For several generations, Jewish-Israeli children have been brought up in an education system where Palestinians rarely appear as Palestinians, but rather as “Arabs,” “enemies,” and a “demographic threat.” In the words of scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, they appear above all as “a problem to be solved” — stripped of a social, cultural, and historical life of their own.
In textbooks, the “Land of Israel” replaces the State of Israel; Palestinian life is erased from view; and modern Zionist history is tied directly to the biblical past, with millennia of Jewish life in the diaspora almost entirely removed. Holocaust memory, meanwhile, is mobilized to produce a sense of permanent existential fear.
The result, Peled-Elhanan argues, is an education system that teaches occupation, ethnic hierarchy, and state violence as natural and necessary facts of life.