Richard L.

Cravatts, PhD: Politicizing High

School Education While Demonizing Israel
Keeping Track of the Other Side
By Richard L. Cravatts
November 17, 2011
Source: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)
The news that a Newton South High School student was alarmed when she received
what appeared to her to be blatant anti-Israel propaganda from her World History
teacher brings to the forefront once again the reality that, even at the pre-college level,
the narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is frequently contorted to reflect ideology
rather than history, scholarship, and fact.
The high schools World History teacher, Jessica Engel, had given a student a section on
Palestinian women from the Arab World Notebook, which described the fact that Over
the past four decades, women have been active in the Palestinian resistance
movement. What was their treatment at the hands of the brutal Jewish state, for doing
nothing more than resisting? Several hundred have been imprisoned, tortured, and
killed by Israeli occupation forces since the latest uprising, Intifada, in the Israeli
occupied territories.
The problem with this type of simplistic analysis as part a history curriculum, of course,
is that it presents a one-sided, highly-biased view of the facts on the ground in Israel
and the West Bank and Gaza, completing ignoring some critical aspects of the conflict,
namely, that resistance is a euphemism for terrorism, and that when Palestinian
women are detained and arrested by Israeli defense forces it is a result of their actions
as part of a campaign to murder Jews and extirpate Israel.
In fact, the Arab World Notebook, the teaching tool used by Ms. Engel for this class, has
already been discredited as a legitimate part of any history curriculum, precisely
because it has it its primary purpose to whitewash the negative aspects of Arab and
Muslim history while simultaneously assigning blame for the regions pathologies on the
colonialism, imperialism, the West, and Israel specifically. A 2005 report on theArab
World Studies Notebook written by the American Jewish Committee, for example,
Propaganda, Proselytizing, and Public Education, found that while the purported intent
of the publication was to create sympathetic views of the Arabs and Muslim religion in
the American classroom, the end product of the guide was to present historical
distortion as well as uncritical praise, whitewashing, and practically proselytizing. More
relevant to the recent incident in Newton, the skewed view of the history and presentday politics of the Middle East as outlined in the guide appears largely designed to
advance the anti-Israel and propagandistic views of the Notebooks sponsors, the Middle
East Policy Council and Arab World and Islamic Resources.

While the Notebook pays lips service to presenting different points of view, the report
concluded, it provides only an Arab perspective on Jerusalem, the Arab-Israeli
conflict, and the conflict between Western and traditional Muslim values.
Teaching history with a political or ideological agenda, of course, does not make for true
education, precisely because it does not put issues into context, distorts movements
and ideologies, and uses events and facts selectively to insure that one interpretation of
history, and only one, is taught to impressionable students.
For instance, one of those women active in the Palestinian resistance movement that
the Notebook so adoringly refers to, Ahlam Tamimi, is actually about to be released from
prison as part of the grotesque exchange of some 900 terrorists for kidnapped Israeli
soldier Gilad Shalit. The Hamas-recruited, unrepentant, psychopathic Tamimi, who was
responsible for the 2001 bombing of the Sbarrro pizzeria in Jerusalem in which fifteen
Israeli men, women, and children were killed and 107 wounded, recently appeared on
TV and was asked whether she felt regret for having murdered innocent civilians while
they ate pizza. No, she boasted, Why should I feel sorry? Asked in the interview if
she would repeat her murderous actions again she unhesitatingly asserted, Yes. I do
not regret what I did, Tamimi had also ghoulishly proclaimed in a 2006 interview.
The AJC report also found that the Notebook consistently distorts facts, applies the
inappropriate and invidious paradigm of colonialism, and brings emotion-laden poetry
and short stories of victimization as the predominant voice of Palestinian culture. One of
the writers critiqued in the report, for example, is the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud
Darwish, whose poem, Identity Card, is included in the Notebook, and ends with the
genocidal lines, The usurpers flesh will be my food/Beware-beware-of my hunger/and
my anger! Whether Darwishs cannibalistic references to consuming Israeli flesh-that
is, murdering Jews as a necessary and inevitable by-product of the so-called occupation
of Muslim lands-is appropriate, or even relevant, content for a history class may be
debated; but it certainly suggests how history can be inverted to suit the ambitions of
ideologues promoting one point of view in which Israelis are oppressive, brutal, inhuman murderous occupiers and thieves, and Palestinians are guiltless victims who
passively resist an unjust occupation by an insidious Zionist regime eager to spill Arab
blood.
North American college campuses are also currently infected with this same radical antiSemitism and anti-Israelism, promulgated by the identical strain of politicized history
and propagandathat animates the Arab Studies Notebook. One would hope that a new
generation of high school and college graduates-who enter the world as journalists,
politicians, diplomats, professors, even parents-would not have been poisoned during
their education with distortions about Israel and its history, that young people do not
learn about the Middle East by seeing only one side of history and leave school
despising, distrusting, and vilifying a nation for no other reason than it happens to be
lived in by Jews.