Teachers discussed “what to do when students say ‘Death to Arabs’ – which they do frequently – and we gave each other the benefit of our experience. We talked about giving the students the knowledge they lack – such as, what is Hamas, what is the West Bank? These things should be part of the subjects they are taught.”
Above: Jewish right-wing neo-facsists in Tel Aviv last month
Ha'aretz reports:
…Groups of teachers have gotten together in various parts of the country to work on the issue of racism at the beginning of the school year. Last week, at a meeting in Jerusalem, two groups – Tnuat Hamorim and Hameorer – handed out lesson plans on racism, filling what they say is a void left by the Education Ministry.
Rani Hazon Weiss, a teacher at the Givat Gonen High School in the capital and a member of the leadership of Tnuat Hamorim, who took part in the meeting in Jerusalem, said the subject of racism is not a new one at her school, where some of the students are members of La Familia, an extremist group of fans of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team. “I saw many teachers trying to deal with the same problems, and so we decided to meet so we, the teachers, would have someone to talk to,” she said.
Weiss said a representative of the Education Ministry came to talk to one of the groups, which she considered very important. At that meeting, she said, the teachers discussed “what to do when students say ‘Death to Arabs’ – which they do frequently – and we gave each other the benefit of our experience. We talked about giving the students the knowledge they lack – such as, what is Hamas, what is the West Bank? These things should be part of the subjects they are taught.”…
If you don't know or understand the other side's narrative and the complaints it has about what your group has done, you have a very high likelihood of being right-wing and adopting racist and/or fascist views, because it it is much easier for you to demonize the other side.
Israel's political right-wing and Zionist Orthodoxy use this method of indoctrination to breed a generation of loyal followers – not to cause those followers to be racist or fascist, but to cause them to accept the right-wing narrative that gives Jews the right to all of biblical Israel and Mandatory Palestine.
In the same way, some left-wing groups fail to teach the right-wing's narrative or explain its historical grievences against the left.
Lost in all of this is what Israel's Arab Muslim and Arab Christian minorities have to say about their lives, how the majority treats them in everyday life, and what their historical grievances are.
And also lost in all this is the narrative and grievances of Palestinians, whose own educational systems are themselves full of these same problems exponentially squared, systems that actually teach little children to hate Jews and relish killing them.
None of this bodes well for Israel's future or for the future of the region.