Hello again, Safranim, I am responding to Clare Kinberg’s post with some reluctance. I had specifically requested replies *off-list* because I didn’t want to get into a back-and-forth about the Arab-Israeli conflict; as Amalia said in her email, this isn’t the place for that discussion.
All I wanted to know was whether any of the books on my list were being used in schools or in public readings, and whether there were controversies I didn’t know about. Discussing the conflict itself would open a can of worms, which I’d hoped to avoid. Looks like I can’t, as my selection of books has been questioned on-list. To learn why I flagged these books for distorting history, people can go to my paper at “Proceedings of the 2019 Conference” on the AJL website, here <http://databases.jewishlibraries.org/node/52652>. Titled “Literature or Propaganda? How They Talk about the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” the paper analyzes six representative books criticizing Israel and five others (all by Israelis) which bend over backwards to incorporate the Arab perspective. At the end of my paper, I ask why it is that Israeli and Jewish writers make this effort to put themselves in their enemy’s shoes, something that writers like Laird fail to do. I cite the long Jewish tradition of self-criticism, going all the way back to the canonization of self-criticism in the writings of the Hebrew Prophets. I’ve examined more than the eleven books in that paper. I have a bibliography of 35 titles, which I’ve attached to this email. If anyone wants to know how I’ve evaluated these other titles, feel free to email me, and I’ll send you the relevant material. To give readers on this list some idea of how I believe these books distort the reality of Israel, however, I’ll just take two titles from Claire’s email: *A Little Piece of Ground* (Laird) and *P is for Palestine* (Bashi). For contrast, I’ll show how one Israeli writer, Pnina Moed Kass (*Real Time*) presents Arab suffering. At the end, I’ll address some issues of pedagogy. I taught school for thirty-five years, and I think I have a pretty good idea of what you can realistically do with novel study in a classroom. * A Little Piece of Ground**, by Elizabeth Laird (2003)* Elizabeth Laird’s* A Little Piece of Ground*, written in collaboration with Palestinian teacher Sonia Nimr, met with controversy from the moment it was published in Britain in 2003. Phyllis Simon, co-owner of a Vancouver, Canada, bookstore, urged Laird’s publisher (Macmillan) to reconsider publication of the book, pointing out that “there is not even one mildly positive portrait of an Israeli in the entire book. . . . *A Little Piece of Ground . . . *is for children, the overwhelming number of whom clearly haven’t a clue about this conflict, and thus depend on books like this for the opinions they form about what goes on in the Middle East.” [1] <#_ftn1>(TG, p. 7) Laird answered Simon as follows: “The book is written through the eyes of a 12-year-old who just sees men with guns. It would not have been true to my characters to do otherwise,”she writes[2] <#_ftn2> (Teacher’s Guide, p, 9). But this is disingenuous: Who but the author made the decision to paint the Middle East conflict exclusively through the eyes of a twelve-year-old Arab boy living in Ramallah during the Second Intifada? Karim sees his father humiliated at checkpoints; not only has he no idea why the Israelis have set these up in the first place, it’s a question he wouldn’t think to ask. Karim and his friends are confined inside by endless curfews which to them seem arbitrary, and there is no voice in the novel to explain them. Soldiers damage his school, but we don’t know why they bother to go there in the first place. Are they just throwing their weight around, or are they looking for stashes of weapons? Laird doesn’t bother to tell us, but she does expend considerable stylistic effort on painting Israeli soldiers not as the teenage boys in tanks that they are, but as the tanks themselves: The Israeli tank that had been squatting at the crossroads just below the apartment block for days now had moved a few metres closer.” . . . (pp. 4-5) “He could imagine the great armoured machines lying down there, like a row of green scaly monsters, crouched waiting to crawl back up the hill and pin the people of Ramallah down in their houses again . . . .”[3] <#_ftn3> (p. 12) As mutant *green scaly monsters*, Israeli soldiers *squat, crouch, *and* pin the people of Ramallah down.* If a book about a gang of African-American teenagers used loaded language like that -- “She could imagine the great *hulking panthers, crouched *behind the parked cars waiting to *pounce *on any passerby who neared their hiding place” – you can bet the sensitivity reader would be after the writer in a flash for dehumanizing and stereotyping blacks. Where are the sensitivity readers for books on Israel? Or perhaps, when it comes to *in*sensitivity, Israelis are fair game? Vivid images of “green, scaly monsters” engage the reader’s sympathy for Laird’s Arab characters – even for the boys’ pet kitten, flattened by an Israeli tank as the apotheosis of Israeli cruelty. But when it comes to Israeli victims of terrorist attacks, she is heartless: “Since a Palestinian gunman had shot two people in an Israeli café two weeks ago, the Israelis had set up another curfew, which meant that the whole city had been locked down.” [4] <#_ftn4>(p. 5) *P is for Palestine: A Palestine Alphabet Book**, by Golbarg Bashi (2018)* Melissa Landa wrote an exhaustive critique of *P is for Palestine* in a Times of Israel blog <https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/p-is-for-palestine-is-not-for-children/> (“P is for Palestine” is not for children,” May 29, 2019). She makes the point that the book is shot through with “political symbols with violent underpinnings”. I would recommend reading Landa’s piece, and will restrict my comments to only one page, “I is for Intifada.” Although the text reads, “Intifada is Arabic for rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or a grown up,” this is not what it means to anyone who remembers the years 2000-2005, the Second Intifada, when more than 1000 Israelis were brutally murdered (and many injured) under Palestinian Authority incitement. Readers may remember the Sbarro Pizza attack in Jerusalem (August 2001) which killed fifteen innocent people, largely children and teenagers. Among these were five members of the Schijvenschuuder family – Mordechai, Tzirli, and three of their eight children. Both parents were children of Holocaust survivors; the family made aliya from the Netherlands in 1977. Another victim of the attack was fifteen-year-old Malki Roth, whose father Arnold has devoted himself to memorializing his daughter by fighting media manipulation by the attack’s mastermind, Ahlam Ahmed al-Tamimi, released in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.. You can read one of his blogs here <https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-wish-others-knew-what-i-know-about-malkis-killer/> . I challenge any librarian or teacher to present a copy of *P is for Palestine* to surviving members of the Schijvenschuuder and Roth families, look them in the eyes, and read the book’s definition of “Intifada” as “rising up for what is right” to them. *How Israeli Authors Differ* In striking contrast with these two books stands Israeli writer Pnina Moed Kass’s *Real Time* (2004), written in the middle of the Second Intifada. Kass offers a minute-by-minute graphic account of a terrorist attack. She neither mitigates nor excuses the atrocity; the grisly horror of the bus bombing, the undeserved suffering of the innocent victims and their families – all are graphically recorded. Yet Moed Kass opens a window into the mind of the young terrorist, Sameh, as he sets out to blow himself up. Sameh believes he has nothing to live for: “All over the world sixteen is paradise, opportunity, girls, cars, everything. . . . Here, sixteen is the magic age of death. No children, no responsibilities, no wife. A sixteen-year-old is a walking grave. Why give a job to someone about to die? Kids who explode themselves and kill Israelis have no future, so don’t give them a future.” (pp. 21-22) The boy’s hopelessness is compounded by despair for his family. His mother was a beautiful woman when he was little, but since his father’s death from cancer has had to work hard just to feed her children, which has taken its toll. The money she will receive after he “martyrs” himself will feed the family; his brothers won’t have to continue peddling and may even be able to go to school. While Moed Kass in no way excuses terrorism, she makes an attempt to understand how a young man who feels as Sameh does can be manipulated by terrorist handlers. *Pedagogy: Using the Books with Children* Claire presents an idealized situation in which students would have the tools to be aware of bias. But this assumes that they will know some Middle Eastern history and have a good understanding of events on the ground today. This is far from a given. Let’s look at what young readers likely won’t know about the books we’ve just looked at: *A Little Piece of Ground:* Will students (or teachers, or librarians) know -- · why Ramallah is under curfew? · what the soldiers are looking for when they enter the school? · whether there might have been tips about weapons caches in the school? · that Elizabeth Laird is married to David McDowall, who worked as an official with UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Administration, the UN agency responsible for education in the West Bank)? · that UNRWA teachers have been posting pro-terrorist material on their Facebook pages,[5] <#_ftn5> · that UNRWA-approved textbooks have been condemned by IMPACT-se for glorifying terrorists as martyrs?[6] <#_ftn6> *P is for Palestine*: Will students (or teachers, or librarians) know -- · that the book is whitewashing terrorism by denuding it of violence? · that the “miftah” (the key), employed by Palestinians as a symbol of their lost homes necessarily implies the return of all Arab refugees, and their descendants, to Israel, and the extinction of Israel as a Jewish state? It is sometimes suggested that students read these books in pairs – one pro-Palestinian book, one pro-Israeli book. But where is the symmetry when the pro-Israeli books incorporate the Palestinian perspective, and the pro-Palestinian books fail to return the favor? How many teachers will want to devote so much time to this one issue that they will have the students read two books on it? Finally, let’s look at how young people think. My experience is that children, and many young adults, have trouble with greys. Their morality is still rooted in the fairy tale, where characters are either good or bad. Unfortunately, Israel is forced to be tough in order to protect its people at home (just as the Normandy Invasion entailed 25,000 – 50,000 civilian casualties in order to defeat the Nazis). When young people encounter IDF soldiers acting brutally in *A Little Piece of Ground*, that will condition their opinion of Israelis. The cognitive dissonance – that a good country may have to act aggressively – is hard to process. *Conclusion:* I’m not surprised that somewhere in the United States there are teachers sympathetic to the Palestinian cause who will select books like *A Little Piece of Ground* to “study” in class. I wish I could suggest a way to monitor this, because I think it’s a form of political indoctrination that has no place in a public school. I am, however, surprised that Jewish educators would see any value in teaching untruths about Israel to Jewish youth. Yes, there are two narratives, but I hope I’ve also shown that there are lies and distortions. The intifada wasn’t “rising up for what is right”; it was sustained murder. Israeli soldiers aren’t demons; they’re young men forced to do unpleasant things to defend their friends and family. There are good soldiers and bad ones, but ethics (known as “purity of arms”) is part of IDF basic training. My own suggestion: Recognize that the Middle East conflict is too hot to handle. Lobby school boards to keep it out of the classroom. Given people’s biases, it can’t realistically be taught objectively, and there are plenty of other books out there for kids to study. Given what’s going on in the United States right now, I’d suggest, for a start, that every American kid read Christopher Paul Curtis’s *Elijah of Buxton, *about a community of freed slaves in Ontario*. *They may even learn something about my country, Canada, in the process! :) Marjorie ------------------------------ [1] <#_ftnref1> Teacher’s Guide for *A Little Piece of Ground*, p, 7. [2] <#_ftnref2> Teacher’s Guide, p. 9. [3] <#_ftnref3> Laird, p. 12 [4] <#_ftnref4> Laird, p. 5 [5] <#_ftnref5> See UN Watch website, www.unwatch.org/report-un-officials-inciting-murder-of-jews-call-to-stab-zionist-dogs/ [6] <#_ftnref6> *Reform or Radicalization: PA 2017-18 Curriculum, A Preliminary Review.* Eldad J. Pardo et al, October 2017, p. 1.See IMPACT-se website, http://www.impact-se.org/about-us/, for this report and for the final report, *The New Palestinian Curriculum: 2018-19 Update—Grades 1–12. Eldad J. Pardo, September 2018.*
Bibliography Chart 7 June 2019.docx
Description: MS-Word 2007 document
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