No Education for Peace=No Peace

I believe the above formula to be a truism.

Yet, sadly, neither Israelis nor Palestinians do a good enough job educating their children for peace, which I define as learning and accepting the painful narrative of the "other."

This is probably true of their proxies as well, the knee-jerk American (Jewish and Evangelical) Zionist Camp and the hyper-liberal European (pan Arab and pan Berkeley) Flotilla Camp. Sorry if you or your loved ones were left out of these generalized categories.


We should all read the most important (perhaps fallacious) story to (not) make headlines this week, regarding Israeli and Palestinian textbooks.

This Haaretz report in the Israeli daily claims that there is at least one Palestinian school teaching the Israeli narrative.

And of course it gets refuted by this story in the Palestinian publication, Ma'an.

Which leaves us at square one.

Forget settlements, the two sides can't agree on what they had for breakfast.

I may soon visit the West Bank to see which account is true.

Didn't Oslo force both sides to alter their textbooks?

Is there even one Israeli or Palestinian high school teaching the narrative of the other side?

Forget this already doomed attempt.

For the sake of a future peace, please tell me there is one.

The Textbook in Question