Alwaght- The dream of establishment of the so-called Greater Israel has been one of the factors influencing the Israeli policies since its foundation in 1948, and this policy has been prioritized more than any other time under hardline government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The geography of this historical dream has expanded over time and includes lands from Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and the radical religious factions that see present Israel as the beginning of the revival of the Greater Israel have tried to bring their project to the fore with culture-building and a fundamental project.
As the war machine massacares people in Gaza and Lebanon, the Israeli academic and scientific community has not stood idle and has drawn a plan aimed at contributing to Netanyahu’s program to expand occupation. In this regard, recently a children's book, titled 'Alon and Lebanon', was published by the Israelis, aimed at aligning the new generation's thought with Tel Aviv's occupational policies.
This story is about a boy named Alon who lives in a kibbutz near the Lebanese border. Alon enjoys the scenery of Lebanon that he sees from the window of his room. In this book, the boy shows the forest and asks where it is. His father says that is Lebanon. He says "I would like to go to Lebanon, it is really beautiful there." His father says that going there now is dangerous because it is still in the hands of the enemy. "It is not ours yet." Alon thinks and says: "But eventually it will be ours. Lebanon is ours."
This book was authored by Amos Azariah and is supported by the radical right-wing settler group 'Uri Tzafon.' This group, which believes in the idea of Greater Israel, tries to plant the idea of living in southern Lebanon in the minds of children through this book. The story of the book goes in such a way that children can establish an emotional bond with Lebanon as a part of the future Israel.
The publication of such books comes at a time when the world is outraged by the crimes of the Israeli occupation army in Gaza and Lebanon, but the leaders of Tel Aviv, defying international warnings, continue their warmongering not only in the current situation, but also train the future generation for occupation. The fact that Netanyahu commits so many crimes in Palestine and Lebanon is partly related to the thoughts that his father relayed to him about Israel's fake history when he was a child.
Reports suggest that Netanyahu's father was one of the Jewish extremists who believed that all Palestinians should be destroyed and the so-called land of the Jews should be taken back, and he highlighted these extreme thoughts and ideas to Netanyahu every day. Therefore, if the new generation of Israelis are educated with the thoughts and delusions of people like Netanyahu and his extremist ministers, a dark future awaits the occupied territories.
Injecting submissionism into Palestinian children
The Israeli government's cultural efforts to shape the thoughts of the Israeli children are not new, and since 1967, the occupation government has been working to impose its books on the schools of the occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem).
"The key to bridging the gaps in East Jerusalem begins with education and ends with the Israeli curriculum. Israel has established a great cooperation between the ministry of education and the Jerusalem municipality on the other hand, and this allows us to create a real revolution in the Arab community in East Jerusalem." These are the words of Nathaniel Issac, the former director general of the ministry of occupied Jerusalem and the heritage of the Israeli regime, which show that the Israeli leaders are not focused on the military option, but on the cultural dimension for territorial development in the future.
In occupied Al-Quds's schools, slogans in Hebrew with this theme appear in the background of children: "Happiness does not mean that you have what you want, but it means that you are satisfied with what you have." In recent decades, the Israeli ministry of education has allocated huge funds to reshape the minds of Palestinian children in Al-Quds in order to lead them in a direction that is in line with the thoughts and teachings of the Jews.
Ignoring the international laws that guarantee the right of people under occupation to receive education according to their beliefs and to protect their culture and heritage, the Israeli regime has already started taking practical steps to distort the history of Palestinians. Curriculum changes for Palestinians living in Al-Quds have been accelerated since 2011, removing the Palestinian flag from textbooks and distorting lessons that focus on Palestine and the right of return.
The Israeli government has even removed the logo of the Palestinian Authority from the cover of textbooks taught in West Bank schools so that the new generation has no understanding of Palestinian organizations. These curricula deprived some 98,000 students in Al-Quds of the ability to study the history of the Palestinian cause and gain enough knowledge to build a Palestinian identity in schools affiliated with Islamic Waqf and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
The most dangerous actions by Tel Aviv against education in the occupied Al-Quds occurred in 2014. At that time, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan whose budget was estimated at $86.5 million, according to which the education ministry began to provide financial incentives to schools in Al-Quds to teach Israeli curriculum. As of 2017, 23 of the 180 schools adopted the Israeli curriculum after they received substantial funding and offered pay rises to teachers and staff.
Tel Aviv quickly tried to instill the Israeli narrative among the Palestinians and impose its entire curriculum on the students of Al-Quds. Under this plan, about $200 million were allocated as financial incentives to schools of Al-Quds to adopt Israeli curriculum.
The Israelis have made it clear that any Arab school in occupied Al-Quds that switches to the Israeli curriculum will immediately receive generous funding. In order to expand the use of the Israeli curriculum in Al-Quds , Tel Aviv allocated additional funds to schools that decided to make the change and awarded approximately $120 million to Al-Quds education.
The push to spread Israeli curriculum in a broad and constant process as part of an effort to eliminate the Palestinian identity and expand normalization and coexistence between the Arab and Israeli children comes along with joint trips and visits of Al-Quds mayer to the schools. Also, in some schools, military officers are always present in order to achieve deterrence and end the struggle for liberation and warn the Palestinian students about arrest.
In addition, the occupation regime has allocated huge sums of money for this process. The budget of the Arab Department of Education in Al-Quds municipality is 444 million shekels ($118.2 million), separate from the salaries of primary schools that receive direct funding from the ministry of education.
Talkig to online. Birzeit.edu website, Palestinian academic and social activist Fuad Abu Hamed said that the expense of an Arab student in occupied Al-Quds is about 11,000 shekels ($2,930) per year, but since 2018, the Israeli ministry of education has put an education development plan with a cost of 500 million shekels ($133.1 million) in addition to the previous budget. He said that this spending shows that the occupiers are trying to impose their curriculum on the Al-Quds Arab residents. He further says that the reception rate of this curriculum has been low in the eyes of the Israelis as so far only 8,000 Arab students went under this curriculum.
At the same time as the increase of cultural measures of the Israelis to change the textbooks of the Palestinians, Islamic religious leaders also warn against these dangerous moves. Ekrima Sabri, head of the Supreme Islamic Authority, in a speech earlier had banned adopting the Israeli curriculum in Al-Quds, saying that it contradicts the Islamic religious teachings and contributes to occupation.
Using its military and political dominance over Al-Quds and given the weakness of the Palestinian Authority and the critical economic and social conditions of the Palestinians, the occupation government steps up its push to settle the Palestinian case from its origin through Judization of Al-Quds. However, the educational curricula do not match the realities on the ground, where Palestinians see every day the brutality, apartheid and violence of the occupation and deal with a history that can no longer be hidden in an age of technology. Over time many countries have created curricula based on their imagination to erase or falsify history, but their plans failed as new generations developed awareness of their own identity and history.
Therefore, despite the intensive Israeli efforts to adopt a pro-occupation cultural project in Al-Quds schools, eliminating Palestinian identity in general has remained an unattainable aim. The experience of the Arabs of 1948 living in the occupied territories who even obtained the citizenship of the Israeli regime shows that their identity will not be erased and Palestinians will not be integrated into the Israeli society wherever they are. Because identity is formed in homes before the manipulation of school curricula, and since childhood, Palestinians are told by their fathers and mothers the stories of the Israeli occupation and its crimes, and they automatically grow within themselves the struggle for liberation of their lost lands.
