Palestinian textbooks have always encouraged terror and extolled martyrdom. For example here is a poem from a third grade textbook about dying for the cause of annihilating the Jews in Israel:
The Land of the GenerousI vow I shall sacrifice my blood, to saturate the land of the generous
And will eliminate the usurper from my country, and will annihilate the remnants of the foreigners.
Oh the land of Al-Aqsa and the Haram, oh cradle of chivalry and generosity
Patient, be patient as victory is ours, dawn is emerging from the oppression.
(Our Beautiful Language, Grade 3, Vol. 2, 2016–17, p 64. )
A new academic paper in Settler Colonial Studies by Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter justifies such lessons taught to children – and condemns any attempt by Europe or Israel to eliminate the incitement to terror in such textbooks as a colonialist attack on Palestinian society.
The paper, “Palestinian education and the ‘logic of elimination’“, includes doubletalk like this to condone teaching terrorism (which she whitewashes as “resistance”):
I seek to make it quite clear that what is at stake is not the upholding of values of objectivity and neutrality but rather the desire – which is barely concealed – to disallow or delegitimise Palestinian resistance….
I place Israel’s attempts to control Palestinian education in historical, political and, perhaps most crucially of all, colonial, context. I argue that these interventions are part of a conscious and deliberate attempt to deny the legitimacy of resistance to occupation….
I instead propose to focus upon the question of incitement, with the intention of demonstrating how this links into Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. I suggest that the proposition that Palestinian education should be detached from the material realities of occupation is in many respects a denial of Palestinian narratives of resistance and struggle and, by extension, a denial of the Palestinian right to exist.
Palestinians are required to distort and even disown their history and narrative in the name of ‘peace’….Under these circumstances, ‘peace’ takes on an Orwellian significance and works in the service of an unsustainable status quo.
According to Nasser-Najjab, asking that Palestinians stop teaching kids that their ultimate goal is to die trying to kill Jews is an unacceptable colonialist demand to change pure and holy Palestinian culture.
Which means, of course, that Palestinian culture is to encourage violence and death.
In the disgusting moral universe of today’s Middle East studies, asking people to stop teaching kids to glorify terrorism is a worse crime than the suicide bombings themselves.
This might all sound outrageous and sickening, but the justifications for terror presented as academic research today becomes accepted narrative by politicians and journalists tomorrow.
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