© AdalahA screenshot from the online video course required by Israel’s education ministry to high school students wishing to travel on school trips. The onscreen caption claims that anti-Semitism in Europe has grown because of the migration of Muslims
Adalah, a legal advocacy group for Palestinians in Israel, sent a letter last month to the ministry of education demanding that it remove the requirement and end the hasbara course.
"The Israeli education ministry is trying to turn high school students into agents of propaganda charged with spreading extreme racist ideology," Adalah attorney Nareman Shehadeh-Zoabi stated.
"This is outrageous and illegal."
Adalah is acting on behalf of the Masar Institute for Education which runs schools in Nazareth.
One of its schools used to run an exchange program with a high school in Sweden, designed to foster international dialogue and cultural exchange.
But the school had to stop the program as the only way to avoid subjecting its students to the Israeli government's racist, and specifically anti-Arab, propaganda.
Students are forced to watch a series of videos before being tested.
Questions are designed to inculcate "a radical and racist political worldview that views Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as terrorists and threats," Adalah states.
Each question has only one "correct" answer that is a "political stance that the student must adopt."
"The videos are a kind of blunt brainwashing that attempts to shape the worldview of adolescents as the course designers see fit," the letter adds.
The course is particularly offensive for Palestinian students, who are "forced to internalize humiliating statements about themselves and their families" in order to pass, which Adalah calls a "blatant insult" and a violation of the law.
False information
The course teaches students that modern sources of anti-Semitism include BDS - the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights - as well as what it calls "Muslim organizations."
In reality, BDS is rooted in universal principles of justice, freedom and equality and "opposes as a matter of principle all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism."
One question asks students how Palestinian organizations use online social networks. Of the four possible answers, the "correct" one is "for encouraging violence," according to Adalah.
The course also forces political stances on students related to Israel's 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza and other matters related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Adalah states.
"The mere fact of presenting in such a one-sided manner questions that by their nature require dialogue conveys a misleading message to the students, and thwarts any attempt to educate them towards dialogue and to examine complex issues from all perspectives before formulating a position," the letter states.
Reader Comments
No amount of dialogue, compromises will ever resolve a issue that is now irreversible, and will only continue to a be stain of failure on the map of mankind.
People of a land look after their own, and do what they think is right to maintain there independence.