It’s Harder To Instill Jew-Hate In My Students Via Zoom

by Hassan Kiswani, Palestinian educator

Jenin, September 2 – Coronavirus has upended routine in numerous ways, chief among them the regular attendance of children at school or childcare. Teachers, parents, and students throughout the world struggle this week to resume a semblance of the academic year, often with the aid of technology to replace the classroom environment. The latter offers a measure of protection from the spread of the pathogen, but the context it creates for facilitating the proper fostering of Judaeophobia remains less than ideal.

The personal touch, the direct human presence, plays an outsize role in pedagogical effectiveness. When I embark on my sacred daily mission to rear the next generation of Palestinians who equate their independence and national identity with the elimination of Jewish sovereignty and security, I have come to rely on that personal touch and the inherent adaptability of the in-person medium. Adjusting to the online context has challenged my ability to impart the crucial aspiration of From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be (Jew-)Free.

Thank Allah, the parents have stepped up and stepped in. The work I do in the classroom, whether real or virtual, goes only so far if the lessons I impart receive no reinforcement at home. An engaged parent means a successful student. I am fortunate that the parents of my students, almost to the very last one, display a commitment to antisemitism that makes me proud of our education system.

New integrative models of Jew-hate that deliver the content in interdisciplinary ways can also ease the process. Our arithmetic word problems ask the student to add or multiply Palestinian babies murdered by Jews for blood with which to make Passover flatbread; our physics texts speak of calculating the arc necessary to hit a Jew-driven vehicle with a slingshot from the side of the road. All this augments the direct didactic methods we employ, such as referring to all areas of the land as “Palestine” and denying any meaningful Jewish presence before the twentieth century, thus paving the way to a very specific, one-sided, black-and-white depiction of the Nakba and everything before or since.

Maintaining the effectiveness of that educational approach has not always proved feasible under COVID restrictions. It is our fervent hope that we can return to the physical classroom soon. Only with in-person attendance can we model the behavior we wish to instill, detouring with our students to throw rocks at armed soldiers.

I will leave it to others to explain why we seem no closer to victory than a hundred years ago. It’s probably the Jews’ fault, though.

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