All formal Israeli state institutions, and the education system in particular, have always been staunchly Zionist and have always taught and promoted one view of history. They all uniformly work for the state, whether they are public or independent (as the ORT school network is). Schools carefully avoid exposing their students to views that challenge the official narrative, thus successfully averting any danger of real debate on the nature of the state and its history, the history and nature of Zionism and Israel’s settler-colonialist relationship with the Palestinian people. As a result, the vast majority of students do not even know when something might be controversial and might warrant questioning. The idea that the Zionist movement had every right to colonise and settle historic Palestine to create a Jewish safe haven, while displacing and ethnically cleansing the indigenous population, is never questioned or debated. In fact, the word ‘colonise’ is not part of the narrative at all. The accepted consensus on all sides of mainstream Jewish Israeli politics is fundamentally that the Zionist movement, and later the state of Israel, have been doing what is necessary to ensure the survival of the Jewish people; indeed that the existential need for an exclusively Jewish state overrides all other considerations. Left or Right, Zionism itself is never questioned.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 10:03:39 +0000
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