Education or Mind Infection?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a Lecturer in Language Education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem specializing in discourse in Israeli education with emphasis on visual and verbal presentation of Palestinian and non-western Jews. In September 1997, Nurit’s daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. She and her family are members of the group Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved Families for Peace. Her two elder sons are active in the peace movement of the “refuseniks” and Combatants for Peace, a new movement of Israeli and Palestinian ex-fighters. This speech was given at Connecticut College, New London, CT on 9/27/06.
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I would like to dedicate these words to all the Palestinian boys and girls, and to all the Lebanese boys and girls, and to all the Iraqi boys and girls who have been massacred by mind-infected Israeli and American soldiers, and who have recently joined my own little girl in the underground kingdom of dead children, which is growing under our feet as I speak. I would like to tell them not to worry: “You will be well received there, children, and no-one will hurt you just because you wandered off on your way to school or because you wore a scarf on your head or because you lived in a certain place. Rest in peace, everyone is equally worthy in your new world.
“All of you dead children were deceived, because your death has achieved nothing at all and the world goes on living as if your blood had never been shed. Because the leaders of the world keep playing their murderous games, using you as their dice and our grief as fuel for their killing machines. Because children are abstract entities for generals and grief is a political tool.”
Living on both sides, that of the victims and that of the killers, I keep asking myself, what are the means by which good Israeli children are turned into murdering monsters, what are the means by which they are so mind-infected as to kill and torture and humiliate other children, and sacrifice their own lives for nothing but the folly and megalomania of their chiefs? In the so-called Western enlightened world everyone feels very well-founded when they blame Islam for suicide-bombing and terror. But who would ever blame Judaism for murder?
And yet, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish children who have never left Brooklyn know that to kill Arabs is a ‘mitzva’ (holy commandment) for they are ‘vilde hayeths’ (wild beasts). And Israeli children actually commit the crimes of slaughter and torture. Neither Judaism nor Islam nor any religion for that matter is the cause for murder and terror. Racist education is the cause. American imperialism is the cause, and the ruthless Israeli regime of occupation is the cause.
The Western world today is infected with fear of Islam and of the Muslim womb. Great France of “liberté, égalité, et fraternité” is scared of little head-scarved girls. Jewish Israel — in public speeches and schoolbooks — calls the Arab citizens of Israel a “demographic nightmare” and “the enemy from within.”
What does this fear-stricken world offer as a solution for Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghan people who are harassed, abused, tortured, and starved by western crimes and exploitation? Generally, the advice this enlightened world gives them is this: “Be like us. Constitute a democracy like ours, and embrace our values which despise you, which consider you an inferior, primitive lot to be cultivated or cleansed away.”
Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghan women are mothers like me. And when they lose a child, even if it is one of twelve children, their pain is equal to mine. But in addition to losing their children they also lose their homes and their livelihoods and their futures because the world does not listen to their suffering and does not hold their children’s murderers accountable.
American soldiers are not the only ones who are sent to kill people they have never seen. Israeli soldiers who actually perform massacres of ‘Arabs’ — Palestinian or Lebanese — may also live their lives without seeing an Arab human face until they are drafted to the army, but they learn, for 12 long years, that these people are primitive, that they bear children in order to send them to the streets and throw stones at our peace-keeping soldiers, that they are uneducated and conniving and dirty.
Israeli children are deprived from knowing their immediate neighbors, their history and their culture and their merits. Israeli children are educated to see their neighbors as an unwanted element. This is not education, this is mind infection.
Our children are mind-infected from an early age, so that by the time they are old enough to become real soldiers, they have already learned to be incapable of questioning the ‘truth’ that has been inculcated in them. This is part of the explanation one can give for the terrible deeds that are committed today by the children of Israelis, who are characterized so often as “people of values.” It is high time to ask, what values are these? The following lines are part of a personal preface by Tal Sela, one of my university students, to his term-paper:
“On the 5th of September 1997 I found myself in Lebanon, on a rescuing mission. All my friends were in the battle, 12 soldiers were killed. The following days I was happy: “I am alive, I survived,” I said to myself. However, a year later I was in deep depression. […This] was in fact a moral crisis, a crisis of consciousness. What I actually felt was frustration, shame, and anger. How could I be so gullible and let myself be duped?
“Today, like every two weeks, I drove peace activists to the military check-points of the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. I saw an officer put tight handcuffs on a taxi driver because he failed to obey the soldiers’ order to park here and not there. “We told him a thousand times” the soldiers said. The man was lying on the ground in the worst heat of the summer, thirsty, for hours on end.
“His friend was luckier: He had to stand on his feet, in a cell, without handcuffs. What pushes these young Israeli boys to play the role of supreme judges until they lose all judgment? In my opinion it is the Zionist narrative which serves as a collective conscience to the whole Israeli society, explicitly as well as implicitly. This grand narrative is the system of values that makes us belong to this particular collective.”
This is not only an Israeli affair because, as you know, the epidemic is worldwide. My nephew, Doroni, seven years old, who lives in the US, said he wanted to be a soldier, and then to go to Iraq and save America. How many American young men, ignorant as he is of the absurdity of this statement, actually went to Iraq and died there without knowing why, but with the words “save America” on their lips? The question is, how were these false values imprinted on their minds and how can they be erased?
The human psyche, says the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. The way to defeat false value systems is to expose them. The viruses of the mind are weakened by young people like Tal and other Israeli refuseniks such as Combatants for Peace.
But most of our mind-infected children will not be free of the grip of those viruses until they find their final rest in the ever-growing, underground kingdom of dead children. Only there will they realize that is doesn’t matter whether their heads were bare or not, whether they prayed in a synagogue or a church or a mosque, whether they were circumcised or not, whether they pronounced forbidden words, ate pig or cow, or whether they had a hot chocolate after their salami pizza just before they were blown up by someone who didn’t.
And when these children die for the profits of somebody else their parents bear it with dignity and pride, as they were taught, put their dead children’s photographs on the mantelpiece and sigh: They were so handsome in uniform. It is time to tell these parents that no-one is handsome in the uniform of brutality. It is time to tell them uniforms and ranks and medals have become ugly. Tell them their dignity and pride are misplaced.
It is time to tell Jewish people that the only way to discourage anti-Semitism is by condemning the only government in the world that deliberately sends young Jewish boys and girls to their certain deaths and which persecutes to the point of genocide a whole Semitic nation.
It is a terribly hard task for people who were educated in Israel or in the USA to admit that we were raised on false, racist values. The only thing that can cause such a change of spirit is the constant image of the mutilated small bodies of the victims of these values. Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, the holiest day for the Jews. On this day people are required to ask forgiveness. Not to forgive but to try and be forgiven.
We must all ask our children’s forgiveness for not being more alert, for not fighting hard enough to keep our promises for a better world, and for letting them be the victims of the horrible mental infection we are all suffering from. We must look at their innocent, astonished, disillusioned small faces and ask ourselves with the poet Anna Akhmatova, who also lost her son to a ruthless regime: Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of their cheek?
