High School History Stacked Against Israel - in the USA

November 28 2011
Dr. Richard Cravatts
If you thought only Palestinian Authority schoolchildren's textbooks demonize Israel, look closer to
home.
A Newton South High School student in Massachusetts was alarmed recently when she received what
appeared to her to be blatant anti-Israel propaganda from her World History teacher. This incident
brings to the forefront once again the reality that, even at the pre-college level, the narrative of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is frequently contorted to reflect ideology rather than history, scholarship,
and fact.
The high schools World History teacher, Jessica Engel, had given a student a section on Palestinian
women from the Arab World Notebook, which described the fact that Over the past four decades,
women have been active in the Palestinian resistance movement.
What was their treatment at the hands of the "brutal Jewish state", for doing nothing more than
resisting? Several hundred have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed by Israeli occupation forces
since the latest uprising, Intifada, in the Israeli occupied territories.
The problem with this type of simplistic analysis as part a history curriculum, of course, is that it
presents a one-sided, highly-biased view of the facts on the ground in Israel and the West Bank and
Gaza, completing ignoring some critical aspects of the conflict, namely, that resistance is a
euphemism for terrorism, and that when Palestinian women are detained and arrested by Israeli
defense forces it is a result of their actions, often successful, to murder Jews as part of the campaign to
extirpate Israel.
In fact, the Arab World Notebook, the teaching tool used by Ms. Engel for this class, has already been
discredited as a legitimate part of any history curriculum, precisely because its primary purpose is to
whitewash the negative aspects of Arab and Muslim history while simultaneously assigning blame for
the regions pathologies on the colonialism, imperialism, the West, and Israel specifically.
A 2005 report on the Arab World Studies Notebook written by the American Jewish Committee, for
example, Propaganda, Proselytizing, and Public Education, found that while the purported intent of
the publication was to create sympathetic views of the Arabs and Muslim religion in the American
classroom, the end product of the guide was to present historical distortion as well as uncritical
praise, whitewashing, and practically proselytizing.
More relevant to the recent incident in Newton, the skewed view of the history and present-day politics
of the Middle East as outlined in the guide appears largely designed to advance the anti-Israel and
propagandistic views of the Notebooks sponsors, the Middle East Policy Council . . . and Arab World
and Islamic Resources. . .

While the Notebook pays lips service to presenting different points of view, the report concluded,
it provides only an Arab perspective . . . on Jerusalem, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the conflict
between Western and traditional Muslim values.
Teaching history with a political or ideological agenda, of course, does not make for true education,
precisely because it does not put issues into context, distorts movements and ideologies, and uses
events and facts selectively to insure that one interpretation of history, and only one, is taught to
impressionable students.
One of the women active in the Palestinian resistance movement that the text, The Arab World
Studies Notebook adoringly refers to, Ahlam Tamimi, was just released from prison in the Shalit
exchange. 15 people died in the bombing she arranged.
For instance, one of those women active in the Palestinian resistance movement that the Notebook so
adoringly refers to, Ahlam Tamimi, was just released from prison as part of the grotesque exchange of
some 1000 terrorists for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
The Hamas-recruited, unrepentant, psychopathic Tamimi, who was responsible for the 2001 bombing
of the Sbarrro pizzeria in Jerusalem in which fifteen Israeli men, women, and children were killed and
107 wounded, recently appeared on TV and was asked whether she felt regret for having murdered
innocent civilians while they ate pizza. "No, she boasted, Why should I feel sorry?"
Asked in the interview if she would repeat her murderous actions again, she unhesitatingly asserted,
Yes. I do not regret what I did. Tamimi had also ghoulishly proclaimed that in a 2006 interview.
The AJC report also found that the Notebook consistently distorts facts, applies the inappropriate and
invidious paradigm of colonialism, and brings emotion-laden poetry and short stories of victimization
as the predominant voice of Palestinian culture. One of the writers critiqued in the report, for example,
is the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose poem, Identity Card, is included in the
Notebook, and ends with the genocidal lines, The usurpers flesh will be my food/ Bewarebeware
of my hunger/and my anger!
Whether Darwishs cannibalistic references to consuming Israeli fleshthat is, murdering Jews as a
necessary and inevitable by-product of the so-called occupation of Muslim landsis appropriate, or
even relevant, content for a history class may be debated; but it certainly suggests how history can be
inverted to suit the ambitions of ideologues promoting one point of view in which Israelis are
oppressive, brutal, in-human, murderous occupiers and thieves, and Palestinians are guiltless victims
who passively resist an unjust occupation by an insidious Zionist regime eager to spill Arab blood.
It has been much publicized that North American college campuses are also currently infected with this
same radical anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, promulgated by the identical strain of politicized history
and propaganda that animates the Arab Studies Notebook.
One would hope that a new generation of high school and college graduateswho enter the world as
journalists, politicians, diplomats, professors, even parentswould not have been poisoned during
their earlier education with distortions about Israel and its history, that young people do not learn about
the Middle East by seeing only one side of history and leave school despising, distrusting, and vilifying
a nation for no other reason than it happens to be lived in by Jews.
The author is director of the Communications Management Program at Simmons College, and is the
author of the forthcoming book, Genocidal Liberalism: The Universitys Jihad Against Israel & Jews.