The Palestinian Curriculum Development Center’s

Response to CMIP Attacks on Palestinian Textbooks

24 January 2004

In its December 2003 newsletter, The Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), published an article entitled “Questions and answers from an ad hoc Working Group of the European Union” in which they answered questions posed by some Members of the European Parliament about Palestinian school textbooks, at the Sub-Committee on the Middle East, Political Committee of the Parliamentarian Assembly of the Council of Europe, October 24, 2003. We would like to provide our own response to CMIP’s distortion, and incitement against Palestinian Education.

In response to a question: “Is it not more difficult for a weaker part to present things objectively?” CMIP lectured the parliamentarians how objectivity is “the key mission of educating, to try and provide an education that is in the best interest of both pupils and the community.” There is no question about Palestinian objectivity when it comes to educating their children. CMIP, however, does not follow its own advice. The center that claims to monitor the impact of peace should start by monitoring what the Israeli occupation is doing on the ground to those Palestinian pupils, their schools, their parents and teachers, and their community. Such objective monitoring and reporting could go a long way in providing a more peaceful and safe environment for those same pupils CMIP claims to be concerned about. Acceptance and tolerance must be mutual to be fruitful and lead to peace.

Another parliamentarian asked CMIP: “Is it not understandable that peace and tolerance not extended to Israelis, in view of the ongoing confrontation and its string of demolition, violence and contempt?” CMIP responded that Palestinians “began producing their own textbooks during a relatively quiet period, after the signing of the Oslo Agreements and before the onset of hostilities in September 2000.” And, that “these books were devoid of peace and tolerance.”

Actually, the first set of Palestinian textbooks was produced in September 2000, when the Palestinian people were still under Israeli military occupation that continued in violation of the same Oslo Agreements. Is military occupation and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza NOT considered hostile by CMIP? That occupation started in 1967; continued after, and in spite of, the Oslo Agreements which called for ending the occupation by May 1999; and only intensified after September 2000.

On Israel’s Violations of the Oslo Agreements, the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department (see http://www.nad-plo.org/noslo.php) stressed that the “Oslo Agreements provide that Palestinians would live in freedom by May 1999. To date, Israel’s military occupation not only continues, but intensifies. The Declaration of Principles (Article 1) provides that the interim period is not to exceed five years from May 4, 1994.” This is confirmed in Article 4 of the Wye River Memorandum. By May 1999, the interim period was to have ended and Palestinians were to be given their freedom. To date, Israel continues its military occupation.

Back in 1997, three years before September 2000, Israeli peace activist Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan gave a speech at an anti-occupation mass rally of Women in Black, in Jerusalem, in which she warned of the impending disasters as a result of the Israeli government’s occupation policies. She said: “Today, when there is almost no opposition to the atrocities of the Israeli government, when the Israeli peace camp has evaporated into thin air, a cry must rise, a cry that is as ancient as man and woman, a cry that is beyond all differences of race or religion or language, the cry of motherhood: Save our children.”

CMIP further expressed its own lack of objectivity, and contempt for the Palestinians, by declaring in a blanket statement that “these books too are devoid of peace and tolerance.” Ironically, in the following paragraph, and in answer to a direct question: “Is there glorification of suicide bombing?” CMIP was forced to admit that “there is no explicit and direct glorification of suicide bombings,” but continued to babble about Palestinians’ glorification of martyrdom, “that social pressure could lead to suicide bombings,” and that “73% [of young Palestinians] aspire to die as martyrs.”

Palestinians define martyrs as all those who are killed by Israel, mostly civilians, and very few of them are combatants. Like other nations, Palestinians pay respect to all the victims of Israeli repression, whose numbers have reached over 3000 men, women, and children, in the last three years alone; tens of thousands since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; and many more prior to that, since the Zionist project of cleansing Palestine of its people began early in the 20th Century. Palestine, like any other nation, glorifies those who fight for its freedom and national liberation. And when 73% of youngsters aspire to fight for their country’s liberation (assuming CMIP’s claim is accurate), they are saying they would rather die fighting than die on their knees, subjected to daily humiliation of their family and friends, death and injury, destruction and home demolition, imprisonment and torture. They are also repeating what Patrick Henry, one of the leaders of the American Revolution against British colonialism said back on March 23, 1775 at the Second Virginia Convention, "Give me liberty, or give me death!"

Nathan J. Brown, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, DC, prepared a report on the Palestinian textbooks, November 2001, in which he wrote that CMIP’s “conclusions may be unsupported by the evidence it presents, and undermined by the evidence it overlooks.” Further, in the same report, November 2001, criticizing the CMIP work, he wrote: “In short, the purpose is clearly to indict the textbooks and the PNA rather than analyze and understand the content of the books. Were the Center to take a similar approach in other countries, including Israel, it could easily find comparable material.”

But in reply to a question about Israeli textbooks, CMIP clears the Israelis of any fault, and asserts that Palestinians in Israeli textbooks “are presented as a people whose national movement is struggling with the Jewish national movement over the same territory.” What territory? Is it the West Bank and Gaza? Or is it all of historical Palestine? Why do Israelis consider the West Bank and Gaza disputed territory? Remember that the West bank and Gaza constitute only 22% of historical Palestine, and that the U.N. Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947 partitioned Palestine into two states. It allotted about 54% for a Jewish state and 46% for the Arab state, with economic union.

At the same Parliamentarian Assembly of the Council of Europe, October 24, 2003, Nurit Elhanan, an Israeli Professor of languages at Hebrew University also presented a study of four Israeli history textbooks and four geography textbooks that are in current use in Israeli state schools, one in primary school and three in secondary school. According to Elhanan, Palestinians do not exist, and they are called Arabs, not Palestinians, in Israeli books. She adds that “Palestinians are absent from all textbooks, the Occupation is never mentioned, and the area where Palestinians live is presented in the maps either as an empty space referred to as ‘an area without data’ (Man and Space- maps) or it is incorporated into the state of Israel (The Geography of the land of Israel- maps). In both cases use of the term ‘occupation’ is out of the question, since you cannot occupy illegally what is yours anyway and you cannot occupy illegally an empty space.”

On Palestinian national identity, Israeli children are taught that Palestinians are a problem, a poison, that they are hateful and irrational. One book, Modern Times - A History textbook for grades 10-12, by Eli Bar Navi and Eyal Nave, p.239 teaches Israeli children that: "During the years the hate and alienation, propaganda, the hope to return and feelings of revenge turned the refugees into a nation… the Palestinian problem would poison for more than a generation the relationships of Israel with the Arab world."

However, CMIP recommended a concrete expression of recognition by the Palestinians to indicate (on maps) both the State of Israel and the PA; no such mutual recognition was asked of the Israelis. Later on when the mutuality was brought up by a European parliamentarian, CMIP demanded a clear-cut acceptance of the existence of the other side and its legitimate rights. If CMIP meant mutual “acceptance”, though we doubt it, we agree. We agree that legitimate rights should be based on all relevant U.N. resolutions. U.N. Resolution 194, 10 December 1948, for instance, states that: "The refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." It conditioned Israel’s legitimacy on allowing the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were uprooted.

Finally, Professor Nathan Brown, in his report on Palestinian textbooks, November 2001, wrote that “the Palestinian curriculum is not a war curriculum; while highly nationalistic, it does not incite hatred, violence, and anti-Semitism. It cannot be described as a ‘peace curriculum’ either, but the charges against it are often wildly exaggerated or inaccurate…often highly misleading and always unreliable.” And on CMIP’s report on Israeli textbooks he asserted that “the Center’s work on Israeli textbooks showed a far more generous spirit and proceeded at a far more leisurely pace, taking years rather than months.”

Needless to say, CMIP is doing everything in its power to demean Palestinians and to deprive them of any European or international funding for education and other vital services that Palestinian institutions desperately need under the brutal Israeli occupation. It is a racist attempt to extend the Israeli occupation and control of Palestinians lives into the minds, textbooks, and classrooms of their children. CMIP with all its available resources might be able to intimidate some government officials and media outlets in other countries, but will not intimidate Palestinians into giving up their legitimate national and individual rights. History has taught us that repressive occupation and colonization, no matter how powerful, must come to an end.