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For several generations, Jewish-Israeli children have been brought up in an education system where Palestinians rarely appear as Palestinians, but rather as “Arabs,” “enemies,” and a “demographic threat.” In the words of scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, they appear above all as “a problem to be solved” — stripped of a social, cultural, and historical life of their own.
In textbooks, the “Land of Israel” replaces the State of Israel; Palestinian life is erased from view; and modern Zionist history is tied directly to the biblical past, with millennia of Jewish life in the diaspora almost entirely removed. Holocaust memory, meanwhile, is mobilized to produce a sense of permanent existential fear.
The result, Peled-Elhanan argues, is an education system that teaches occupation, ethnic hierarchy, and state violence as natural and necessary facts of life.
A professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Peled-Elhanan’s research traces how Palestinians, as well as Israel’s internal “others” — Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews — are represented inside Israeli textbooks, and how those portrayals shape the moral and political imagination of Israeli society.
In this episode of The +972 Podcast, Peled-Elhanan discusses the role Israeli education has played in bringing the country to this moment, in which a Kahanist government is committing genocide in Gaza. She examines the ideological work performed by history, geography, and Holocaust education; the erasure of Palestinian life from maps and curricula; and the ways non-Ashkenazi Jews are absorbed into the national story while still being marked as backward or inferior.
Peled-Elhanan also reflects on the scrutiny directed at Palestinian textbooks, the growing repression of teachers and academics who criticize the war, and her own firsthand experience of the post-October 7 crackdown on dissent.
As Israel’s genocide in Gaza exposes the deadly consequences of decades of dehumanization, she also imagines what a radically different education system could look like — one that teaches children the shared history of this land, rather than training them to fear and conquer it.
