Without
Borders
By Uri Avnery
27 March, 2007
Gush
Shalom
Incredible! In Palestinian schoolbooks,
there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence
of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the "Zionist
gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That's how they poison
the minds of their children!
These blood-curdling revelations
were published this week in Israel and around the world. The conclusion
is self-evident: the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for
the schoolbooks, cannot be a partner in peace negotiations.
What a shock!
Truth is, there is nothing
new here. Every few years, when all the other arguments for refusing
to speak with the Palestinian leadership wear thin, the ultimate argument
pops up again: Palestinian schoolbooks call for the destruction of Israel!
The ammunition is always
provided by one of the "professional" institutions that deal
with this matter. These are foundations of the far-right, disguised
as "scientific" bodies, which are lavishly funded by Jewish-American
multi-millionaires. Teams of salaried employees apply a fine-tooth comb
to every word of the Arab media and schoolbooks, with a pre-ordained
objective: to prove that they are anti-Semitic, preach hatred of Israel
and call for the killing of Jews. In the sea of words, it is not too
difficult to find suitable quotes, while ignoring everything else.
So now it is again perfectly
clear: Palestinian schoolbooks preach hatred of Israel! They are breeding
a new generation of terrorists! Therefore, of course, there can be no
question of Israel and the world ending the blockade on the Palestinian
Authority!
WELL, WHAT about our side?
What do our schoolbooks look like?
Does the Green Line appear
in them? Do they recognize the right of the Palestinians to establish
a state on the other side of our 1967 borders? Do they teach love for
the Palestinian people (or even the existence of the Palestinian people),
or respect for the Arabs in general, or a knowledge of Islam?
The answer to all these questions:
Absolutely not!
Recently, Minister of Education
Yuli Tamir came out with a bombastic announcement saying that she intends
to mark the Green Line in the schoolbooks, from which it was removed
almost 40 years ago. The Right reacted angrily, and nothing more was
heard about it.
From kindergarten to the
last day of high school, the Israeli pupil does not learn that the Arabs
have any right at all to any of this land. On the contrary, it is clear
that the land belongs to us alone, that God has personally given it
to us, that we were indeed driven out by the Romans after the destruction
of our Temple in the year 70 (a myth) but that we returned at the beginning
of the Zionist movement. Since then, the Arabs have tried again and
again to annihilate us, as the Goyim have done in every generation.
In 1936, the "gangs" (the official Israeli term for the fighters
of the Arab Revolt) attacked and murdered us. And so on, up to this
very day.
When he comes out of the
pedagogic mill, the Jewish-Israeli pupil "knows" that the
Arabs are a primitive people with a murderous religion and a miserable
culture. He brings this view with him when he (or she) joins the army
a few weeks later. There, it is reinforced almost automatically. The
daily humiliation of old people and women - not to mention everybody
else - at the checkpoints would not be possible otherwise.
THE QUESTION is, of course,
whether schoolbooks really have that much influence on the pupils.
From earliest childhood,
children absorb the atmosphere of their surroundings. The conversations
at home, the sights on television, the happenings in the street, the
opinions of classmates at school - all these influence them far more
than the written texts of the books, which in any case are interpreted
by teachers who themselves have been subject to these influences.
An Arab child sees on TV
an old woman lamenting the demolition of her home. He sees on the walls
in the street the photos of the martyred heroes, sons of his neighborhood,
who have sacrificed their lives for their people and country. He hears
what has happened to his cousin who was murdered by the evil Jews. He
hears from his father that he cannot buy meat or eggs, because the Jews
are not allowing him to work and put food on the table. At home there
is no water for most of the day. Mother tells about grandpa and grandma,
who have been languishing for 60 years in a miserable refugee camp in
Lebanon. He knows that his family were driven out from their village
in what became Israel and that the Jews are living there now. The hero
of his class is the boy who jumped on a passing Israeli tank, or who
dared to throw a stone from a distance of 10 meters at a soldier who
was pointing a gun at him.
We once went to a Palestinian
village in order to help the inhabitants rebuild a house that had been
demolished the day before by the army. While the adults were working
on finishing the roof, the local children gathered around Rachel, my
wife, showing a keen interest in her camera. The conversation that sprung
up went like this: Where are you from? From America? No, from here.
Are you messihiin (Christians)? No, Israelis. Israelis? (General laughter.)
Israelis are like this: Boom Boom Boom! (They assume poses of shooting
soldiers.) No, really, where are you from? From Israel, we are Jews.
(They exchange looks.) Why do you come here? To help in the work. (Whispers
and laughter.) One of the boys runs to his father: This woman says that
they are Jews. True, the embarrassed father confirmed, Jews, but good
Jews. The children draw back. They look unconvinced.
What can schoolbooks change
here?
And on the Jewish Israeli
side? From the earliest age, the child sees the pictures of suicide
attacks on TV, bodies scattered around, the injured being taken away
in ambulances with blood-curdling shrieks from their sirens. He hears
that the Nazis slaughtered his mother's entire family in Poland, and
in his consciousness Nazis and Arabs become one. On every day's news
he hears bad things about what the Arabs are doing, that they want to
destroy the state and throw us into the sea. He knows that the Arabs
want to kill his brother, the soldier, without any reason, just because
they are such murderers. Nothing about life in "the territories",
perhaps just a few kilometers away, reaches him. Until he is called
up, the only Arabs he meets are Israeli Arab workers doing menial work.
When he joins the army, he sees them only through gun sights, every
one of them of them a potential "terrorist".
For a change in the schoolbooks
to have any value, reality on the ground must change first.
DOES THAT mean that schoolbooks
have no importance? It should not be underestimated.
I remember giving a lecture
in one of the kibbutzim in the late 60s. After I explained the need
for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel (a fairly
revolutionary idea at the time), one of the kibbutzniks stood up and
asked: "I don't understand it! You want us to give back all the
territories that we have conquered. Territories are something real,
land, water. What shall we get in return? Abstract words like "peace"?
What shall we get tachles (Yiddish for practical things)?"
I answered that from Morocco
to Iraq, there are tens of thousands of classrooms, and in every one
of them hangs a map. On all these maps, the territory of Israel is marked
"occupied Palestine" or just left blank. All that we need
is that the name Israel should appear on these thousands of maps.
Forty years have passed,
and the name "Israel" does not appear in Palestinian schoolbooks,
nor, I assume, on any school map from Morocco to Iraq. And the name
"Palestine" does not appear, of course, on any Israeli school
map. Only when the young Israeli joins the army, does he see a map of
"the territories", with its crazy puzzle of Zones A, B and
C, settlement blocs and apartheid roads.
A map is a weapon. From my
childhood in Germany between the two World Wars I remember a map that
was hanging on the wall of my classroom. On it, Germany had two borders.
One (green, if I remember correctly) was the existing border, that was
imposed by the treaty of Versailles after the (first) World War. The
other, marked in glowing red, was the border from before the war. In
thousands of classrooms all over Germany (then governed by Social-Democrats)
the pupils saw every day before their eyes the terrible injustice done
to Germany, when pieces were "torn" from her on every side.
Thus was bred the generation which filled the ranks of the Nazi war
machine in World War II.
(By the way, some fifty years
later I was taken on a courtesy visit to that school. I asked the principal
about that map. Within minutes, it was brought out from the archive.)
NO, I do not make light of
maps. Especially not of maps in schools.
I repeat what I said then:
the aim must be that the child in Ramallah sees before his eyes, on
the wall of his classroom, a map on which the State of Israel is marked.
And that the child in Rishon-le-Zion sees before his eyes, on the wall
of his classroom, a map on which the State of Palestine is marked. Not
by compulsion, but by agreement.
That is, of course, impossible
as long as Israel has no borders. How can one mark on the map a state
which, from its first day, has refused, consciously and adamantly, to
define its borders? Can we really demand that the Palestinian ministry
of education publish a map on which all the territory of Palestine lies
inside Israel?
And on the other hand, how
can one mark on the map the name "Palestine", when there is
no Palestinian state? After all, even most of those Israeli politicians
who profess - at least pro forma - to support the "two-states solution"
will go to great lengths to avoid saying where the border between the
two state should run. Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister, is totally
opposed to the announced intention of her colleague, Minister of Education
Yuli Tamir, to mark the Green Line, lest it be seen as a border.
Peace means a border. A border
fixed by agreement. Without a border, there can be no peace. And without
peace, it is the height of chutzpa to demand something from the other
side that we totally refuse to do ourselves.
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