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<h1>It’s not shocking to see Israeli children celebrate the Gaza genocide</h1><p class="gmail-article__subhead gmail-css-1wt8oh6"><em>Israel
has long been indoctrinating its children to believe Palestinians are
less than human, and thus not worthy of empathy or compassion. </em></p><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-article-b-l" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-13-at-10.53.31-1702466522.png?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Rifat Audeh" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh">Rifat Audeh</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, and freelance journalist.</div></div></li></ul><div class="gmail-article-dates" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><span class="gmail-screen-reader-text">Published On 13 Dec 2023</span><span aria-hidden="true"><br></span></div><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><font size="1"><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/13/its-not-shocking-to-see-israeli-children-celebrate-the-gaza-genocide">https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/13/its-not-shocking-to-see-israeli-children-celebrate-the-gaza-genocide</a></font></div><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><span aria-hidden="true"><br></span></div></div></div><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2Fpou7ko"></a></div></div><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Twitter" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=It%E2%80%99s%20not%20shocking%20to%20see%20Israeli%20children%20celebrate%20the%20Gaza%20genocide&source=sharethiscom&related=sharethis&via=AJEnglish&url=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2Fpou7ko"></a><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"></div></div><div class="gmail-featured-media__image-wrap"><div class="gmail-video-shadow"><div class="gmail-pre_video-wrapper"></div></div></div><div class="gmail-featured-media__image-wrap"><div class="gmail-video-shadow"><div class="gmail-pre_video-wrapper"><div class="gmail-responsive-image"><img src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/image-1702472885.jpg?resize=730%2C410&quality=80" alt="" width="440" height="247" style="margin-right: 0px;"></div></div></div><div class="gmail-video-duration__brand-bar"><span class="gmail-screen-reader-text">Video Duration 02 minutes 07 seconds </span><span aria-hidden="true" class="gmail-video-duration__duration">02:07</span></div></div><div class="gmail-wysiwyg gmail-wysiwyg--all-content gmail-css-ibbk12"><p class="gmail-p1">In November, Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, uploaded on its official X page a <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/11/21/israeli-state-tv-video-shows-children-singing-about-gaza">video</a>
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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">There is myriad evidence of Israel’s brainwashing of its citizens to erase the humanity of Palestinians spanning many decades.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">He revealed that<span style="font-size:22px"> 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.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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!’”</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">“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.”</p><p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">Just take a look at Israel’s official textbooks.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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”.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">Bar-Tal’s study is from over 20 years ago, but more recent studies show that the situation is hardly any different today.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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?”</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">She found that the books commonly label Palestinians as “terrorists” and also “simplify history” to the benefit of Israelis.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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”.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">“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”.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">“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.”</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.</strong></em></p>
</div><hr><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-13-at-10.53.31-1702466522.png?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Rifat Audeh" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/rifat-audeh">Rifat Audeh</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, and freelance journalist.</div><div class="gmail-article-author__desc gmail-css-1wt8oh6">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.</div></div></li></ul>
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