Since the issue is between Israel and the Palestinians, then there must be "a conspiracy” involved: I have been waiting for months now for the release of the book "Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education", written by Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and published by I.B. Tauris in the United Kingdom. The book is an English translation of the original in Hebrew. Amazon, the company that I deal with regularly, has never delayed an order I had placed. However, this particular book was so late that I almost screamed "conspiracy". For one thing, I had ordered it last August, and was promised to receive it in October. But on 1/9/2011, I received an apology from Amazon because the book's publisher announced that it would be delayed. Then on 16/10/2011, Amazon again notified me that the publishing of the book had been cancelled. So I went to Waterstone's, which said that the book will be released on 18/11/2011. But soon afterwards, I found a new date for the book's release was posted on its website, which was 30/1/2012. I.B Tauris itself then announced on its website that the release date would be 30/11/2011, before saying that the book has not yet been published. Dr. Peled-Elhanan is an exceptional peace advocate. I had previously cited her defense of Islam before the European Parliament, where she said that it is not Islam that she felt threatened her, but “American imperialism, European apathy and Israel's racism and violent occupation”. Her book represents the results of a study she conducted on Israeli textbooks in the past five years. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, she says it is a form of racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service. The Guardian quoted Peled-Elhanan as saying that many people cannot explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, and that she believes the explanation lay with how Israeli school textbooks represent Palestinians. Dr. Peled-Elhanan also said that hundreds of Israeli textbooks did not contain even one photograph that depicted the Arabs as "normal people". She said that the books authorized by the ministry of education claim that the killing and dispossession of Palestinians in the war of 1948 was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state. But the most important aspect of Dr. Nurit's statements is that they are a testimony from an Israeli witness per se. This issue is always on the table, and the word ‘incitement' is a pillar of the policy pursued by every single Israeli government, which all know the racism of the system and so project it unto others. Two years ago, I received a book entitled “The Portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in Israeli Schools: An Analysis of School Curricula in Public Education”, written by Dr. Ali bin Saleh al-Khabti, and published by the Obeikan Bookstore. The book contains Hebrew excerpts that depict Islam as a violent religion linked to terrorism, claiming that it is a religion of the sword (even when the word sword was not mentioned at all in the Quran, even in the verse known as the "Verse of the Sword"). However, Dr. al-Khabti is an Arab and a Muslim, i.e. belongs to the other side, while Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a professor in an Israeli university, whose father is Mattityahu Peled, one of the commanders in the 1967 war, and the head of the Department of Arabic Language at the University of Tel Aviv. Also, Peled-Elhanan's daughter was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem in 1993. The publication of her book "Palestine in Israeli School Books" coincided with my reading an article in Foreign Policy written by Matthew Berkman, a Jewish American Research Associate at the U.S./Middle East Project. Berkman began his article by attacking the "double standards" of 27 U.S. senators who signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to press Palestinian leaders to end "incitement directed against Jews and Israel within the Palestinian media, mosques, and schools." The article is worth publishing in full in Arab newspapers. I choose two paragraphs that I will summarize and translate here. Berkman said: Anyone who reads Israel's press these days will find it difficult to do so without chancing upon yet another outrageous example of such incitement. Be it the declaration of Rabbi Dov Lior, a senior authority on Jewish law in the Religious Zionism movement, that the offspring of non-Jews possess "genetic traits" of "cruelty and barbarism"; or an open letter signed by dozens of Israel's municipal chief rabbis calling on Jews "to refrain from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews"; or the wives of those state-sponsored rabbis urging Jewish girls not to date, work with, or perform national service in the company of Arabs; or even news of the publication of "The King's Torah," a theological text widely endorsed by settler rabbis that authorizes the killing of non-Jewish children and babies, since it is clear that they will grow to harm the Jews. Could it be that the senators who condemn the glorification of violence when it issues from an obscure Palestinian official are simply unaware of the multiple proclamations of such a prominent figure as Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party (a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu's governing coalition) and a former Chief Rabbi of Israel's Sephardi Jewish community? "It is forbidden to be merciful to [Arabs]," Yosef was quoted as saying in 2001, Recently, Yosef sermonized that "Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] and all these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians". At any rate, there is in Nurit Peled-Elhanan enough compensation for all the Israeli and Arab extremists out there. [email protected]
