From Alice Walker’s Color Purple to David Icke’s Shape Shifting Lizards

Susan Abulhawa’s toleration of anti-Semitism only helps the enemies of Palestine

 A controversy has broken out over an interview that Alice Walker, famous for the Pulitzer prize winning The Color Purple, did for the New York Times. In a written interview Alice Walker: By the Book, on the 13^th December, Alice responded to the question ‘What books are on your nightstand?’ by saying that one such book was “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke.

‘In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.’

When Black people and Palestinians start making excuses for anti-Semitism it has but one effect. It confirms the Zionist argument that Palestinian opposition to Israeli settler colonialism is motivated not by outrage at Israel’s behaviour but by hatred of Jews.

Of course the Zionists have leaped upon this. Zionist opposition to the anti-Semitism of people like Louis Farrahkan is not motivated by genuine outrage at his racism but by their own racism. When the Anti-Defamation League, a group that worked with the South Africa Secret Police BOSS and sends US Police for training Israel denounces Farrakhan we can smell the racist hypocrisy a mile off. [See Lenni Brenner, When Israel Was Apartheid’s Open Ally].

Anti-Semitism amongst Black people in the US is reflective racism. It is equivalent to the Jewish reaction to non-Jews and anti-Semites in Russia and Poland which was often chauvinist. When the ADL home in on Louis Farrahkan and ignores Trump, Bannon, Orban and all the other genuinely anti-Semitic white supremacists we can  be sure that what motivates them is not anti-Semitism but support for Zionism.

Nonetheless the apologetics of Alice Walker are deeply depressing. Walker is a brilliant novelist and anyone who has read her tale of racism, abuse and misogyny cannot help but be moved. 

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

I don’t know what other planets Icke has visite but what is clear is that he is anti-Semitic. Icke isn’t dangerous in the way that the supporters of Tommy Robinson are or the supporters of Zionism are. He is more mad than bad. He believes that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian creatures control the world. His books, the Robots Rebellion and And the truth shall set you free endorse the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is incomprehensible that Alice Walker has chosen to endorse Ike.

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

Isaac Stanley Baker describes the book in the Washington Post thus;

“And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” which draws on the infamous anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” includes this judgment: “I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.” The Nazi extermination, he wrote, was “coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite.”

It is therefore doubly regrettable that Alice Walker, instead of reassessing what she said, dug herself further into a hole. On her own website she defends Icke, as a fellow victim of censorship and denies that he is an anti-Semite even though he holds that Jews in effect organised their own destruction. How would Alice Walker have described someone who said that Africans were responsible for the slave trade? The fact that some Africans collaborated with the slave traders and some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis does not therefore mean that either the Slave Trade or the Holocaust was a consequence of their victims’ actions. Alice Walker wrote:

‘I find Icke’s work to be very important to humanity’s conversation, especially at this time.  I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish.  I do believe he is brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask, and to speak his own understanding of the truth wherever it might lead.  Many attempts have been made to censor and silence him.  As a woman, and a person of color, as a writer who has been criticized and banned myself, I support his right to share his own thoughts.

Walker compares the ‘attempt to smear’ Icke with the attacks on her and supporters of BDS. It is a confused melange.

But if we can ignore the racist ravings and ramblings of her Zionist critics, whose attacks on Walker are motivated only by their own racism the same cannot be said of her Black Jewish critics.  One such is Nylah Burton in Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me. Nylah writes about the poem It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud.

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.

Nylah describes how hostility to others can be blinding to oneself yet ‘it seems that Walker has willingly allowed herself to be blinded. “ She describes ‘Our (Frightful) Duty’ as

‘a terribly written poem filled with terrible things. It oozes deep paranoia, defensiveness, and rage. In every single way, it’s ugly.

The “poem” utterly fails as poetry. It isn’t lyrical. Its lines and stanzas are choppy and graceless. Each stanza seems to end with an aggressive exhale, the kind that a person expels when they finish purging the awful thoughts that consume them. In some places, it reads like a rambling lecture delivered by a tenured professor who isn’t afraid to offend her students anymore. At other times, it reads like a Breitbart article with line breaks. There is no artistry here, but there is plenty of trauma.

The most significant stanza is where Walker writes:

For the study of Israel, of Gaza, of Palestine,

Of the bombed out cities of the Middle East,

Of the creeping Palestination

Of our police, streets, and prisons

In America,

Of war in general,

It is our duty, I believe, to study The Talmud.

It is within this book that,

I believe, we will find answers

To some of the questions

That most perplex us.

Yet she couldn’t be more wrong.  The Talmud explains nothing. Attacks on the Jews in Europe often used selective quotes from the Talmud, a book of disputation and interpretation in just the same way as Zionist and Islamaphobes attack Muslim using the Quoran.

According to the sales pitch for Tommy Robinson’s Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam ‘Islam is a religion of war and conquest, ... right up until thousands of innocent Americans were wiped out on 9/11.’

Today in Israel racist rabbis such as Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur in Torat Hamelech use the Talmud to justify the right of Jews to murder non-Jews, yeah even their infants and suckling babes. Israel’s bloodthirsty Military Rabbinate likewise use the Talmud and the Torah to justify the slaughter and rape of Palestinians.  No doubt a similar exercise could be mounted with respect to the New Testament. It was Christians not Muslims who perpetrated the Holocaust.

But the point to make is that Israel’s murderous barbarities are not caused by the Talmud anymore than the Holocaust was a product of the New Testament or ISIS was the product of the Quoran.  Murderers often resort to religious texts to excuse their deeds but the same texts also exhort us to love thy neighbour as thy self.

Alice Walker and David Icke

We can of course expect the Zionists to denounce Alice Walker as an ‘anti-Semite’.  Although what Alice has done has provided fuel for the Zionist fire, we can disregard their criticisms of her as the ravings of hypocrites and racists. What is however more painful is the criticism from fellow anti-racists and friends and in this category I put the Israeli educationalist Nurit Peled-Elhanan. In A Letter From Nurit Peled- Elhanan, activist, educator, and friend from Israel and a Poem, she expressed her sorrow at what Alice had written:

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Dear Alice,

I read your poem and the criticism of it and I must react.

The people who torture and kill Palestinian have never studied the Talmud. It is not studied in Israeli state schools. And no one can read it on their own. The ones who study it are the ultra-orthodox Jews such as the pro-Palestinian Neturei Karta in NY.

The quotes (whether true or false) are surely partial and do not characterize this 12 volume work (thousand pages in every volume) whose writing ended thousands of years ago.

The Talmud is not a prescriptive book. It is an endless interpretation of the Torah, always adapting the Torah to present times so that people can live by it. Ethiopian Jews never studied it and lived by the Torah as is.

In these volumes you read discussion and polemics between different sages about every tiny aspect of human life. And the discussions are brought as they happened, more or less because it was all discussed orally.

But the main thing is that each such discussion ends with: “and so they disagreed” and people would choose the interpretation they wanted. Every argument that is brought is immediately countered by an opposite argument and the discussion that ensued. It is always open ended.

In my time we learned a bit of it and I loved it, because it is Logic, like reading Plato. Today schools don’t teach it anymore.

So in order to know what is in the Talmud – which none of the non-orthodox Israelis or Jews know – you have to read at least a whole chapter, pros and cons etc.

One of the most discussed subjects in the Talmud as in the Torah is the treatment of foreigners, workers, slaves etc. Extremely human and enlightening.

I don’t want you to be trapped in superficial propaganda of ignorant people. And again: the reason for the ruthlessness and violence towards Palestinians is not to be found in ancient writings but in Modern ones. It is Modernity and European Enlightenment that brought slavery, colonialism, Fascism and Totalitarianism, national movements such as Zionism and the way to treat people as superfluous. Auschwitz was not prescribed in any ancient scripture, neither is Israeli colonialism.

Much love

Nurit

To which Alice replied:

Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

***

Dear Nurit,

Thank you, Sister Nurit, for not letting go of my hand, while informing me of your views, which I welcome and respect. Though we may have areas still to discuss, and perhaps always will, given the differences in our backgrounds and cultures, my own grip is as strong.

Can you get my website: alicewalkersgarden.com where you are?  If so, please read the entire poem.  Also read a later poem, below, “Conscious Earthlings.” About the necessity of separating “Jews” from Zionist Nazis. I am including it here.

Also, would you mind if I published your letter to help with the discussion, which seems to be, from what I hear, more about shouting. I am open to continuing our dialogue, if you are.

Love,

Alice

This controversy has not been helped by Palestinian writer and novelist Susan Abulhawa, author of Mornings in Jenin who in the guise of supporting Alice has stumbled in with hobnail boots trampling all in her path. Her In defence of Alice Walker argues that Abulhalwa ‘Alice Walker's real 'offence' is not anti-Semitism; it is her unwavering support for the Palestinian cause.’

Alice Walker and Palestinian Women

Yes that probably is what motivates some, but by no means all, of the criticism of Alice Walker, but whose fault is that? Undoubtedly Alice Walker has been viciously attacked for her support for the Palestinians and that includes the routine cry that she is ‘anti-Semitic’. 

Alice Walker is a good example of how false accusations of anti-Semitism actually create anti-Semitism. In what must be rank as one of the most fatuous analogies Abulhalwa compares the reaction to Alice Walker’s comments to that of Israeli Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour whom the Israelis gaoled for 5 months for writing a poem:

I am reminded of Dareen Tatour, who was imprisoned by Israel for a poem she posted on Facebook, on the fanciful claim it called for violence against Jews; and Gunter Grass, whom Israel banned and lobbied to have his Nobel Prize in Literature rescinded because he wrote a poem arguing that Germany should stop supplying Israel with nuclear submarines. Even the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s greatest poet, was denounced as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The Board of DYR still lists Lea Tsemel and Ilan Pappe

Unfortunately Abulhawa has kept company with some pretty dodgy people previously and it was only in 2014 with their attack on BDS that she parted company with the Board of Deir Yassin Remembered. DYR, which was formed about 10 years previously, had been taken over by a right-wing American Professor Daniel MacGowan together with an anti-Semitic Israeli/Swedish fascist Israel Shamir and a British holocaust denier Paul Eisen. Its original purpose was to build a memorial to the village of Deir Yassin in Palestine, where a terrible massacre of up to 254 people had occurred in April 1948, as a means of ‘encouraging’ the Palestinians to flee from their homes.

DYR had originally included people like Jeff Halper, Ilan Pappe and Lea Tsemel, all of them Israeli anti-Zionists.  One by one they all resigned from DYR. Yet if you go to the web page today you will still find some of them listed as members. As Halper remarked, “The Deir Yassin Remembered board is like Hotel California, you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave).” See, Jinjirrie, BDS Attacked by the Deir Yassin Remembered

Below is a very moving article by a Black Jewish American, Nylah Burton, about her feelings concerning what Alice Walker has written.

Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me

The Intelligencer, 26.12.18.

By Nylah Burton

Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/The New York Times/Redux

When I first read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I leaned into every word, inhaling Celie’s tragic and triumphant story. In Celie, I felt the presence and pain of my female family members brought up in rural Alabama. In Walker’s unflinching descriptions of misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia, and incest, I saw an open accounting of issues buried deep within the larger southern black community — and within my own family.

Above all, I was drawn into The Color Purple because it was haunted by ghosts — the ghosts of Alice Walker’s past. Eloquently and bravely, she was able to confront generational trauma by telling a universal tale that still felt faithful to her own story. And it was Walker’s ability to throw open the shutters and allow her ghosts — our ghosts — into her writing that made it so revelatory. It cemented her standing as an acclaimed novelist, a civil-rights icon, and a formidable thought leader in the field of black feminism.

That changed abruptly two weeks ago, after the New York Times invited Walker to list her favorite books in its weekly “By the Book” column. She took the opportunity to promote David Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which contains some of the most hateful anti-Semitic lies ever to be printed between covers. As excerpted in the Washington Post, Icke’s book alleged that a “small Jewish clique” had created the Russian Revolution and both World Wars, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust to boot. Icke has also accused Jews (among others) of being alien lizard people. After a week of criticism, Walker doubled down in her assessment of Icke’s indefensible work, calling him “brave” and dismissing charges of anti-Semitism as an attack on the pro-Palestinian cause.

It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.

The ghosts in The Color Purple helped me to better understand my own identity and the suppressed history of my ancestors — a journey I’m constantly engaged in as a black Jewish woman. But the ghosts in “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty” leave me with more questions than answers. How did Walker’s curiosity curdle into paranoia? How was her commitment to improving the human condition twisted into support for genocide apologists? How could the artist who helped America to better understand black women use her writing to promote the oppression of another group?

In her essay, “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,” Walker writes that “an extreme negative emotion held against other human beings for reasons they do not control can be blinding. Blindness about other human beings, especially for a writer, is equivalent to death.” Lately it seems that Walker has willingly allowed herself to be blinded. “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty” is a terribly written poem filled with terrible things. It oozes deep paranoia, defensiveness, and rage. In every single way, it’s ugly.

The “poem” utterly fails as poetry. It isn’t lyrical. Its lines and stanzas are choppy and graceless. Each stanza seems to end with an aggressive exhale, the kind that a person expels when they finish purging the awful thoughts that consume them. In some places, it reads like a rambling lecture delivered by a tenured professor who isn’t afraid to offend her students anymore. At other times, it reads like a Breitbart article with line breaks. There is no artistry here, but there is plenty of trauma.

Walker writes that we must examine the “root” of our broken world. For her, the rabbinical commentaries in the Talmud are this root. She claims that the Talmud has provided justification for Jews making slaves of goyim (non-Jews), which world history proves to be untrue. She also claims that the Talmud permits the rape of young boys and 3-year-olds, which is a misinterpretation often used to justify anti-Semitism. Walker is unequivocally wrong about the root of the world’s evil. But how should we begin to search for the root of Walker’s hatred? What ghosts lurk within her stanzas?

I have a deep abiding love for black women and all that we do. Because of that love, I feel betrayed by Walker, and like all scorned lovers, I find myself consumed with a need to understand why. Guided by a singular question (What the fuck happened?), I spent Christmas buried in her writings, trying to understand how Walker could turn on women like me.

The opening of the poem speaks of a male friend, a “Jewish soul,” who accused Walker of anti-Semitism because she didn’t support the state of Israel. Walker refers to this anonymous friend with a great deal of intimacy; charged with anti-Semitism, she herself reacts like a lover betrayed. When she mentions the house that they shared in Mississippi — “where black people often assumed he was a racist” — it becomes clear that she is referring to her ex-husband.

In 1967, Alice Walker married a young Jewish civil-rights lawyer named Mel Leventhal. Their interracial marriage — the first such legal union in the state of Mississippi — was still illegal in Walker’s home state of Georgia at the time. Leventhal’s mother was also deeply opposed to the union, and his other family members didn’t allow Alice to attend family events. “Leaving no question about how she felt about her son’s marriage to a shvartse (a pejorative Yiddish term for a black person), Miriam Leventhal sat shiva for her son, mourning him as dead,” Evelyn White writes in Alice Walker: A Life. A source who knows the family told me that Mel preferred to ignore rather than confront his family’s bigotry. This caused Walker to feel increasingly isolated and resentful. The marriage ended in 1976, after the pair had one daughter together, named Rebecca.

From left: Mel Leventhal, Rebecca Walker, and Alice Walker, 1970. Photo: CSU Archives/Everett Collection

When writing of Mel in her essays, Walker links him inextricably to his Jewishness, as well as his occupation as a lawyer. Even when they are not arguing (frequently, according to her) about the abuses against Palestinians, each mention of him is some variation on  “white Jewish lawyer husband.” Perhaps Walker is combining those disparate words — each a piece of his identity, yet each reductive — to make sense of his contradictions: How could he fight for the dignity of black people while allowing his white family to deny dignity to his wife and daughter? How could he be white, and yet not fully welcomed by white gentiles in Mississippi? How could he crusade for justice at home and dismiss her concern for Palestinians abroad?

I loathe the misogynist assumption that a woman’s faults must be the direct result of a man’s actions, but I find myself incapable of separating Walker’s fraught marriage from her hatred of Judaism. She doesn’t separate the two either. In her 2014 book, The Cushion in the Road, Walker writes about meeting an elderly Palestinian woman in the Occupied Territories. The woman accepted a gift from Walker, and then bestowed a blessing upon her, “May God protect you from the Jews,” to which Walker responded, “It’s too late, I already married one.”

It’s telling that Walker feels she should reference her marital strife in such a context, even as a joke. In both this comment and in her poem, she seems incapable of reconciling the conflicts inherent to Leventhal’s identity — conflicts that put a strain on their marriage. Instead of accepting that white Jews can both oppress and be oppressed, Walker leaps to blaming all Jews (and  the Talmud) for all oppression.

Walker writes in the poem of trying to educate the “Jewish soul” on the topics of “dignity,” “justice,” “honor,” and “peace.” She sets off each of these words with quotation marks, casting doubt on whether Jews are capable of learning these values. Walker is quite proud of her subsequent epiphany, insinuating that those (like her younger self) who believe that any Jew can desire peace, justice, and honor know “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Walker’s fights with Leventhal are not the only ghosts in this poem. There is also Rebecca Walker, Alice’s daughter. Rebecca and Alice haven’t spoken in many years, and Rebecca has publicly denounced her mother for being neglectful during Rebecca’s childhood. “I came very low down in her priorities,” Rebecca wrote in 2008, “after work, political integrity, self-fulfillment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.”

While Rebecca never addressed her mother’s anti-Semitism, she is known for publicly embracing her Jewish identity, most notably in her book Black, White, and Jewish. How must Rebecca be feeling right now? How would it feel to have the whole world discussing your mother’s hatred of your Jewish soul, your religious texts, your heritage?

As a black Jewish woman, I find the white Jewish community’s focus on black anti-Semitism hypocritical and distracting. Its negative impact is often exaggerated, and dwelling on it is counterproductive to racial justice and solidarity. But in an attempt to show compassion toward black people — especially black women — I sometimes find myself burying my own opinions about it at the expense of my soul. Recently, I was at an event where someone implied that Jews were naturally more conniving and exploitative. I shut down the conversation, but I wanted to flip the table in anger. What does that do to the soul of the black Jewish woman, who is often rejected by both the white Jewish community and — more rarely — by the sisters who are supposed to understand her?

In an interview for the PBS documentary “Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth,” Walker said she was hurt and confused by her estrangement with her daughter. “You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul,” she said. “But, as (author) Tillie Olsen told me, ‘You have your own children and do the best you can until they are able to get out in the world. And then the world takes over.’”

In the poem, Walker invokes her maternal status as a source of her authority over all of humanity. She refers to herself as an “elder” who went to Palestine to “do my job / of keeping tabs / on Earth’s children.” It’s a particularly defensive stanza in an already-paranoid poem. I feel that she is trying to convince herself that she has done her job as an actual mother. Her claim on the “Earth’s children” reads like a deflection from the one child she has, who is surely bothered by her mother’s hatred of Jews like herself.

Another source of the poem’s purported authority is age. Walker tells us that we will understand the evils of the Talmud as we get older. “We must go back / as grown-ups now, / Not as the gullible children we once were … It is our duty, I believe, to study the Talmud.” But Walker isn’t talking to us. It feels like a plea to her child. A plea for what? Understanding? Forgiveness? Permission?

I can understand Walker’s trauma: I live much of it. But I cannot understand how she could write such awful things. I understand that Walker experienced virulent anti-blackness from many in the white Jewish community — as I have — but I don’t understand how she could spin that off into a hateful conspiracy. I don’t understand why this poem was written. But I do understand that everything about it paints a picture of heartbreak. I see a person who has made terrible mistakes, and who is desperately trying to run away from them. I may not be able to forgive or excuse, but it is my frightful duty — as a black Jewish woman — to try to understand.

I spoke to a black Jewish woman who said that Alice Walker’s anti-Semitic “trolling” needed to be called out, but also that Walker was “a monster of [the white Jewish community’s] own making.” She warned that a failure to address such racism would push more people — notably, Jews of color — to this extreme. I believe this; I’ve already reported on the ways that racism was pushing black Jews away from the community. The impact of this dynamic on Walker’s work is supported by her description of her writing process in the essay “From an Interview”:

“All of my poems … are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair … Poems — even happy ones — emerge from an accumulation of sadness … I become aware that I am controlled by [the poems], not the other way around. I realize that when I am writing poetry, I am so high as to feel invisible, and in that condition it is possible to write almost anything.”

Still, I wonder how Walker could put the burden of her trauma onto us — black Jewish women. What is her responsibility to her daughter, and what is my responsibility to Alice Walker? Many of my black and Jewish friends refuse to even judge her. Perhaps it is I who know nothing, nothing at all.

I know that I will not cancel Alice Walker. I can’t erase the incredible work she created. I will continue to read The Color Purple and her other works. But I will never be able to rid myself of the ghost of this poem. It would be irresponsible and self-hating of me to do so. I will read and teach Walker’s work with love, but this poem will always be there, fluttering in the wind like a torn-out page of the Talmud.

Study Says that Palestinian Textbooks Do NOT Incite Hate

It's not Palestinian but the Israeli Education system that Teaches Racism

Palestinian schoolchildren studying at the UNRWA Gaza Elementary School in Gaza City in 2010. IRIN/Creative Commons

A new study by Israeli and US and a Palestinian academic finds, unsurprisingly, that contrary to Zionist propaganda, Palestinian textbooks do not contain an incitement to hate Jews.  This has not gone down well with the Israeli government. An Education Ministry spokesperson, in a good example of someone whose education has been blighted, said that ‘the results of the ‘study’ reveal that the decision not to cooperate with these bodies was right." The ministry called the study "biased, unprofessional and significantly lacking in objectivity."

Clearly Israel’s Education Ministry has a problem with elementary logic. The fact that a result is not to your liking doesn’t therefore mean that the process leading up to it was ‘biased, unprofessional’ etc. No proof is offered to support this allegation nor can there be. The obvious explanation for the Israeli government refusal to co-operate was that it knew its propaganda had no factual basis.

A new US-led study found that while Israeli and Palestinian schoolbooks contained bias, most don't resort to outright hatred as had been suggested previously. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

However that does not mean that the study itself was unproblematic, as the article by Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan for Electronic Intifada ‘Biased new study skirts around racism in Israeli school books’ argues.

I am not an expert in education or pedagogy, but it seems to me that research which simply involves the examination of texts, without taking into account the sub-culture and relationship between the two education systems is flawed. To ignore the occupation and to compare the education system of the occupier with the occupied is to indulge in the superficial.   Indeed to hold that mentioning the occupation in Palestinian books is itself an example of bias is to demonstrate an enormous arrogance and inability to understand by the said academics.  Is it seriously suggested that an education system under occupation should not mention the occupation?  Would not that be not only biased but absurd and unrealistic?  Should nothing have been mentioned to Jewish children in the ghettoes of Poland about why they were there?  It demonstrates the stupidity of the colonial academic.

In particular, simply examining the written word without also examining how Arabs are portrayed in Israel school books, is certain to omit more than it includes. For example the fact that Arabs are regularly portrayed as villains, aggressors, whereas Jews are the victims, wouldn’t be picked up in a pure textual study. Professor Elahanan’s Nurit Elhanan-Peled, ‘Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education’ Library of Modern Middle East Studies, 2012 is well worth reading.  see How Zionism Tried to Portray the Arabs as Hitler's Successors
Tony Greenstein

New study of school textbooks threatens to undercut argument that Palestinian schools preach hate

The New York Jewish Week 02/05/13

Washington — An in-depth comparative study of Palestinian and Israeli school textbooks is offering some conclusions that already are making some Israeli government officials very unhappy: Palestinian textbooks do not have as much anti-Israel incitement as often portrayed.

While this finding might appear to be welcome news for supporters of Israel, it also threatens to undercut one of the central elements of the official Israeli narrative. For years, the charge that Palestinians "educate to hate" has been an Israeli trump card in undermining claims that Palestinian statehood is overdue, and it is an article of faith among many lawmakers in Congress.

"This obviously cuts down one of the pegs and a linchpin in the argument that the Israel government makes, that the Palestinian Authority is teaching hatred to their kids," said an official who works closely with mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States. The official declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Titled "Victims of our own Narratives?" and funded by the U.S. State Department, the study finds both Israel and the Palestinians lacking in making the case for the other side’s presence in the Holy Land. It also scores Israeli books as better than Palestinian ones at preparing schoolchildren for peace.

But in the same pages it praises both Israel and the Palestinian Authority for publishing textbooks virtually free of "dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other."

"Both the Israeli and Palestinian communities should be commended for this important positive aspect of their books," the study says. "Extreme negative characterizations of the other of his sort are present in textbooks elsewhere in the world."

The study was launched in 2009 by the Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, a multifaith body that aims "to prevent religion from being used as a source of conflict, and to promote mutual respect," according to its website. It is comprised of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, the Palestinian Islamic Waqf, and the heads of Christian churches in Israel and the West Bank.

The Israeli government did not formally cooperate with the study; Palestinian Authority officials did.

Yale University psychiatry professor Bruce Wexler convened the study team, which was headed by Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University and Sami Adwan of the University of Bethlehem. They assigned Hebrew-Arabic bilingual research assistants to plow through more than 3,000 passages from textbooks — 74 from the Israeli side and 96 from the Palestinian side.

The assistants assessed the passages based on criteria developed in part by an advisory panel that included Palestinian and Israel academics and outside experts, including those who have critiqued Palestinian books.

Most of the advisory panel, including several Israelis, signed onto a statement Sunday endorsing its findings.

"We agreed that the methods of the study were of the highest scientific standards and agreed on the main study findings," the statement said.

At least one Israeli member, Arnon Groiss, said he has reservations about the methodology and could not attach his name to the final report, which he said he has not seen.

It’s not clear whether the study will alter fundamentally the standard Israeli narrative about Palestinian schools laying the groundwork for future conflict with Israel, and the study does not absolve either side.

The study quantifies textbooks’ negative depictions of the other side and identifies a lack of positive depictions of the other side as an obstacle to peace.

"This presentation bias, along with the general lack of information about the other’s culture, history and religion, creates an image of the other only as aggressive enemy to whom it is not possible to relate or respect, with whom there can be nothing in common," the study says. "This lack of information even more than the negative information constitutes a lack of recognition of the other’s legitimate presence."

Wexler said the goal of the study was to test according to rigorous statistical standards allegations that each side has made about the other’s texts.

"The type of testimony that’s been presented to Congress and to our national leaders has been one person reading selected passages from the books," Wexler told JTA.

The study found that textbooks in Israel’s state schools were likelier to depict Palestinians in a positive light and to include criticism of Israeli actions, while books in Palestinian and haredi Orthodox schools were overwhelmingly negative in their depiction of "the other."

Critics, including some of the Israelis on the advisory panel, said this equivalence fails to take into account how each culture responds to such depictions.

"The problem is, he makes comparisons between promotion of education for peace on the one side and education that calls for the annihilation of the other side," said Yossi Kuperwasser, the director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, referring to Wexler. "It’s like comparing apples and giraffes."

A statement from the Ministry of Strategic Affairs picks out passages in Palestinian textbooks it says the study ignores; many of them implicitly negate Israel by referring or depicting the entire territory as "Palestine."

The study, however, addresses that issue at length and finds that maps on both sides tend either to depict the entire area as "Israel" or "Palestine."

Detractors of the study say its rigorous analytical methodology rips biased and sometimes inflammatory passages from each cultural context. They contend that triumphalism is more incendiary in a Palestinian society that they say is more forgiving of terrorism.

Kuperwasser has been leading the charge against the study.

"It omits important examples of incitement and delegitimization of Israelis and Jews in official PA textbooks, whether in an intentional attempt to blur the differences between the two educational systems or due to poor research," he said.

Israel’s Education Ministry said in a statement that "the results of the ‘study’ reveal that the decision not to cooperate with these bodies was right." The ministry called the study "biased, unprofessional and significantly lacking in objectivity."
editor@jewishweek.org　

Biased new study skirts around racism in Israeli school books

Nurit Peled-Elhanan
The Electronic Intifada
12 February 2013

Mention of Israeli colonization in Palestinian textbooks was faulted in biased study.

Mention of Israeli colonization in Palestinian textbooks was faulted in biased study.
(Mahfouz Abu Turk / APA images)

A new report on Palestinian and Israeli school books has elicited much debate ("Israel shoots back:
 ‘Look beyond the textbooks,’" The Times of Israel, 6 February).

The report — by academics in Tel Aviv, Bethlehem and the American university Yale — is short.Yet it raises some poignant questions ("Victims of our own narratives? Portrayal of the other in Israeli and Palestinian school books," Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, 4 February [PDF]).

Israeli educators who hastened to pronounce it biased were quite right. Such a study cannot be symmetrical, for it examines two education systems, one of which is entirely subjugated to the other. A reminder of this situation is found in the introduction of the report. It notes that the Wye River Memorandum — signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 1998 — included an "explicit statement about incitement."

The agreement states that "the Palestinian side would issue a decree prohibiting all forms of incitement to violence or terror, and establishing mechanisms for acting systematically against all expressions or threats of violence or terror. This decree would be comparable to the existing Israeli legislation which deals with the same subject."

No such caution is mentioned with regard to the Israeli regime of occupation, even though Israel is regularly taken to task by the United Nations for its aggressive behavior.

As textbook researcher Samira Alayan from the Georg Eckert Institute for the Study of Textbooks has shown, Palestinian textbooks are severely controlled and censored not only by Israel but also by European and American bodies that finance their production (see an abstract of the book: "Images of identity: Self and other in school text books of the Palestinian Authority," June 2011 [PDF]).

Objective?

Nevertheless, the new report prides itself for having engaged "objective" evaluators who come from the US and Europe, although the US denies tourist visas to most Palestinians — including the  ambassador of the PA to the European Union, Leila Shahid, who was not allowed to attend the NewYork session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in October last year — and many European states and companies profit from the occupation of Palestine. Why not recruit evaluators from Pakistan or South Africa?

The report relies on content analysis but neglects the ways in which the content — both visual and written — is used to persuade readers of its ideological message. For instance, it praises Israeli textbooks for relating the details of massacres but does not discuss how these books try to legitimize the massacres as part of the "big picture" — to Israel’s benefit.

One Israeli textbook, we are told, acknowledges that most of the Palestinians killed by Zionist forces in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, in 1948 were women, children or elderly. Yet the book cites claims that the victims died because they refused to leave their homes and that the massacre "still serves as an excuse for Arab propaganda against Israel."

This excuse bears a chilling similarity to the one used by Israel when it subjected Gaza to a three-week bombing campaign in late 2008 and early 2009. And this excuse is not confined to one work.
The 2009 book Israeli Nationalism and Nation: Building a State in the Middle East — by Eyal Naveh, Naomi Vered and David Shahar — stated that the residents of Deir Yassin failed to evacuate their village because the loud-speaker from which they were supposed to receive a warning was not functioning properly.

Taboo of occupation

Two main categories are missing from the analysis: occupation and racist discourse. Perhaps that is why describing the dire facts of the occupation seemed to involve "negative characterization of Israelis" to the researchers.

Israeli school books do not address the occupation because their message is that there is no occupation. They inculcate what sociologist Stanley Cohen — in his 2002 book States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering — termed the "Zionist kitsch" about the eternal historical rights of the Jews on the whole land of Israel and Palestine. This explains why the researchers behind this study were offended by how Palestinians use the term "colonialism" to describe Zionist settlement on their land. In Israeli mainstream books, illegal settlements like Ariel or Alon Shvut are presented as no different to Tel Aviv.

The green line — the 1949 armistice line separating Israel from the territories captured in 1967 — is never shown or discussed. The only Israeli geography book I found that discusses the issue of the green line is Sfat Hamapa (The language of maps) by P. Dina (published in 1996).

In Israeli textbooks, the cruel practices of occupation such as administrative detention, military checkpoints and house demolitions are presented as necessities in our "defensive democracy."
Since racist "teaching tools" of a visual or verbal nature are not part of the analysis presented in this study, racist Israeli representations of Palestinians are reported to be "neutral." Since Palestinians are never presented in Israeli textbooks as persons like us — modern professionals — only as negative stereotypes of terrorists, nomads and primitive farmers, one must conclude that these racist representations seemed "neutral" to the researchers and to the "objective" western evaluators.

Better times?

The report concludes that the books on both sides fail to relate the "better times" when there were good relationships between Arabs and Israelis. This must refer either to the good relationships between Jews and Muslims in Morocco, Tunisia and Iraq, prior to the "redemption" of Zionism — a reality Zionist education in Israel has always done its utmost to conceal — or to the years between 1967 and 1987 when oppression of Palestinians was considered by Israelis to involve an "enlightened occupation." I found one reminder of that "idyllic" time in a geography book published a decade ago but still used — Israel: The Man and The Space by Zvia Fine, Meira Segev and Raheli Lavi: "Some of the foreign workers are Palestinians who come from the areas controlled by the Palestinian authorities. They are employed in unprofessional jobs and their wages are lower than that those of the Israeli citizens who work in the same jobs … This is characteristic of all developed countries."
The conclusions of the new study reflect the Israeli bon ton that brought the success of Yair Lapid in the recent elections — to wrap up Arabs and Orthodox Jews together and slander them. But, as usual, there can be no comparison.

While Orthodox Jewish textbooks present Arabs — all of them — as evil forces, a sort of biblical Amalek we must eliminate with the help of God, Palestinian textbooks never resort to such discourse. They respect Judaism as one of the three monotheistic religions but relate — as accurately as they can under so much censorship — the true and horrid facts of life under Israeli military rule.
The new study — or at least the part that has been published — seems quite problematic and biased but not in the way Israel is trying to spin it. Let’s hope the full study, when published, will clear up some of this confusion.

Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a lecturer in language education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education ‏(I.B. Tauris, 2012).

See also How Zionism Tried to Portray the Arabs as Hitler's Successors http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/how-zionism-tried-to-portray-arabs-as.html