American Jewry's hypocritical silence about Israeli apartheid:
One of the premises of modern Israeli education is its fantastic ethnocentrism and racism: to highlight "Israeli democracy" without even mentioning the Palestinians! Hypocritical American Jews, in the vanguard of expanding multiculturalism in America, overwhelmingly support Jewish apartheid in their Zionist nation.]
Operation Brainwashing,
By Gideon Samet, Haaretz (Israel), September 10, 2003
"Like the defense establishment, the Israeli education system can't complain about the deep cuts into its slice of the national pie. It is still one of the world's highest budgeted educational systems proportionate to the budget and the GDP. It has maintained that level even as the local welfare society and its counterparts internationally have absorbed body blows from the rules of unfettered capitalism. Those who should be complaining are the clients for education, the hundreds of thousands of households that are getting a flawed product from one of the most important services, which must maintain its level even in this brutal age of neoconservatism. In a multilayered crisis, education has become another sphere of bad judgment. Regrettably, there's a plethora of evidence for this. This time, boys and girls, we'll only talk about what the Education Ministry prepared to broaden your knowledge base, which has so shamefully declined, with ever growing black holes that threaten to turn the chosen people, starting in first grade, into a society of sheer ignoramuses. This ignorance is not the invention of the snootily refined. "We are ashamed of the ignorance of the pupils of Israel," said Prof. Yaakov Katz, chairman of the ministry's own pedagogical secretariat. "Children don't know the anthem, can't recognize the flag or identify Herzl." It's insulting, Katz added mournfully, to live like that. As often happens in the twilight zones of state authorities, the type of solution Katz proposed is most apparently part of the problem. The learned Prof. Katz led a team that for a full year prepared the list of "the 100 concepts for junior high school." And what a folly it is ... [T]he root of the problem is the composition of the list and what isn't - and can't be - among the meager 100, which range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Katz said the team included the ministry's supervisor of Arabic education. Alongside phrases like "man was created in the image of God" (and the Human Rights Treaty), missing is any concept at all of a fifth of the citizens of the state [Arabs]. Didn't Ali Assad, the supervisor, propose any? Did they erase his choices? There is a cacophony of Judaism and what Prof. Katz and his team understand as "Israeli democracy," one of the three chapters in this disgraceful document (the others are Jewish heritage and Zionism). From the difference between the new moon and the full moon, mourning days and fast days, the superficial mantra of the "Jewish bookshelf," with a poor sampling of sayings of the sages, the sin of the spies, the Egoz Moroccan refugee ship (but no mention of the "Exodus") - all the way to MKs, courts, the symbol of the state, the flag, ombudsman and more sawdust from the carpentry shop of Limor Livnat, who recited "a child can not grow up in the country without knowing these concepts" at the inaugural ceremonies for the list. In short, there's nothing there except the same old blather that already fills the Education Ministry. A list of knowledge can't be just an empty beginning of what's promised to fill it. There is nothing about the culture of the world, as if Katz and his colleagues didn't want to trouble the already weak minds of the pupils with another chapter. The missing items - and if such a project is undertaken, then there are at least 200-300 missing to reach a reasonable level - kept out entire chapters of the state's history. And there's no mention of the Palestinians. Actually, the list just raises the banner of ignorance even after making you recite who and what was Rabbi Kook, Hannah Senesh, the Jewish National Fund, Yad Vashem, the President, the National Insurance Institute and even the State. The baseless shrinking and twisting of the list is obviously evidence of the opposite of what its creators declared. The best that can be said in the defense of its creators is that maybe they were not entirely aware that "Operation Knowledge" was a basic effort to brainwash, not enrich, the pupils. The only enlightening thing in this list is that it was so shamefully unenlightened." |
