Nurit Peled-Elhanan

In Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, which was released in the UK in April 2012, Nurit Peled-Elhanan describes the depiction of Arabs in Israeli schoolbooks as racist. She states that their only representation is as "refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists," claiming that in "hundreds and hundreds" of books, not one photograph depicted an Arab as a "normal person."[4]

Dr. Arnon Groiss, a leading expert in the field of textbook analysis, criticized Peled-Elhanan's working paper, "The Presentation of Palestinians in Israeli Schoolbooks of History and Geography 1998–2003", which was based on seven schoolbooks, for being "highly selective [in its] use of source material, leaving out all references which contradict [its] thesis," "[a] deliberate misinterpretation of facts" and "[i]naccurate, distorted, and even downright [based on] false evidence." The author Arnon Groiss concluded that "Peled-Ehanan's claim regarding this point is clearly false ... This heavily politicized and thus biased approach distorts the material to produce a picture to her liking." Groiss further criticized the work of Peled-Elhanan for stretching the definition of racism to include cases that researchers would normally categorize as ethnocentrism. To date, the paper has not been published by scholarly journals.[10]

In an August 2020 webinar hosted by her brother, Miko Peled, Elhanan said that the Israeli textbooks teach students that Israel exists primarily to prevent another holocaust, and as such, Jews are the only ones ever presented as victimized. She stated further that the curriculum commands students to actively ignore other victims, and that it “Nazif[ies] Arabs.” [11]

Considered by some an authority on Israeli textbooks, Elhanan has also issued statements on Palestinian curriculum, albeit without specifying which of the several she was referring to or having published work on the subject. She claims that it is “highly censored,” and that references to Jerusalem, the Nakba, and refugees are removed, though she has not cited any specific evidence to this point. Elhanan also asserted that entire pages of textbooks are left blank as a result of this censorship, and “even if they wanted to [teach hate, they can’t because] they are censored.”[11]

In 2020, Elhanan stated that "their [Palestinian] curriculum is financed by the World Bank, the EU and so on who actually work for Israel."[11]

Elhanan’s opinions on the conflict are ever-present in her public appearances outside the academy. She attributes malicious intent to Israeli society and leaders. In a 2007 address, she called Israeli draftees “murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olives, and poisoners of wells” as well as “disciples of mass murderers”.[12]

In a 2013 interview for Ground Views about her study of Israeli textbooks, she said that Israelis were educated to “legitimate massacres” and glorify the military exploits of Sharon, Barak, and Rabin.[13] In 2014, she wrote “Israeli leaders who worship nothing but Power and Death should know that no words will ever wash this blood off their hands, that nothing will ever exonerate them.”[14]

In the same 2007 address to the Women in Black movement, she said of Israeli mothers:

“[They]are nothing but golems that have turned on their creators and are more terrible and cruel than they, who dedicate their wombs to the apartheid state and the occupation army, who educate their children in unmitigated racism and are prepared to sacrifice the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders’ megalomania, greed and bloodthirstiness. These mothers are also to be found among the teachers and the educators of our day.”[15]

Elhanan frequently equivocates between the plight of Palestinians and the holocaust. During the 2014 Gaza Conflict, she stated “Will anyone remember the day the Holocaust of Gaza begun, or had reached its peak? I doubt it. I am a linguist, and therefore very conscious of the power of words. I know that I have just said ‘Holocaust’- and so it is.”[16]

She supports the Boycott Divestment Sanction movement against Israel[17] and has said “what Daesh (ISIL) is to Islam, Zionist Israel is to Judaism.”[3]

Elhanan criticized Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua for comments he made in reference to the cultural gap between Jews and Arabs that Yehoshua said was the reason they could never live together. She said that in her eyes Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah are equivalent: "They enjoy watching children die." When asked about an incident in which residents of a neighborhood in East Jerusalem had a barbecue near a Jewish neighborhood during Yom Kippur, shouted through megaphones and attacked Jews returning from synagogue, Elhanan said that the occupation and lack of neighborhood services generated hate and "hate creates things like that."[1]

Elhanan has stated, "The ones that are hurt are never the ones that deserve it. Was George Bush killed in the Twin Towers disaster? No. He ought to have been killed."[1]

In 2007 she implied that Bush, Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon were destroying the world and accused the United States and the United Kingdom of "infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and bloodthirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists."[18]