Muhammad and Meira begin first grade

I work with a senior Palestinian TV journalist, Mustafa, who, like me, hits fifty this month and, like me, has a child, Muhammad, who begins first grade this week.

My Meira, also six, is excited to know that ever so soon she will learn how to read and write like her older siblings.

I witness the same excitement that I see on Meira’s face when I see Muhammad at his home in Ramallah, sitting with his older siblings.

Muhammad, who always runs to get me Kosher cookies when I come to work with his father on a fliming assignment, tells me that now that he’s in first grade he’ll be able to read the kosher label on the cookies.

Yet when I joined Mustafa this week to cover the beginning of the school year in both the Israeli and Palestinian first grades, the difference in the curriculum could not be more dissonant.

When I went to the curricula center in the Al Bira, the well kept middle class Palestinian suburb of Ramallah, the PA director of textbooks and printings, showed my Palestinian journalist and myself the new school books that have been published for the first time by the Palestinian Authority itself, with special grants received from the nations of the European community, beginning this year with brand new books for the first and sixth grade.

The other school books used by Palestinian school children, published for the PA in Egypt and in Jordan, are rampant with passages that prepare Palestinian children for war against the state of Israel, while describing the Jewish state in Nazi-like terms.

When the Israel Civil Administration had supervised the Palestinian school system until 1994, Israel had deleted all such passages. The PA simply reinstated them.

Many people had held out hope that the new school books published by the Palestinian Authority would contain passages of peace, unlike the others. No such luck. The history and geography books for both the first and sixth grades contain maps which portray all of Palestine, and numerous new passages that call on a new generation of Palestinian children to liberate all of Jerusalem and all of Palestine.

The contrast with what Israeli school children are learning is striking, since a peace curriculum has been required in the Israeli schools and Israeli educational Television since 1993.

As I browsed through the Palestinian school books, I could not help but think about the difference between Meira and Muhmmad.

Meira knows the Sesame Street song “let’s be friends” in Arabic from the program that he has been watching on Israeli educational TV since she is four, and she sometimes insists on singing it at the Shabbat table.

For her, the idea that she might make friends with Arab kids her own age has caught her imagination from a young age.

Yet Muhammad, at the same age, can’t stop singing the Biladi song of the PLO, the marching song which calls on every Palestinian youngster to take up arms against the Jews.

Such manipulation of children was not supposed to be part of the peace process.

After all, “peace education” was to be included in the second paragraph of the Oslo declaration of principles that was signed and issued by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jorgen Holst, and PLO leader Yassir Arafat back in September, 1993.

Yet almost seven years to the day from that declaration of principles, and despite numerous grass roots efforts at reconciliation, the official organs of the PLO and its administrative creation, the Palestinian Authority, have yet to issue their first statement in Arabic that calls for peace and reconciliation with Zionism and/or the state of Israel.

I inquired as to whether the Italian consul, Mr. Gianni Ghisi, who was responsible for organizing the funding of the European consuls to fund the new Palestinian textbooks, had even seen the new textbooks of the Palestinian Authority that he had funded.

Mr. Ghisi responded by saying that the PA would not let him see the books before they were published, despite an agreement that they had to review the texts before publication.

Recognizing that the PLO and the PA had instead substituted incitement for peace in their official rhetoric, the US, PLO and Israel had agreed at the Wye conference in October, 1998 to establish a continuing task force to address the subject of official PLO incitement to war.

That task force met constantly for more than a year, even into the Barak administration, which assumed the helm of Israeli leadership in July of 1999. Barak appointed Yaakov Erez, the editor of Maariv, to head Israel’s delegation to the task force on incitement.

The Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, an agency that monitors school books on all sides of the middle east conflict, dispatched streams of material to the task force, and organized an unusual nonpartisan session of the Knesset in May to address the subject of PA education, which constantly depicts Israel as a Nazi entity that needs to be wiped off of the face of the earth.

The Center’s website can be accessed at: www.edume.org.

Following my visit to the PA curriculum center at AL Bira, where I had perused the new textbooks of the PA, I called Yaakov Erez to ask him if the textbooks had been seen and evaluated by the task force on incitement. Erez told me that he had resigned from the committee, and referred me to the Israel Foreign Ministry, who had assigned a senior staff member to continue Israeli representation at the committee.

When I got to the Israel foreign ministry and finally located the Foreign Ministry staffer who was assigned to the incitement committee, he informed me that the task force on incitement was no longer meeting. The reason given by the Israel Foreign Ministry staffer: Lack of interest demonstrated by the current US ambassador.

So there you have it.

Meira begins first grade knowing the Sesame Street song in Arabic by heart, wondering aloud if she will ever have an Arab friend, while Muhammad will be handed a map of the whole of Palestine on his first day of school, and inculcated to do everything that he can in his young life to make war on my children.

It was therefore not surprising that the New York Times, in a front page story on August 3, 2000, entitled “Palestinian Summer Camps Offer Games of War”, documented how the schoolyards of Palestinian educational institutions were used all summer to train 25,000 Palestinian school children in the art of war.

The writer, who now works as a journalist, has worked on issues of reconciliation and holds a master’s degree in community organization social work practice