Washington State’s ‘Native Education’ Curriculum Attacks Israel In Grade School

While it is true that most Palestinian Arabs likely view their uprisings in that way, the ancient and unbroken Jewish residence in these same sacred lands is omitted from the lesson.

•         There is no mention of the evidence of Jewish indigeneity or the need for a sovereign Jewish homeland in the often violently intolerant Middle East.
•         The assignment’s language indicates that students will never hear anything about the archaeological and textual discoveries that place the Jewish people in the land more than a millennium before the Arab-Islamic colonial incursions.
•         Nor will students learn about the Jewish majority in Jerusalem dating back to the 1800s, or the genetic evidence indicating that most of the world’s Jewish population can be traced to the Levant.
•         Perhaps most disturbingly, the centuries-old oppression of Mizrahi Jewish communities in the Arab world, culminating in their brutal ethnic cleansing in the 20th century, is also left out. Nearly 1 million refugees were compelled by these anti-Semitic atrocities to find refuge in Israel.

Since students do not receive the above information in the Since Time Immemorial curriculum, those who complete the assignment will likely come away from it with two notions: first, that Israelis are analogous to Europeans who overran another people’s territory; and second, that the ethical position is to side with the indigenous Palestinians in their fight to reclaim their sacred homeland from Jewish usurpers.

True, the lesson does not explicitly assert either of those two propositions. The children are left to make obvious inferences for themselves. But no schoolchild will be able to avoid the curriculum’s suggestion that Israelis are the intruder and Palestinians, the victim.

Those conclusions might not be a conscious deduction on the part of the child. The scandal behind the lesson is that it plays on the innocence of grade-schoolers: all those boys and girls who think that they are “just doing” their required Native American assignment, but have no clue of the controversial ethics, history and politics of the Middle East that are being smuggled into it — and into their subconscious.

Any intellectually honest adult can see that this assignment is not an actual lesson on Jewish-Arab history. It is the exploitation of Native American suffering in order to plant in the schoolchild’s mind an assumption about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

It is, in short, not a good education but a form of political conditioning.