Israel seeks to impose own version of history on Palestinians: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Paul Larudee, a member of the Free Palestine Movement in Berkeley, about the Tel Aviv regime offering special funding to Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem al-Quds to switch to the Israeli curriculum.

A rough transcription of the interview appears below.

Press TV: They say that this will improve children’s education quality. How do you feel about that?  

Larudee: Well their idea of improving quality is to teach what Israel wants them to know and also what Israel does not want them to know because their textbooks do not teach the Palestinian story of their history and the Nakba and this sort of thing. It is not they won’t learn it but the purpose of this is to impose, as colonists have done, as colonial regimes have done since time immemorial, their own history as the important points on the people who have been colonized. That is what is going on.  

Press TV: In 2016 and after so many decades of this ongoing occupation and oppression, are they really expecting the occupied peoples to forget the true history?

Larudee: They do not expect them to forget the true history but they are separating Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian ... for example the West Bank, so that there is less and less communication.

Palestinians who live in Jerusalem do not really have the possibility of maintaining even marriages with Palestinians from the West Bank. Their partner from the West Bank is unable to live in East Jerusalem, is unable to get permission from the Israeli authorities to live with their spouse in East Jerusalem.

So it is another kind of wall in between those who live in the colonized territories and those who live in the ghettos or the concentration camps which is what the other areas of the West Bank are fast becoming much like Gaza.

Press TV: So it seems that, and you can correct me if I am wrong, there seems to be a long-term plan then in a sense that these students who go through such a curriculum will then can come out to be desensitized and/or brainwashed according to Israeli curriculum, so I am wondering what does that mean for the future of Palestine?

Larudee: I can only recall when I was still able to go, that I was in Jaffa more than a decade ago and I found some Palestinians. I did not speak Hebrew. They tried to speak Hebrew to me and I told them in Arabic because I guessed they were Palestinians. I told them in Arabic that I do not speak Hebrew and they asked where I come from, they responded in Arabic and I said so you are Palestinian and they said no. They said no, we are not Palestinians. Palestinians live in the West Bank, we live in Israel. We are Israeli Arabs.

This is where this kind of education leads, to a kind of self-denial of their identity. It is very sad to see something like that but this is the intention of what Israel is doing.

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