How many ways can the Guardian legitimize the defamation that Zionism is Racism?
The infamous UN Resolution (3379), passed in 1975, claiming that Zionism is an inherent form of Racism may have been repealed in 1991 but the ideological influence of the notorious document – inspired by a cynical alliance between Arab and Soviet-Bloc states – clearly lives on in the ideological orientation of Guardian editors, commentators, and reporters.
In the past week alone, they’ve posted essays and reports which have advanced, or at least legitimized, characterizations of the Jewish state as “colonial”, “apartheid”, “racialist”, “exclusivist“, and “supremacist“, and provided a platform to an extremist who is on record morally justifying the murder of innocent Israeli teenagers and expressing enthusiasm at the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons raining down on Israel.
Most recently, the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood, was able to find, and uncritically quote, an Israeli academic characterizing Israel as a “supremacist” state which treats Palestinians as slaves.
The remark was made by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, in Academic claims Israeli school textbooks contain bias (Guardian, Aug. 7th), about incitement in school textbooks in the region.
Peled-Elhanan, during the course of explaining to Sherwood that the biggest problem in the region in not, as most believe, the PA Education System’s systematic inculcation of their students with hostility towards Israel but, rather, Israel’s racist depiction of Arabs, is quoted as explaining suicide bombing as “the direct consequence of the oppression, slavery, humiliation and state of siege imposed on the Palestinians.”
Sherwood’s Israeli academic also supports the academic boycott against Israel, supports the “Right of Return” of Palestinians to Israel and has called the Jewish state “immutably racist” - that is, racist by its very definition.
In other words, she’s the Guardian’s favorite kind of Israeli: citizens of the state who revel in leveling the most incendiary, baseless charges to the Western left – often to the point of denying their own nation’s very moral legitimacy.
What Peled-Elhanan tells Sherwood about the issue of incitement in textbooks, it turns out, is quite similar to what she told Kelly James Clark in an interview posted at Israel-Academia Monitor, that “Israeli text books are using stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims that incite Israelis to war and wanton murder of Palestinian.”
When challenged by Clark, all Peled-Elhanan could provide was the allegation that Palestinians are never portrayed as a doctor or teacher, only, she claims, racist icons. When pressed to cite examples of such “racist icons”, Peled-Elhanan could only cite two: one cartoon displaying an Arab riding a camel and another as a primitive farmer.
And, in her interview with Sherwood, other than broad charges that Israelis are inculcated with the belief that Palestinians are people “whose life is dispensable with impunity”, there is no specific example provided, nor a source cited and, most remarkably, Peled-Elhanan denies to Sherwood (as she did to Clark) that Palestinian textbooks promote hate, intolerance, and violence:
“Asked if Palestinian school books also reflect a certain dogma, Peled-Elhanan claims that they distinguish between Zionists and Jews. “They make this distinction all the time. They are against Zionists, not against Jews.” [emphasis mine]
So, we should no doubt take comfort that Palestinians don’t inculcate their children with hatred for Jews, merely against the more than six million Israeli (Zionist) Jews and, presumably, their supporters abroad.
Indeed, had Sherwood attempted to check the veracity of claims made the radical academic, she may have come across a detailed research by The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE), - an organization which reviews textbooks from Israel, the Arab world and Iran.
IMPACT-SE just unveiled its 2011 report on PA school textbooks, at a press conference in Jerusalem which Sherwood must have missed, which reviewed 118 textbooks currently used in Palestinian schools – 71 of which are for students in grades one through 12, and 25 that are taught in religious schools in the West Bank and issued by the PA Ministry of Wakf and Religious Affairs.
- There is generally a total denial of the existence of Israel…in geography textbooks, Israel usually does not appear in maps of the Middle East, instead “Palestine” is shown to encompass Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Jaffa is also shown on maps of Palestine, but Tel Aviv and other predominantly Jewish cities, such as Ramat Gan, kibbutzim and moshavim, are not displayed.
- Palestinian textbooks include many references to martyrdom, death, jihad and refugees returning to cities and towns in Israel – and frequently demonize Israelis and Jews
- Other textbooks told students that “the rank of shahid stands above all ranks,” and included a Muslim hadith about the destruction of Jews by Muslims on the day of the resurrection, which also appears in the Hamas charter.
Peled-Elhanan, during the course of being interviewed by Clark at Israel-Academic Monitor, when asked about such incitement, dismissed it thusly:
“Palestinian education cannot be racist because it is so controlled and monitored by the world, even if they wanted to.”
What precisely such an argument even means is impossible to discern.
But, as Clark said about his interview with Peled-Elhanan:
“Even by the standard of critical scholarship, Peled-Elhanan writings stand out as an extreme example of using scholarship to support a political agenda.”
And, even by the standards of the Guardian, the degree and volume of hate directed against Israel, which has been published and legitimized in the paper over the past week, standout as an extreme example of using the veneer of journalism to support an extreme ideological agenda.
- Are Israeli textbooks racist? (Elder of Ziyon)
- Israel fires back at Harriet Sherwood (cifwatch.com)
- On the Guardian’s sanctimony over Jerusalem Post’s apology to Norway: pot kettle black (cifwatch.com)
- Another in the series: Where in the world is Harriet Sherwood? (cifwatch.com)
- Harriet Sherwood’s talent for avoiding use of term “terrorist” when characterizing Palestinians who’ve murdered Israeli civilians (cifwatch.com)
- Harriet Sherwood’s shocking report! Israel detains Palestinians who, umm, riot and commit acts of violence (cifwatch.com)
- Harriet Sherwood’s tastes in anti-Israel propaganda (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian or Gaza TV News? Harriet Sherwood continues to run interference for Hamas apologists (cifwatch.com)
- 15 seconds in Sderot: An open letter to Harriet Sherwood, the Guardian’s Jerusalem, Israel correspondent (cifwatch.com)
- Where in the world was Harriet Sherwood? Well beyond the 3 nautical mile limit from Gaza coast (cifwatch.com)
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
10 comments
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August 8, 2011 at 9:23 am
moshe
‘Most recently, the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood, was able to find, and uncritically quote, an Israeli academic characterizing Israel as a “supremacist” state which treats Palestinians as slaves.
The remark was made by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, in Academic claims Israeli school textbooks contain bias (Guardian, Aug. 7th), about incitement in school textbooks in the region.’
Actually, this article didn’t appear in the Guardian, much more worryingly it appeared in the Observer and is yet another nail in the coffin of Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper, which has the
unfortunate fate of being the Guardian’s sister newspaper and by the look of things is in danger of being subsumed by it.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan even managed in Sherwood’s article to accuse ‘the Israelis’ of the massacre at Yeir Dassin, although I had thought that what happened there was before the Israeli state came into existence.
Thank you, Adam, for publishing your analysis on Sherwood’s latest. As far as I am concerned the Observer has lost another reader.
August 8, 2011 at 10:20 am
Robert M. Soran-Schwartz
As an Israeli and researcher I would endorse the observation that Israel is – due to its Zionist ideology and its Judaist (Jewish is not totally correct, because the religion not the ethnicity defines who is a Jew and who’s not) state character – inherently ethno-religiously racist, segregationist coloni(ali)st and oppressive country. What characterizes the state, also
applies to at least a large minority, if not already a majority of the Jewish-Israeli citizens, a fact that I recorded over the time in hundreds of hours of
taped conversations with fellow Israelis.
By-the-way, Israel doesn’t need the Zionist ideology since long time ago. Israel exists as the sovereign state of the Israeli NATION with a Jewish majority. Nothing and nobody can turn the clock back, except Israel and the outdated Zionists themselves. Israel should consider itself a “normal” country, with only one ruling “ideology” or “Weltanschauung”: democracy.
August 8, 2011 at 10:55 am
ziontruth
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are mine, as a private commenter, and not representative of CiFWatch.)
“As an Israeli…”
Exhibit B for the problem of Israel letting anti-Zionists operating from within it. (Exhibit A would be Jonathan Cook, who seals every one of his anti-Zionist screeds by mentioning he wrote it from Nazareth.)
“…and researcher…”
Did you reach your conclusion before beginning your research, or after? Knowing you anti-Zionists, I suspect the former is the answer.
“…ethno-religiously…”
Any viable state needs to have something that binds its residents together, otherwise you get chaos (as in Lebanon), unless an iron fist is there to put the lid on the differences (as in Iraq before the fall of Saddam). To criticize Israel for being an ethnostate is, in my opinion, the highest form of praise you could give it.
“…racist…”
No. Marxist revisionist language fail. Jewishness is not defined by race (a Jew is someone either born to a Jewish mother or having undergone halachic conversion—the latter criterion means Jewishness isn’t a genetic affair), therefore the Jewish State can’t be racist.
“…segregationist…”
No signs on the beaches saying “For Jews only,” no drinking fountains for non-Jews, no demands for non-Jews to sit at the back of the bus. Yours is slander against the Jewish State.
“…coloni(ali)st…”
Impossible by definition. The Jews are the indigenous people of Palestine; it’s the Arabs who are settler-colonists here (regardless of their maliciously false appropriation of the name of “Palestinian” for themselves, which only the Jews can call themselves).
“…oppressive…”
Not so oppressive as to ban anti-Zionists like Cook and you from engaging in sedition against it from within its territories.
Show me someone who contends Israel is an oppressive state and I’ll show you someone too cowardly to board a flotilla to North Korea or Syria.
“…the Israeli NATION…”
There’s no such thing as an “Israeli nation.” There’s a Jewish nation, and there’s an Arab nation. The attempt to fuse the two nations in Israel into a binational proposition nation (on the American and French models) is doomed to fail, because neither is the Jewish nation willing to give up on self-determination and return to Diaspora servitude, nor is the Arab nation willing to give up its national pride. But as the Arab nation already has so much (a huge mass of land outside its indigenous territory, the Arabian Peninsula, comprising over 20 states), while the Jewish nation has so little, justice requires that the Arab nation stop stealing what rightfully belongs to the Jews.
“…and the outdated Zionists themselves. Israel should consider itself a ‘normal’ country, with only one ruling ‘ideology’ or ‘Weltanschauung’: democracy.”
As the results of “new, improved” multicultural experiments all over the world show, the nation-exclusive state, far from being an outdated model, is the wave of the future, because nations that won’t adopt it simply won’t survive.
The time is out for states where various nations (not races) are put together with no common bond except the happenstance geographical sharing, and the time is out for free-for-all democracy that enables the attacks on the very framework of the democratic nation-state itself (as it happened in 1933). Instead, the time has come for the idea of the State As Its Nation’s Castle, where members of the nation feel safe and secure by virtue of being free of any potential threat to their self-determination, and the time has come for self-defending democracy that outlaws any attacks on the nation-exclusive state itself.
There is room for all kinds of opinions, misguided as they may be; but there is no room for putting the idea of exclusive national rights on trial. The breaking of nations’ safety and security by means of putting the cart of geography before the horse of national belonging has led to a level of hatred, xenophobia and bloodshed comparable only to that which various imperialisms (Nazism, Marxism and Islam) have wrought. Your ideas are not new, but old, tried and consistently found to fail.
August 8, 2011 at 12:59 pm
Hoi Polloi
As a European and a researcher I would endorse the observation that Germany is an evil nation and has no right to exist.
August 8, 2011 at 11:55 am
Another Joshua
It would seem that Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s convictions stem from a traumatic experience in her life. Her thinking may have been skewed for some time having been caught up in the peace movement’s ideals of the 1990s desperately searching to resolve the conflict, that when tragedy struck with the sad loss of her daughter in a suicide attack, rather than question the sincerity of the Palestinian leadership seeking peace, chose instead to blame Israel for it. This is what she said:
“”My little girl was murdered because she was an Israeli by a young man who was humiliated, oppressed and desperate to the point of suicide and murder and inhumanity, just because he was a Palestinian.”
“There is no basic moral difference between the soldier at the checkpoint who prevents a woman who is having a baby from going through, causing her to lose the baby, and the man who killed my daughter. And just as my daughter was a victim [of the occupation], so was he.”
She exploits her tragedy to give herself validation. Otherwise what other accomplishments can this woman show apart from being “the daughter” of another personality – Mattityahu Peled?
As for the Guardian, which gives prominence to a voice that is so confused and unbalanced, it continues its shameful record of seeking to denigrate Israel in whatever manner it can.
August 8, 2011 at 12:41 pm
AKUS
Another example – an extreme one – of the “Stockholm syndrome” where the victim identifies with the perpetrator.
August 8, 2011 at 1:15 pm
Another Joshua
@Akus
I agree. I tend to think that such a person has narcissistic tendencies also. She has cut off her emotions from what has really happened to her and transferred it to a cause that she has found support and validation. A “noble” and grandiose cause. That sense of leading and being validated gives her her sense of worth. But she will never be satisfied. That her understanding, or what she propagates is derived from such a serious crime to her and her family cannot be comprehended by her in the actual context that it happened. In reality it was a senseless crime, but her understanding is that the crime of murder will not be good enough to provide her satisfactory explanation of someone being taken from her. Therefore, for her, a whole country is to blame and it will still not be enough.
I simply cannot take this stuff. It’s very painful
It’s also interesting that she is pre-occupied with “education” of youth. Her child would have gone through the same education that she has purported to blame for all the troubles that have befallen her.It’s very complex, but no good derives from this, for her or for anyone, because, if my hunch is right, her mind cannot be balanced. She is stuck in a groove and getting paid for this nonsense.
August 8, 2011 at 11:56 am
pretzelberg
In “hundreds and hundreds” of books, she claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a “normal person”.
Instead of taking this very charged assertion at face value, Harriet might have at least wanted to get a second opinion – or, ideally of course, learn enough Hebrew to draw her own conclusions.
August 8, 2011 at 12:39 pm
AKUS
Nurit Peled-Elhanan,like others such as Neve Gordon, has no trouble taking her salary at the Hebrew University from the very country and people she so objects to. She plans to publish her book about Israeli education in English in the UK rather than Israel, under the Tower Publishing Ltd empress. If she had any real interest in raising her concerns in Israel one would assume she would publish in Israel, in Hebrew, where, if any of her assertions have merit, something could be done about them.
Instead, this is clearly a propaganda ploy aimed once again at the delegitimization of Israel, accompanied by the absolutely incredible statements about the education system in PA and Hamas schools, which are notoriously ant-Semitic and xenophobic.
Still, let’s look on the bright side. By publishing in Britain it should, at the very least, allow Dumbarton’s library to hold several thousand copies on their shelves for eager souls there to read about the iniquities of Israel’s education system without actually learning that both Arabs and Jews (and everyone else of all religions or none) study in state-subsidized schools or what is taught in Arab schools outside Israel. She should send a complimentary copy to the town council.
August 8, 2011 at 1:20 pm
JerusalemMite
Peled-Elhanan is simply joining the ranks of frustrated extreme leftists who have failed to persuade the Israeli public that their views are in any way rational and turn instead to the rabid Israel Haters in Europe to buy her sad offerings.