The last ballistic missile from Yemen was shot down not so far from here, and a part of the fuselage, either of the interceptor or the missile, crashed through the roof of a home in a rural community this side of Jerusalem. We didn't hear the booms - maybe they came while the sirens themselves were blaring - as we waited the obligatory ten minutes in our safe room / bunker, which is also the walk-in closet of our bedroom.
We had a curious meeting there with a UK journalist who had been staying in our home overnight and so joined us for the 3 AM "pyjama party".
For some reason the conversation gravitated to a film he had watched, "
Innocence" by the Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi, which is about Israeli militarism in schools.
So yesterday I sent him also the link to an
interview with Ilan Pappé, the anti-zionist israeli historian and academic who has been living for many years in the UK, was interviewed by Al-Jazeera.
I'm not sure how interesting the whole interview is, but in the last part of it, he also speaks about indoctrination of school children. He says that while young American Jews, when they see posts that show the destruction and killing in Gaza, have experienced an upheaval in their views towards Israel, young Israeli Jews remain unaffected by the same information, due to their previous indoctrination.
Al Jazeera: But within Israel, young people also have access to the documentation of the genocide on social media, on platforms like TikTok. But many still disregard Palestinian suffering.
Pappe: They didn’t get the same education as young Jews in America. They got an education from a very indoctrinated country. And that’s the key. They were produced, if you want, engineered by the Israeli education system.
I wrote an article in 1999 warning that, looking at the Israeli curricula, the next graduates of this system would be racist fanatics, extreme and dangerous to themselves and to others. Unfortunately, I was absolutely right.
This is the product of a very indoctrinated society from the cradle to the grave.
You need to re-educate these people. You can’t just show them things and hope that this would move them.
Eyal Sivan, an Israeli filmmaker who has long been living in Europe, once visited us in Neve Shalom - Wahat al-Salam and screened for us his 1991 film, "Izkor: Slaves of Memory". The film shows how this indoctrination works.
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https://vimeo.com/ondemand/izkorengAnd Nurit Peled Elhanan, author of "Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education" once gave a talk to teachers at our primary school, in which, with many examples she showed how propaganda creeps in even on a subtle level.
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Nurit Peled-ElhananThus. though much is made of the
influence of Israel's media in manufacturing consent to the genocidal campaign on Gaza, it has also to be put into the context of the previous indoctrination which all Israelis have received from childhood.
Israelis often complain of a parallel Palestinian indoctrination which leads to radicalisation on their side too. I would argue that a much larger factor in such radicalisation is the reality on the ground. Another amazing old film, "
Arna's Children", by the late Juliano Mer Khamis, shows the multi-generational influence upon Palestinians who have, for example, seen their home destroyed in childhood, on the way their opinions are formed and their likelihood to resist the occupation, sometimes violently.
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