NEWS
The Israeli school system: a factory of the enemy
Academic research
The facts
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Professor Emerita of Language Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of Palestine in Israeli School Books (I.B. Tauris, 2012), has systematically documented how the Israeli state school system — both secular and religious — presents Palestinians as a problem to be eliminated. From primary school through secondary education, historical massacres of Palestinians are framed as "events with positive outcomes for Jews". The teaching of the Holocaust, according to the researcher, is not designed to generate universal empathy but to traumatise students and feed fear of the other — to the point where Palestinians come to occupy the symbolic place of European persecutors. "Ben-Gurion said he would accept reparations from Germany to defend us from the Nazi Arabs. So Palestinians became our potential exterminators."
Legal comment
The research documents a state educational system producing the systematic dehumanisation of a national group. Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Art. III includes among punishable acts "direct and public incitement to commit genocide". When such incitement is structured into a state school curriculum — not as an individual episode but as educational policy — responsibility is not merely individual criminal responsibility but State responsibility under ARSIWA arts. 40-41. The State is answerable for the systemic conditions it creates.
Implications
Ben Gvir's statements, the ICC warrants, the use of white phosphorus — none of these facts emerge from nowhere. They emerge from decades of forming a generation that was never taught to recognise Palestinians as human beings. A soldier trained from childhood to regard the other as "a problem to be solved" does not carry out illegal orders by conscious choice: he does so because the educational system of his State never gave him the moral tools to refuse them. This is the context the international community has a duty to consider when assessing the responsibility of the State of Israel.
Sources: Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Palestine in Israeli School Books, I.B. Tauris 2012 · +972 Magazine
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