Our Wednesday News Analysis | How Palestine became a ‘forbidden word’ in German high schools

Source: +972 Magazine
https://www.972mag.com/germany-education-israel-narrative-palestinians/

By Hebh Jamal
Published December 5, 2022

From textbooks to trips, Germany's education system is aggressively pushing a pro-Israel narrative hostile to any Palestinian dissent in the classroom.

“Most [of my German] teachers were Christian Zionists who actively picked on us, discriminated against us, and told us we were liars when we spoke of our families’ suffering back in Palestine.”

“I was blindsided when he [German politician] suddenly claimed we’re [Palestinians] not as innocent as we pretend to be and [Palestinians] posed a threat to Israelis.”

“The discourse in Germany ignores Palestinians completely. The euphemisms used to describe the Israeli army — calling them ‘security forces’ — will always relativize the violence against my people...”

“The word ‘Palestine’ was strictly forbidden in my classroom,” Dahlia Vakili, a Palestinian German, recalled in an interview with +972 about her secondary education experience in the federal state of Lower Saxony. “Whenever I would mention that I was Palestinian, my teachers were outraged and said that I should refer to [Palestinians] as Jordanian,” she said. Vakili, now 35, was also reprimanded for wearing the black-and-white checkered keffiyeh, which one teacher referred to as a “terrorist scarf.”

Vakili is not alone. Several more current and former Palestinian-German students have told +972 about experiencing discrimination and censorship in the classroom on the basis of their Palestinian identity, and feeling that there is no room to disagree with how Israel is presented in their schools.

Mariam, a 12th-grader in Saxony, told +972 that she was interrupted by a teacher when talking about her Palestinian background, and told that she was Israeli. “That was a really painful experience for me. My teacher implied my identity just didn’t exist,” she said.

Mariam has also been accused of being antisemitic because of her pro-Palestinian beliefs, including by her peers. “The discourse in Germany is extremely pro-Israel,” she explained. “Every criticism of Israel or its political system is seen as antisemitic and [is] denounced, even by fellow students who feel emboldened to call me antisemitic for holding anti-Zionist views. I know being pro-Palestinian doesn’t mean I’m anti-Jewish,” she added, “[but] I’m careful who is around me when I talk about my identity or my experiences as a Palestinian in this country, because I am afraid of discrimination.”...

Read more: How Palestine became a ‘forbidden word’ in German high schools

Why the Nakba should never be forgotten
 

Source: Arab News
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2211856

By DR. DANIA KOLEILAT KHATIB
Published December 6, 2022

"The incoming government of Israel, does not recognize how the world is changing.
It is banking on some high-level accords for its security,
but the problems are much deeper than this.

The Abraham Accords will not take root and will not cement people-to-people relations as they were supposed to if no reconciliation takes place.

The World Cup in Qatar has shown the centrality of the Palestinian issue. Even a Moroccan player raised the flag of Palestine after a match.”

Netflix is currently streaming “Farha,” a movie about a teenager who witnesses the Nakba. Israelis have been left infuriated by the film, which in their perspective is full of libels and shows them in a bad light. However, the movie is not about that at all. Actually, the Nakba is about the collective memory of Palestinians as people. The movie’s purpose is to assert the Palestinian right to statehood.

The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, is about the events of 1948, when Palestinians were driven out of their homes and Israel as a state was declared. More than 700,000 people, half of Palestine’s pre-war Arab population, were expelled from their homes. They became stateless and many of these refugees’ offspring are still stateless today.

An opponent to the movie posted on Twitter that he does not mind a movie showing Palestinians suffering, but he is against a movie showing Jews as killers. However, we need to ask what caused these people’s suffering? What triggered their displacement? And to be realistic, it was the use of force. Only through force could Israel have been built. David Ben-Gurion said it in his memoirs and this is not exclusive to Israel. Unfortunately, human history has shown us that state-building is often a violent endeavor. The Palestinians would not have peacefully left their homes to give space for the Jewish settlers to build their state. Hence, showing the Jewish settlers as being peaceful and kind would be a fantasy.

In the collective Palestinian memory, the Nakba defines their existence as people who have the right to their ancestral homeland. This puts even peace activists who believe in the two-state solution on edge. Will recognizing the Nakba give the Palestinians claim to all of historic Palestine? That is also not the case because the UN recognizes Israel and there are established facts on the ground: Israel is a full-fledged state with people and institutions. Recognizing that Jewish settlers took the place of Palestinians does not delegitimize Israel...

Read more: Why the Nakba should never be forgotten

HOW BEN-GVIR BLOWS APART THE ‘SECURITY’ STORY OF ISRAEL’S OCCUPATION

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-ben-gvir-occupation-security-blows-apart-how

By Jonathan Cook
Published December 6, 2022

What Israeli generals are really worried about is how little will change when two ultra-nationalist, religious settlers are put in charge of the occupation

The most moral army in the world will be much harder for Israel’s apologists in western capitals to defend. And that is Eisenkot and Gantz’s real fear.

There is a good reason why Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the Israeli military, expressed alarm last week as Benjamin Netanyahu awarded unprecedented powers over the occupation to a far-right settler party in his new government.

Eisenkot claimed that the army was in danger of “falling apart” if Netanyahu so openly politicised its role. But that is not the real reason he and the other generals are so worried. They understand that Netanyahu is about to blow apart the security rationale that for so long obscured their racist oppression of the Palestinians under their control.

Now the settlers’ brutality will be conducted within a system of openly Jewish supremacist rule

The prime minister-designate put Itamar Ben-Gvir, of the fascist Jewish Power party, in charge of the police service inside Israel and extended his remit to include the Border Police, a separate paramilitary force that chiefly operates in the occupied territories.

Ben-Gvir is a high-profile supporter of Kahanism, the virulently anti-Arab ideology of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. His political faction is now the third largest in the Israeli parliament and the linchpin of Netanyahu’s new coalition.

Ben-Gvir’s political ally, Bezalel Smotrich, meanwhile, is expected to preside over Israel’s Civil Administration, an unelected, unaccountable military bureaucracy that enjoys far greater powers over the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank than the nominal Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas.

Now a settler leader, one who calls for annexation of the West Bank, will be directly in charge of approving the building of more settlements...

Read more: How Ben-Gvir blows apart the ‘security’ story of Israel’s occupation