Israeli Teachers Find 2016-17 Curriculum Has No Anti-Arab Incitement

“This goes against everything I’ve been taught by The Guardian and Haaretz.”

Raanana, August 17 – Public school teachers in Israel preparing for the 2016-2017 school year have discovered that the neither the Ministry of Education nor local governments have included anti-Arab incitement in the curriculum, a teachers’ union representative said today.

Primary and secondary educators conducting meetings and preparing lesson plans for the coming academic year are reporting that they are not expected to teach the glories of killing or abusing ethnic minorities, and that no local or governmental mandates bind them to instilling in their students a drive to oppress or kill Palestinians in particular, says Avi Uss, a union spokesman.

“Anyone consuming international media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is going to be rightly shocked,” commented Uss. “That includes a good number of our teachers, who of course are some of the best, well-rounded, dedicated educators on the planet. Imagine their surprise to discover that, despite the media’s efforts at balance, which requires portraying Israeli and Palestinian societies as two sides of the same violent coin, their own government and culture do not expect of them to dehumanize the other.”

“This goes against everything I’ve been taught by The Guardian and Haaretz,” worried Hasa Ta, a Tel Aviv literature teacher. “I’m not sure how well equipped I can claim to be for my mission as an educator if the Ministry of Education doesn’t match its expectations to the ones created by the BBC and the Times of London.”

Ms. Ta pointed to a list of books from which she must choose to study with her students. “There are over 200 titles on this list, but not a single selection here that you would expect to find on the shelf a Kahane supporter,” she railed. “How am I supposed to conform to the world’s expectations with such constraints? I’m supposed to be just as bad as my Palestinian counterparts, from everything Agence France-Presse and CNN have informed me, but I can’t conform to that standard if the materials I’m provided don’t pass muster. What am I going to do?”

Other teachers voiced a more circumspect attitude. “It’s not such a problem for me,” claimed Jerusalem mathematics teacher Ali Mut. “My students are from East Jerusalem, and they’ll get all the incitement they need outside the classroom. Granted, it will be incitement in the other direction, but that’s fine with me, and with them. It’s not as if the Israel Ministry of Education, or any other Israeli authority, will have the guts to do anything about it.”