08.07.26

Editorial Note

Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan has been teaching Language Education at the Hebrew University and the David Yellin School of Education. Israel Academia Monitor reported about her many times before. 

She comes from a prominent leftist family and has been a political activist for decades, but in 2010 she attracted broad public attention with her book, Palestine in Israeli. School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. The work claimed that the Israeli educational system, reflecting society at large, is deeply racist. Her comments on Holocaust education in schools were equally harsh. She claimed that Holocaust education creates a siege mentality and hatred toward the “other” that justifies military actions. 

Several Israeli academics criticized the book on epistemological and methodological grounds, with some going so far as to allege that the study reflects a deep ideological bias. Despite this criticism, the book increased her international stature. 

In 1997, her thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed in a terror attack in Jerusalem. To cope with the loss, Peled-Elhanan became a prominent peace activist with the Parents Circle – Families Forum, an organization of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families.  She also pivoted to more general issues of human rights. To recognize her contribution, the European Parliament bestowed the Sakharov Freedom of Thought Prize on her in 2001. She subsequently spoke at World Children’s Day and Women’s Day, which are observed by the European Parliament. “I was invited. They spoke about children who suffer all over the world. They haven’t touched Palestine. And when I asked, ‘Why don’t you speak about Palestine?’ They said, ‘This is another matter.’ They are stricken with fear of antisemitism. They are so afraid to be called antisemites. I told them then, I said, ‘Nobody has ever died of being called antisemitic. Nobody has ever died of being anti-Semite, but so many people and children and newborn babies die because they are called Palestinians. So what are you afraid of?'”

Peled-Elhanan used the 2011 invitations to speak at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, at a conference on “Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict,” to raise the Palestinian issue. In a talk titled “The Educational Stakes,” she explained how “the killing of Palestinians is legitimated as long as you can find some consequences that retrospectively can justify it, by the way, during the raids on Gaza.” She asked, “who would ever blame Judaism or Christianity for the oppression and massive killing of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghan children? who would blame the people who support American, European and Israeli crimes against Muslims all over the world who send their children to fight these ruthless, useless wars in the name of democracy and freedom and excuse themselves with some imaginary Clash of Civilization, the Western world today is infected with fear of Islam.” She continued, “the Jewish democratic state of Israel holds millions of Palestinians hostages because they are not Jewish, however as we know neither Judaism nor Islam nor any other religion for that matter is the cause for the aggression of armies, and the act of Terror committed by those who have no armies although all those killers use religion, and the words of fundamentalist priests and rabbis to justify their crime, the cause for aggression is racism and greed, racist education, imperialism and ruthless regimes of occupation. I know it is a terrible task, terribly hard task for people who were educated in Israel and in the USA or in any other Western Democratic country to admit we were raised on heterophobia, on fear of the other, fear that is enhanced by ignorance and lack of communication.” 

Closer to home, she kept attacking the IDF soldiers. She used a 2007 address to the radical group Mothers in Black to describe the soldiers as “the murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olive [trees] and poisoners of wells… who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism.  These children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger.”  As for their mothers, “they have dedicated their wombs to the apartheid state… and are prepared to sacrifice the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders.”  

Even the brutal Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, did not compel Peled-Elhanan to change her position. She never equivocally denounced Hamas and, soon after, continued to assail Israel. More recently, she returned to criticizing Israeli education. In a recent interview with the radical-leftist 972 Magazine, she told the interviewer that “Israeli education has always been very racist towards Palestinians… They were never depicted as human beings or as a society — their culture, their habits, their customs, their history, their civilization is never taught. They have always been depicted as a problem to be solved, even in the books of what was called “new historians,” where they were mentioned, but mentioned in a racist way.”

Answering a question about Holocaust education, she stated: “From my research, I can say that the purpose of Holocaust teaching in Israel is to traumatize every year, again and again and again, and to create a terrible fear of another Holocaust. We can see it: During the Gulf War, everybody was talking of another Shoah, you know, the book ‘Shoah and the Syndrome.’ And 7th of October, Shoah, everything is Shoah… The Ministry of Education thought of a plan to keep young people inside Israel. That’s what they came up with: to traumatize them and frighten them so much of the outside world that they would stay and be ready to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of others, of course. My conclusion is this is the main function of Holocaust education.”

She added that “I think that state schools and other schools that educate the pilots and all the elite units in the army, who are not less criminal than those little soldiers, pogromists, only differently. Even if you ask people who define themselves as Zionist left, they all admire the army, still. Okay? Even today. Even today. This is the education they got: The army is above judgment.” 

For more than two decades, Israel Academia Monitor has documented how a group of Israeli activist academics contributed to the delegitimization of the Jewish state, undoubtedly contributing to the dramatic rise in antisemitism and antizionism. Nurit Peled-Elhanan exemplifies this phenomenon.  

REFERENCES:

May 28, 2026

https://www.972mag.com/podcast-transcript-how-israeli-classrooms-indoctrinate-jewish-supremacy/

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: How Israeli classrooms indoctrinate Jewish supremacy

Amos Brison

Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Amos Brison, Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host of today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the river and the sea. 

Before we dive in, a quick reminder that what we do would not be possible without you, our readers and listeners. If you believe in our mission and would like to support our work, head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of 972 or make a one-off contribution.

[music] 

Amos Brison

If Palestinians appear in Israeli textbooks at all, they never appear as Palestinians. They appear as “Arabs,” as enemies, as a “demographic threat” — always, in the words of today’s guest, education and language scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, as “a problem to be solved.”

Peled-Elhanan’s research into Israeli textbooks has traced how Palestinians, as well as Israel’s internal “others” — Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews — are represented inside the education system, and how those portrayals shape the moral and political imagination of Israeli society.

These questions have become especially urgent since October 7, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza has exposed what happens when children brought up in an evironment that systematically dehumanizes Palestinians become soldiers, voters, and political leaders.

For Peled-Elhanan, the issue has become personal as well. In the crackdown on dissent that followed the war, she experienced firsthand how the system treats those who challenge its official narratives.

Welcome Nurit.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Hi. 

Amos Brison

I’d like to start with the present. In your view, what role has the Israeli education system played in bringing us to this moment in which Israel is under the leadership of an ultra right-wing, Khanist government that has committed genocide in Gaza? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Well, Israeli education has always been very racist towards Palestinians and, as you said, non-Ashkenazi Jews. Although it’s also racist towards East European Jews, everything that’s “Eastern” is treated in a racist way. We don’t know anything about them, just as we don’t know anything about Mizrahi Jews, Arab Jews, or we don’t know anything about Ethiopians, or we don’t know anything about East European Jews, really, except for the fact that they were exterminated. You cannot find anywhere, any material about these communities — nothing. In the books, they are represented as the problem that the state had to cope with. If you think that today, more than 60% of students are of Mizrahi and Ethiopian origin, how do they feel reading these things? 

But especially Palestinians, of course, this is the most important thing. They were never depicted as human beings or as a society — their culture, their habits, their customs, their history, their civilization is never taught. They have always been depicted as a problem to be solved, even in the books of what was called “new historians,” where they were mentioned, but mentioned in a racist way, Elie Barnavi and so on. 

So I think this is the general attitude that the Palestinians, or they’re never called Palestinians, they’re called Israel’s Arabs or Arabs, are a problem to be solved and we have to solve it. I think a few weeks ago, some of these pogromists said, “You educated us that they are a problem to be solved. So we’re solving it.” He actually said that. I don’t think there is much difference. Of course, today it’s more extreme, it’s more vulgar, it’s more blatant, but the attitude has always been there. 

Amos Brison

In your research, I’ve noticed you pointed to history and geography as two fields that are particularly important for this type of indoctrination. 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

And civic studies, yeah. 

Amos Brison

And civic studies. Can you explain why these fields are so important? Most interestingly, for me, is geography. It’s less intuitive, maybe, and maybe give us some examples. 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Geography is meant in Israel to reproduce or propagate or teach territorial identity. Israeli identity is a territorial identity. The maps and the books are called “The land of Israel,” never the state of Israel. And this is on purpose. All the maps depict the greater land of Israel, not the state of Israel. Even on a map called “The Arabs of Israel,” you don’t have one Arab city on the map. So the feeling is that they live among us, on top of us, which is horrible for Israelis. Not even Nazareth, not even Akko. They are depicted as a burden, as people who refuse modernity, as people who refuse to give anything for the general good. This is a quote from “The Geography of the Land of Israel.” And this is all we know about them, that they are primitive, that they are parasites, and that they don’t live anywhere because we don’t see on the map the places where they live. 

And of course, the settlements, the illegal Jewish settlements in Palestine are presented as part of Israel, part of the state of Israel. There is one map that shows you them. They say that the borders of Israel are temporary borders, and on the map, you see two soldiers that point their guns towards Lebanon and Syria, for example. So all this is geography. You have those graphs, for example, graphs of progress. Progress is being expressed by lesser number of children, by a higher age of marriage. 

Reproduction is an obsession in Israel, as you know, the demography is. So they give you all these graphs and tables of demography. In one graph that was accepted by Human Development — it’s an organization that produces graphs every year — they say that they managed to put Israel as the last one on the list of developed countries, as contrary to non-developed countries. But you have an asterisk telling you that the graph of Israel does not represent the non-Jewish population. It was accepted by this American organization of Human Development. 

Amos Brison

And of course, history education plays a crucial part. I want to quote one thing from one of your papers, “As in other nation states, the main task of Israeli school books is to construct a continuous national narrative in order to construe and consolidate the national identity for all Jewish citizens.”

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Yeah, I mean other countries did the same, like Germany did the same thing, France and so on. We are directly connected to a biblical past. The life of Jews in what is called diaspora was minimized to almost nothing. This ancient past took its place, and we are directly connected to this ancient past and of course to the heroes — Masada, Joshua, biblical Joshua, and so on and so forth. So this creates what Pierre Nora calls the “cult of continuity.” 

Amos Brison

I remember growing up in the Israeli education system that like Bible studies was kind of this in-between place of, is it history, or is it literature, or mythology? I think this confusion may not have been so accidental. 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Of course not. For the secular schools, it is history, yes. 

Amos Brison

What role would you say the Holocaust plays in Israeli education? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Israeli children are educated to “a Holocaust.” Eyal Naveh, in his book, “Past in a Storm,” says that The Holocaust is the main element of Israeli identity, much more than Zionism, for example, or the establishment of an Israeli state. From my research, I can say that the purpose of Holocaust teaching in Israel is to traumatize every year, again and again and again, and to create a terrible fear of another Holocaust. We can see it: During the Gulf War, everybody was talking of another Shoah, you know, the book “Shoah and the Syndrome.” And 7th of October, Shoah, everything is Shoah. 

The sociologist, Julia Resnik, explains that until the 70s, Holocaust studies were not so important. But after the ‘73 war, you know, there was a huge wave of emigration from Israel. People said, “Excuse me, this is not for me.” The Ministry of Education thought of a plan to keep young people inside Israel. That’s what they came up with: to traumatize them and frighten them so much of the outside world that they would stay and be ready to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of others, of course. My conclusion is this is the main function of Holocaust education, because we don’t learn anything about the people. 

The people — except for a few like Anne Frank or Annick Lever — are never presented by their name. They have no biography. They’re completely dehumanized. They are presented as samples of categories. And sometimes you have someone with a story of another or a killing in one place, and if you take seven books, every book tells you it’s another place. It doesn’t matter. As Shmuel Krakowski wrote, “We know so much about the extermination, but we know nothing about the exterminated.” So it is not meant for us to feel or for the children to feel any empathy or mourning. No, it is meant to traumatize them, to make them post-traumatic people who are afraid of anything that is not themselves. This is the main thing. 

Amos Brison

Yeah. I mean, do you see a connection between how Holocaust education shapes Israeli classrooms and how Israeli students are taught to see Palestinians? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Yes, first of all, Palestinians replaced the Germans as the potential exterminators. Ben-Gurion said that he accepts the compensation from Germany in order to defend ourselves against the Nazi Arabs. So they became Nazi, and this is it. Okay, we all want to live in Berlin. But we must have an exterminator in order to justify ourselves. So they became the potential exterminators. This is it. 

There’s a chapter in history books and also in the final exam, the Bagrut, the matriculation, that is called “The Formation of Holocaust Remembrance.” This chapter includes all the terrorist attacks of the Palestinians — decontextualized completely, out of context, as presented in the media always, “suddenly they got up and killed us.” This chapter, after every terrorist attack, there’s the same sentence. “This event proved to the Israelis their vulnerability and their weakness and made them identified with Holocaust survivors.” After every terrorist attack. Then, in the matriculation, you have questions. “Please choose one terrorist attack and tell us how it affected Holocaust remembrance.” So all the time they are conflated. 

Sometimes it’s very blatant, like [Menachem] Begin saw Arafat as the new Hitler. The invasion into Lebanon saved us from another Auschwitz. In one book of Ketzia Tabibian, the terrorist attack of Entebbe, she says that some of the terrorists were Germans and they divided the passengers into Jews and non-Jews, so this is [Joseph] Mengele. All the time you have this conflation between Palestinians and the Nazis. 

Amos Brison

Do you see any space in Israeli classrooms to connect Holocaust memory to any kind of universal ideals of anti-racism or anything like that. 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

The only school that ever did it was Kedma, Kedma School in Shchunat HaTikva, a poverty neighborhood in Tel Aviv. They had a program for Holocaust Day that was called “The Seventh Candle.” So six candles for the six million and seventh candle for all other genocides, for all other sufferers from racism in the world. 

This enraged the authorities. Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. He was furious. He called [Ron] Huldai, [mayor of Tel Aviv] to, I don’t know, to close the school. All kinds of people, I don’t know — [former Education Minister] Limor Livnat is mentioned — told them, “You will not steal our Holocaust with your Moroccan belly dancing.” Ah, because they also played a Hannah Szenes song, “Eli Eli,” as it is sung by a HaBrera HaTiv’it, you know, to a Moroccan rhythm. It’s beautiful what they did. But they said, “You will not steal our Holocaust with the belly dancers.” 

I mean, the whole country was furious. Although some people, especially Holocaust survivors, congratulated them. Yad Vashem adopted the program, but I don’t know if any other school ever adopted it from Yad Vashem. I don’t see any other school doing this. 

Amos Brison

I want to go back a bit to the broader education system in Israel, like the Jewish education system. It’s divided into several streams, right? There’s the state secular, Mamlakhti, state religious, Mamlakhti Dati, and the ultra-Orthodox. I’m not sure if you research all of them, but could you maybe talk about the meaningful differences between them and how Palestinians and others are portrayed? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Today, they’re not portrayed at all. My study ends in 2021, and already in the last few years, you have this very abstract idea of terror and enemy, but they have no name; you don’t know who they are. They become very abstract. I didn’t study Orthodox, although I read the book. I mean, there’s nothing to study there because it is so blatant. You see what I mean? You cannot do any analysis. But I think that state schools and other schools that educate the pilots and all the elite units in the army, who are not less criminal than those little soldiers, pogromists, only differently. Even if you ask people who define themselves as Zionist left, they all admire the army, still. Okay? Even today. Even today.

This is the education they got: The army is above judgment, the army is above criticism, the army is always right, and so on and so forth, doesn’t matter. And if the army does something wrong, it has a good reason. This is how for example, in the 90s, when books did mention massacres like Deir Yassin, like Kfar Qasim, like Qibya, at the end of the chapter, they would always tell you that the far-reaching consequences were good for the Jews. So they wouldn’t tell you, “We went to kill all the people in Qibya because we wanted security.”

No. But at the end of the chapter, they would say reprisals such as, “That in Qibya brought some confidence to Israeli Jews.” You see? And this, even in books of leftist writers like A.L. Naveh. 

Some confidence, okay? So this is called, in discourse analysis, “consequential explanation.” You take the consequences and you turn them into cause. You don’t have to say explicitly, “We went to kill them.” No. But since we did kill them already, the result is good for us. 

For Deir Yassin, for example, they said that the Deir Yassin massacre caused a panic, panicked flight of Israel’s Arabs. Even a moderate person like Weizmann said it was a “miracle.” So this is how the chapter ends. You see? 

Amos Brison

Yeah.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

So even if they describe massacres, at the end of the chapter, you know, it was good for us. And today they don’t describe massacres, they don’t describe anything. But this is very important to know because people always say, “Do they mention the Nakba? They don’t mention the Nakba.” Yes, they do mention the Nakba in the 90s, in the beginning of 2000. But what do they say about the Nakba? They say it was for “the best.” 

Amos Brison

I mean, how do you compare from your research on the Israeli textbooks and the education system more broadly? Do you recognize similar dynamics in other societies and other periods of history? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

I don’t think it’s very different. You know, I lecture all over the world, and whenever I lecture in schools, people start thinking about their own narratives and their own school books, okay? Whether it’s in Italy, where the massacre in Croatia is not mentioned, or in other places. I was in Luxembourg, they started talking about the French. It’s very similar because this is the “raison d’être” [reason for existing] of school books. Why do we need school books? The state needs school books in order to legitimate its controversial acts and to create this myth of continuity. Otherwise, you don’t need school books. So it’s very much alike in other places. 

I think that in Israel, because it has immediate practical consequences of killing people — what you don’t have in other places — I mean, not in Europe. It is so crucial to know what’s going on there, but it’s not very different from other places. No, this patriotism and the fabricated national narrative and the fabricated nationality, the nation, okay? They never mention those who live on the margins of the nation. I have school books from Uzbekistan, where they really depict the Armenians in a horrible way. I know in India now, they changed all school books; they changed them. In Turkey. 

All these school books, they have their pariah, they have what is called their “chosen trauma” from past generations of something horrible that happened and that they impose on present day enemies. I was in Spain now and they said that they don’t learn anything about the Franco era. So also they have this myth of continuity from before. This is the nature of school books. It is the nature of school books. But again, we have very immediate consequences when children say they are a problem to be solved and they go and kill them. 

Amos Brison

Do you think there are maybe warning signs that people can look for if they see an education system or school books that are preparing children to accept things like domination or ethnic hierarchy or even mass violence? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

First of all, I think parents should read what their children study. You should be more involved in this way, okay? Read. Read what they read, read their assignments — read. You have to know what’s going on. Because children, you know, everybody asks me when I lecture in other places, “Why don’t they go to the Internet to verify the truth?” Nobody at the age of 14 or 15 goes to the Internet to verify school material. Couldn’t care less, they want to pass the exam. But because they want to pass the exam, these are the only things they read. They don’t hear anything else. And that’s a point. So I think, really educate parents to do that. Because after that, suddenly you come up with this, you know, these ideas of there are no innocent people in Jenin, there are no innocent babies in Gaza. Where does it come from? 

Amos Brison

Are there examples of societies that successfully reformed curriculum of this kind? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Yes. In Ireland, they did it very nicely. And there are joint books in Korea and Japan, and also in France and Germany. But teachers are not very satisfied because the Holocaust is all but gone from these books, you know. Something like Germany was not so nice to France and France was not so nice to Germany and the economy suffered terribly, something like that. When I was in Luxembourg, the teachers said that it was “unacceptable: and they would take the children on their own to Auschwitz and so on and teach them the Holocaust. 

But yes, there are, there are times all the time. There’s also here, you know, learning the narrative of the other. This was written by teachers themselves, with the guidance of a Palestinian professor and Israeli professor. You have on one side the Palestinian narrative, on one side the Israeli narrative. Needless to say, in Israel, they don’t allow this into schools. The Palestinian Ministry of Education allowed it as a project, you know, for two or three weeks. There’s one school in Israel that taught it, Sha’ar Negev, but then they felt an urge to tell the whole world, and it was banned. 

My students, even, I used to give it to them as exercise, you know? They said, “No, no, no, we’re not touching it. We’re not touching it.” So there was this. Van Leer has a series of the two narratives, and it’s very, very telling what happens there. For example, in the Van Leer series, the attitude of the Palestinian historian who writes to Israeli casualties and the attitude of the Israeli historian to Palestinian casualties are the same. They practically don’t mention them. They mentioned their own, and then they say, “On the other side, there were some casualties and so on.” 

I think that for research purposes, to give it to teachers and to see how these things work is very important. 

Amos Brison

So you mentioned the Palestinian education system. Well, For decades, it’s been demonized by Israeli officials, supposedly perpetuating rejection of Israel’s right to exist, supporting Palestinian refugees’ right of return, preparing children for war against Israel. Want to ask how you view this position and what do these critics leave out? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

First of all, this is not my specialty. The main expert on this is Dr. Samira Elayan, who studies the Palestinian educational system for years now, wrote a very important book about education in East Jerusalem. What I know I know from her study and then all the books of the Palestinian Authority are on the internet. You can read them in English. 

The Palestinian textbooks are monitored and censored constantly, directly by Israel and indirectly by people who work for Israel, like the European Parliament and World Bank and all this. So even if they wanted to write what you said, they couldn’t. So it’s a lie. It’s a sheer lie. The first edition of Palestinian textbooks was in the beginning of the 2000s, and it was after Oslo, and they wanted very much to write it in the spirit of Oslo. So there is a map of Israel, and there is a whole chapter about Jewish scholars and Jewish heroes and so on and so forth. 

What we don’t have. Since nothing happened, you know, in 2018, they published a new version, and this new version is much more nationalistic. They’re out about the colonies, they say the word occupation, and so on, but there’s nothing which is not true. Now, there is this terrible organization called IMPACT, that disguises itself as an academic organization because they rented a room in the university, but they are not an academic organization. No journal ever publishes anything they do, but they have a lot of money and a lot of influence. I don’t know why. 

All these years, because I have the Sakharov Prize, I visit the European parliament a lot. And every time I come, I speak to people, “You have to monitor the Israeli system, not only the Palestinian one,” and this is the first time that I have an invitation to come to UNESCO and speak about it. But once, after this impacted people, I don’t know what they said, the parliament wanted to stop the budget, the educational budget for the Palestinian Authority. Samira and I were summoned urgently and we saved it. 

I mean, we saved the budget because we proved that they’re lying. They’re just lying. Everything they say is a sheer lie, because as I told you, even if they wanted to, they cannot. Now in East Jerusalem, for example, they study the books of the Palestinian Authority, but with the monitoring and censorship of the Israeli Ministry of Education. So the children receive books with blank pages, like you have a title, Palestinian nationality, and then three blank pages. They also erased the symbol of the Palestinian Authority from the cover and many, many paragraphs inside.

For example, when they speak of nationality, they put something about Zionism and, I mean, they intervene with the content of the books. There is no way Palestinians can do anything against it, because otherwise they will not receive the budget. Of course, there is written material that comes not from the Ministry of Education, you know, just like we have. We have this horrible book called Derech HaMelech that says…

Amos Brison

Torat HaMelech. 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Yeah, “You can kill enemy babies and rape enemy women,” but it doesn’t come from the Ministry of Education. It comes from all kinds of rabbis who maybe have more influence, but it’s not the Ministry of Education. So we studied, Samira studied, and I studied, only the authorized books, those who go to schools. 

Amos Brison

The European Union published a major study in 2021 about the textbooks, the official textbooks of the Palestinian Authority. 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Right.

Amos Brison

And whether they adhere to standards of peace, tolerance, and nonviolence. Why have there not been any comparable studies of Israeli textbooks? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

I cannot answer you that. I know that one day there was a “the child’s day,” “day of the child,” something in the European Parliament, I was invited. They spoke about children who suffer all over the world. They haven’t touched Palestine. And when I asked, “Why don’t you speak about Palestine?” They said, “This is another matter.” They are stricken with fear of antisemitism. They are so afraid to be called antisemites. I told them then, I said, “Nobody has ever died of being called antisemitic. Nobody has ever died of being anti-Semite, but so many people and children and newborn babies die because they are called Palestinians. So what are you afraid of?” 

But of course, there are other things. I mean, I’m not that naive. There are all these countries that are implicated in the occupation and have all kinds of agreements with Israel and so on and so forth. It’s economical. But they don’t touch the subject. I told you, this invitation that I have from UNESCO is the first time ever. It’s much easier to slander Palestinians than to really criticize Israeli education. 

Amos Brison

Yeah. So recently, our education minister, Yael Kish, reportedly tried to bury poor test results by Israeli students in English, Hebrew, and science. He ordered the Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education to stop publishing reports pending review. What does this reveal about the state of the education system, and do you see a link between this and the political indoctrination that you research? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Of course, of course, of course, of course. I mean, these people, they are all, you know, they lie. They have this ideology — fascist ideology — at any cost. About 10 years ago, we were the last in the OECD tests in every measure except poverty. Ok? It’s not new. Israel has been at the bottom of the ladder for years. It’s getting worse all the time, of course, because they are busy with heritage and nationalism and all these things. They encourage, if you have ignorant youngsters, they would do whatever. I mean, they’ll be good soldiers, let’s say. Okay. They’ll obey anything. 

You can infect their minds with any virus you want if they know nothing, especially if they don’t know any other language. This is very, very encouraging. A lot of programs are being written by teachers, they don’t use the books anymore. But it’s a long and very hard battle. 

Amos Brison

Haaretz recently reported on a secretive unit tied to the Education Ministry that monitors teachers who criticize the government or the war. I want to tie in a bit your story here because you yourself were suspended in 2023, not long after October 7th, from David Yellin College, for comments you made in a faculty WhatsApp group. You later resigned, citing political persecution. How do you understand this campaign against teachers and academics? How do you view it impacting education in Israel going forward? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

First of all, I was not suspended. I resigned. The president of the college wanted to suspend me, but there are procedures which he didn’t want to follow, and the management told him, the administration told him, “You cannot do it.” I believe that his lawyers also told him you cannot do it. What happened was that there is a sociologist in the Hebrew University called Gad Yair, and after the 7th of October, he published two videos. One explained why Hamas are Nazis, and one with an explicit plan of “Nakba Two.” There was this WhatsApp group where I have never participated in my life, but I read what they say. And a lot of teachers said, “Yes, they are Nazis,” and so on and so forth. 

I decided to react, but I didn’t know it would be so, you know, scandalous. I explained why Hamas are not Nazis, because Nazis were a state with an army that dominated helpless minorities and exterminated them, and this is not the relationship between us and Hamas — thank god. They don’t dominate us and we are not helpless minorities, and so on. Then I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre, from an introduction that he wrote to Franz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth,” where he says, “After years and years that your heel was pressing his neck and you released your leg, your foot from his neck and allow him to look at you, what kind of look do you think you’d find in his eyes?” And I said, this is the look we saw on the 7th of October. 

Now this group is closed. The administration has no right to go in, but there were two teachers, I know who they are, who rushed and told the president. He wrote me a letter immediately, saying that he wants to suspend me until the hearing. As I told you, other administration people told him, “This is not the way to do it. You don’t decide on your own. There is a procedure and so on.” And his lawyer says the same, so he let it go. I said, “I’m not coming to any hearing.” He said, “Ok, instead of suspension, I will put a letter in your file saying that you justify the massacre and you support terrorism.” I said, “Ok, if you put this finally in this letter in my file, then I quit.” And I quit. The good thing was that the teachers were appalled, and so they decided to write an ethic code for the college that will specify the rights of the administrations and the rights of the teachers. So something good came out of it. For me, it was a way to say goodbye. 

Amos Brison

And enjoy retirement. 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

And enjoy my retirement, yeah. 

Amos Brison

Do you think there’s like any room inside Israeli education institutions for dissenting voices at this point? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Yeah, there are many private schools, democratic schools and dialogic schools, and all these schools where they can do that, yeah. 

Amos Brison

Yeah. How much of an impact do they have at this point? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Nothing. But I don’t think you should judge people’s actions by their impact on the system. Because we know that all the good organizations starting from Breaking the Silence and Yesh Din and the Families Forum and Standing Together, all these wonderful organizations, have no political representation. So what? They are creating a certain alternative world where these things are happening. This is all we can do. We can live in our small alternative world. 

Amos Brison

And maybe to close, after everything you’ve studied and lived through, what would a truly different education system look like between the River and the Sea, as we say? And what would it take to reach there, if it’s possible? 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Today it’s not possible, but again, it can be a private one. I think a joint narrative should be written. A narrative of the 100-200 years in this place. Yes, of everybody who lives here. I think it should include literature and poetry and architecture and agriculture and joint initiatives and really tell the children the story of the place. Because in Israel, we have this complex that we belong in Europe and not in the Middle East. So we don’t know anything about the Middle East. We don’t study anything about the Middle East. Turn the Middle East into the cradle of civilization instead of a place that should be feared and conquered. 

I’ll tell you that in 2009, I had this idea with a Palestinian professor, Sami Adwan, and we asked for volunteers to come and start writing this joint narrative. People came from all over the country — there was such a response, I couldn’t believe it. I think there is a chance to do something like that. To know where you live and to like where you live, because today nobody likes the place. I mean, they all declare, “we love, we love, we love.” They don’t love anything. They’re scared. So this can be a very nice, you know, solution.

It will not be in an instant, but if you have something to offer, maybe someone will take it up. But of course you cannot expect something out of the blue to affect the whole country. Education takes time, a long time. You see, the education Israel is giving — racist, belligerent, aggressive, and so on — also took time and sophistication. So counter-education, of course, will take time, a lot of time. 

Amos Brison

Thank you, Nurit.

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https://eaford.org/site/assets/files/1132/israeli_mother_addresses_the_european_parliament.pdf

  Israeli Mother Addresses the European Parliament By Nurit Peled-Elhanan 

Dear Friends Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit’s speech made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg on March 2005. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honor and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament). However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R`aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family’s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder. When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized. I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars. It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA. This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb. Great France of “la liberte egalite et la fraternite” is scared of little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat. Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew. I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour; I don’t know the kind of violence that turns a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished, who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal. But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children. Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses, though they may have various illustrious names-such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland-are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful. We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homorganic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers… Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.` All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies. And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers. I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals.. Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes. Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields. I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova – another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children – asked: Why does that streak of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?  

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In the State of Israel, the Jewish Mother is Disappearing

In the State of Israel, the Jewish Mother is Disappearing

By Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Address at the 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Jerusalem, 28 December 2007Nurit Peled Elhanan

I thank Women in Black for inviting me to speak here today. At this moment, I would like to dedicate my words to the children of the Gaza Strip, who are withering slowly from hunger and disease, and to their mothers, who continue to bring children into the world, to feed and to educate them wonderfully. The rate of literacy in the Gaza Strip today stands at 92% – among the highest in the world, and all that in the most terrible concentration camp on earth, the residents of which are being strangled as the civilized world looks on in silence.

I wish we could celebrate today the conclusion of the activities of Women in Black. But the truth is that their activities are becoming harder every day. In a state in which the gods of death and money rule, in a state where the economy is flourishing while the children are hungry, where the mythological heroes are fearless murderers, where the leaders openly and publicly admit that human life is not worth a fig in their eyes, in a state that sends its sons to be killed without even bothering to invent a reason for it, in a state that imprisons millions of human beings in ghettoes and enclosures and kills them slowly, the persistent quiet voice of Women in Black is the strongest conscientious voice of refusal. Women in Black are an example and paragon of refusal to worship the god of death, refusal to obey the racist laws of the State of Israel. The activity of Women in Black is itself a rejection of racist education and the routine, systematic poisoning of minds that sustain the schools, the media, and the speeches of the nation’s elected representatives.

In the state of Israel, the Jewish mother is facing extinction. The Jewish mother of today is closed off in neighborhoods like Mea Shearim[1], where the mothers protect their children from the army, but outside those neighborhoods the voice of the Jewish mother is not heard except in organizations like Women in Black, which society at large condemns and vilifies. The state of Israel condemns and vilifies the voice of the Jewish mother, which is the voice of compassion, tolerance, and dialogue. The state of Israel does all it can to ensure that this voice will be muted and silenced forever.

Outside the peace organizations, which are considered by the public to be marginal sleepwalkers and extreme leftists, the voice of the Jewish mother ceased long ago to be a maternal voice. The Israeli mother as she exists today embodies a motherhood that is distorted, lost, confused, and sick. The Jewish mothers like Yocheved, the mother of Moses; like Rachel, who wept for her children and refused to be comforted; like Mother Courage; the mother who cannot find solace and healing in the death of the children of another mother, have been replaced by mothers who are nothing but golems that have turned on their creators and are more terrible and cruel than they, who dedicate their wombs to the apartheid state and the occupation army, who educate their children in unmitigated racism and are prepared to sacrifice the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders’ megalomania, greed, and bloodthirstiness. These mothers are also to be found among the teachers and the educators of our day. And only the women who stand here week after week, in the rain and the sun, they are the one and only reminder that the voice of the other motherhood, the natural one, has not completely disappeared from the face of this wasteland that had once been the Holy Land..

Few are the parents in Israel who admit to themselves that the murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olives, and poisoners of wells are none other than their own beautiful sons and daughters, their children who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. The children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbors, the gentiles, children who were brought up in the fear of Islam – a fear that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass murderers. And not only do those boys and girls kill and torment; they do so with the full support of Mom, with the full appreciation of Dad, encouraged by this entire nation, which does not so much as raise an eyebrow at the death of children, of the old and disabled. A nation that rallies around pilots who do not feel a thing except a bump on the wing when they drop bombs on entire families and crush them to death.[2]

In this hell in which we live, in the daily inferno under which stirs and grows the underground kingdom of dead children, the role of Women in Black, the mothers and grandmothers who stand at this square and in similar squares all over the world, is to be the guardian of sane, natural motherhood, and to ensure that its voice is not silenced and does not disappear from the face of the earth. To remind a world that has lost its humanity that we were all made in the image of God; consistently and tirelessly to say that still, despite the apartheid wall, despite the cruel siege of Gaza, despite the wars without cause, and in the face of the fury of the rulers of this country, all of whom down to the last one are criminals against humanity, the voice of women and mothers – the voice of compassion, justice and hope – will not be silenced. More power to you.

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[1] An ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, most of whose residents do not recognize the State of Israel and most of whom do not serve in the Israeli armed forces.

[2] The reference is to Israeli air force pilot and former IDF Chief-of-Staff Dan Halutz, who, when asked by a journalist – shortly after the Israeli air force dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in the Gaza Strip killing fifteen civilians – what he felt as a pilot when he dropped a bomb, replied, “I feel a slight bump on the wing when the bomb is released.”

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education at Hebrew University, lost her daughter in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Nurit turned her grief into a quest for justice – the end of the Israeli occupation, which she considers the reason for her daughter’s death, and the uprooting of racism from Israeli schools.