Israel created Hamas and bolstered its political presence, so it's tough to have sympathy for it now. You get what you asked for. Still, Hamas is acting like a piece of shit by saying that the "sons of Israel" had been annihilated and brainwashing the youth with outlandish propaganda. There are red lines when it comes to common decency and respect towards the mind, and Hamas is crossing those red lines.Textbooks have long been a point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which dueling historical narratives and cultural clashes underpin a territorial fight. And they are central examples of what Israeli leaders call Palestinian “incitement” against Jews, held up as an obstacle to peace talks newly resumed under American pressure.Beyond their take on Israel, the new texts are also a salvo in the war for influence between the rival Palestinian factions: Gaza-based Hamas and Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank. They reflect a growing gulf between the 1.7 million Palestinians living in the densely populated Gaza Strip and the 2.5 million spread among the West Bank’s cities and villages.“Textbooks are always and everywhere a very important means of representing a national ethos,” said Daniel Bar-Tal, a Tel Aviv University professor who helped lead a comprehensive recent study of Israeli and Palestinian textbooks.“When a leader says something, not everyone is listening. But when we talk about textbooks, all the children, all of a particular peer group, will be exposed to a particular material,” he added. “This is the strongest card.”What Gaza teenagers are reading in their 50-page hardcover texts this fall includes references to the Jewish Torah and Talmud as “fabricated,” and a description of Zionism as a racist movement whose goals include driving Arabs out of all of the area between the Nile in Africa and the Euphrates in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
“Palestine,” in turn, is defined as a state for Muslims stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. A list of Palestinian cities includes Haifa, Beersheba and Acre — all within Israel’s 1948 borders. And the books rebut Jewish historical claims to the territory by saying, “The Jews and the Zionist movement are not related to Israel, because the sons of Israel are a nation which had been annihilated.”
The circle of violence begins in the classroom. That is where minds are formed, fresh and ripe for the taking. That is where Hitler went to build his army. That is where the Homeland Security regime in the United States has went to in order to build a young and ideologically committed force to take on pissed off veterans and alienated extremists.
Those who run Hamas are no dummies. They are reading from the same playbook. All totalitarian gangsters go down this path.
