians as “terrorists” and
also “simplify history” to the benefit of Israelis.

She concluded that Israeli textbooks prioritise “the creation of a usable
past over accuracy and often harness the past and manipulate it for the
justification of the present”.

“The books – in defiance of actual evidence- still present the Palestinians
as the ‘thugs’ and the Israelis as the victims” she wrote, and reflect the
Zionist-Israeli opinion that “the Palestinians cannot be viewed but as an
obstacle or a threat to be overcome or eliminated. Therefore their stories,
their suffering, their truth or their human faces cannot be included in the
narrative”.

In his book, One Nation Under Israel, Hurley explained the consequences of
such indoctrination through the testimony of Israeli educator Shlomo Ariel,
who had met with 10 groups, each made out of 50 Israelis about to enter the
army, and discussed with them their perception of and attitudes towards
Arabs.

“In each discussion group there were a few who proposed physically
liquidating the Arabs, right down to the elderly, women and children,”
Hurley quoted Ariel as saying. “They received the comparison between Sabra
and Shatila (massacres in Lebanon) and the Nazi destruction favourably and
said with full candour that they would carry out such destruction with
their own hands with no inhibitions or pangs of conscience. Not one
expressed shock or reservations about these declarations…Many supported
apartheid on the model of South Africa…In each group, there were not more
than two to three holders of humanitarian, antiracist views.”

Several decades have passed since Ariel had these discussions with young
Israeli conscripts and learned that very few of them see Palestinians as
human. Yet the ongoing brutal war on Gaza, and the many posts we see online
by young Israelis – including many young conscripts – celebrating the
carnage, applauding the military, and mocking Palestinian suffering, prove
that little has changed since then.

So no, no one should be shocked to see Israeli children singing happily
about the genocide of the Palestinians. Israel has been brainwashing them
to do so for many generations.

*The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.*
------------------------------

   - [image: Rifat Audeh] <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh>
   Rifat Audeh <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh>
   Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, and
   freelance journalist.
   Rifat Audeh is a Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, an
   award-winning filmmaker, and a freelance journalist. He is a survivor of
   the 2010 Freedom Flotilla which attempted to break the blockade of Gaza.
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