For generations, Jewish-Israeli children have been brought up in an education system where Palestinians rarely appear as Palestinians. Instead, they are “Arabs”, “enemies”, and a “demographic threat” — or, in the words of scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, “a problem to be solved.” A professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Peled-Elhanan has spent years documenting how Israeli textbooks erase Palestinian life, mobilize Holocaust memory to produce existential fear, and present occupation and ethnic hierarchy as natural facts of life. As Israel’s genocide in Gaza lays bare the consequences of decades of dehumanization, she reflects on what this system has produced — and, having experienced the post-October 7 crackdown on dissent firsthand, what it does to those who challenge it.
More content from this blog
- Nicaraguan Political Prisoners Keep Dying in Regime Custody – 16 June 2026
- Dispelling the Multipolar Myth, by Patrick Bond – 5 September 2025
- The Women Organising Homes and Labour, by Liam Taylor – 16 May 2026
- Surrogacy and Bodily Autonomy as a Matter of Sexual and Reproductive Justice – 20 October 2025
- The Revolution Nationalists Cannot Join. Interview with Nandita Sharma – 21 June 2026