Israel: All bias is not equal

last updated 8 January 2015

Itamar Marcus

The Jerusalem Post

Palestinian schoolchildren are taught to view the destruction of Israel as their duty, said Itamar Marcus. But you’d never know that from the new report by the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, an Israeli group, which purports to find that Palestinian schoolbooks are no more biased against Israelis than Israeli schoolbooks are against Palestinians. In drawing this preposterously whitewashed conclusion, the report gives “as much weight to the fringe, ultra-Orthodox school system in Israel” as it does to mainstream Palestinian schools, in a “misleading attempt to demonstrate equivalence.” The report entirely ignores the “hate and promotion of violence” that are central to Palestinian education. Children are taught that Israel is a foreign, colonial, racist country, and that to take up arms against it is both legal and vital. Needless to say, “there is no corresponding defense of terror and promotion of violence in Israeli textbooks.” Even Hillary Clinton has said that the Palestinian education system “profoundly poisons the minds of these children.” The international community should pressure the Palestinians “to replace their hate education with peace education.” Those who make excuses for them, like the authors of this report, are simply “enablers of this hatred.”