While wading through responses to one of my latest reports, I came across the following refutation. "Part of the problem that nobody talks about is the Palestinian educational system that instills hostility and hatred from early grade school on, [and] doctrines that lead to suicide homicides."
My answer to that familiar refrain is: even though this reputed cornerstone of Palestinian teaching is certainly talked and talked about repeatedly in some quarters such as AIPAC or the Jerusalem Post, I want to know: what's really to talk about?
The "problem" is not the Palestinian "educational system," which these people do talk about at length in predictable negative generalities but not specifics. The "problem" is the brutality of the never-ending occupation, which is enforcing and abetting the escalating colonization of the best parts of the West Bank and Gaza; and that they don't talk about. Under such conditions, however, the terrible facts of colonization speak for themselves without the need of a single school book being opened.
What does need to be talked about in this context is that the reason why Palestinian youngsters don't need their schools to "instill hostility and hatred" of Israel (or a series of U. S. accomplice administrations for that matter) is because if they really did, it would mean that they have been sleeping through the daily experiences of debilitating and demeaning occupation. No Palestinian can escape that, even when he or she is asleep.
Specifically what they can't escape is the kind of Israeli hostility and hatred (of which ironically only the Palestinians are being accused) in the form of soldiers and settlers in their midst, whose continued presence provides irrefutable assurance that 1) escalating annexation of their land will continue unrelieved, 2) that a variety of non-judicial collective punishments for daring to oppose the occupation will continue unrelieved: for instance, imprisonment without charges in the form of curfews, detentions, and/or jailings of hundreds of thousands of boys, men, girls, and women--as well as President Arafat, 4) that home demolitions, and the withholding, theft, and the frustrating of such services and essentials as water, electricity, medicine, clinics, and hospitals will continue unrelieved, 4) that the severest restrictions of movement of goods and people from village to village and town to town anywhere in the world will continue unrelieved, and 5) that in the Old City of Hebron, CPT will need to continue--apparently indefinitely--to conduct its daily school patrols in order to be on the spot when settlers and soldiers try to stop youngsters from trying to get an education.
Furthermore having experienced the U. S. educational system first hand, I find that instilling chauvinistic antagonisms, national and racial condescensions, jingoistic tainted concepts of history, and the fomenting of forms of violence rationalizing politically correct patriotism is not much different than that being taught elsewhere in the world, including the Middle East and especially Israel, which as we know, outside of the U.S., is the most extensively militarized nation in the world: an authentic Goliath pitted against a Palestinian David.
As for "doctrines that lead to suicide homicides," I've just listed a few of the living, or I should say dying examples that have created the conditions, which have made it possible for violent Palestinian radicals to recruit their unique teenage or not much older underground army of terrorizing occupation resisters. The conditions, not the schooling, are what have been convincing some youngsters to enlist in the very uneven campaign against the relentless annexation of their lands and rights, which is being achieved and enforced in part with U.S. supplied weapons of large scale destruction and intimidation, and the products of Israel's near universal conscription. Those conditions and not their schooling is what has been turning a relative handful of disillusioned deprived, dispossessed, and disenfranchised kids into mini-smart bombs and pintsized guided missiles.
However, with respect to "doctrines that lead to suicide homicides," if the writer meant a so-called technique of incitement, which reportedly promises recruits the prospect of sleeping with a bevy of beautiful virgins in Paradise, such assurances are simply the Middle Eastern version of recruiting incentives applied everywhere. For instance in the U. S. where sleeping around this side of Paradise is a somewhat easier proposition for libidinous young American males than for their Middle Eastern counterparts, the remarkably similar recruitment assurance to American prospects is still that they too can be all that they want to be.
However, given the circumstances of every young Palestinian's dreary existence, when it comes to sleeping in Paradise, the other day my wife, Sis, wondered: if the promise of multiple sex with multiple virgins in Paradise is really what is convincing young Palestinians to become suicide bombers and not the desperate existence they are still being obliged to endure, then how come young Palestinian women have been willing to die that way too?
Of course, in writing this, I am creating the possibility of being misunderstood with respect to the purported efficacy of violence: a grave notion, which runs counter to my belief. So, I am adding the following disclaimer to the preceding arguments: I am neither excusing nor rationalizing the terrible effects of "suicide homicides." So what I have been saying must not be taken as an apologetic for today's violent Palestinian terrorists; but of course, the same condemnation applies to their terrorizing IDF counterparts too.
Moreover those critical of Palestinian violence, especially suicidal violence, in order to discredit Palestinian aspirations for genuine independence, cannot have it both ways. By that I mean it is well known that acts of desperation-driven suicidal violence are an honored component of Israeli lore too. Remember Samson? And several hundred years later there was the mass murder of the cornered women and children by their Zealot husbands and fathers atop the Masada mountaintop in the Judean wilderness.
This hallowed event--depicting an epitome of honored and so-called honorable patriotism--took place during the final desperate days of the Jewish revolt against Rome. Then, as we know, in an act of terminal defiance, the male remnant committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner.
However, one wonders what those ancient heroes promised their loved ones with respect to a Paradise to come as they slit the throats of their wives and children.
Of course, some will complain that I have my nerve in perceiving a symmetry that really doesn't exist between those long ago events and what today's purportedly lust driven and erroneously taught Palestinian youngsters have been perpetrating on Israeli innocents during the current uprising. Perhaps there isn't. But I do perceive an undeniable asymmetry. So let's leave it at that.