Colonizing Childhood and Zionist Pedagogy: Interview With Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Colonizing Childhood and Zionist Pedagogy: Interview With Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Singhe Atygalle-1 Apr, 2013

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, peace educator and activist and co-laureate along with late Prof. Izzat Gazzawi of the 2001 Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and the Freedom of Speech awarded by the European parliament. Peled-Elhanan has translated Albert Memmi‘s Le racisme (1982) and Marguerite Duras‘ Écrire (1993) into Hebrew. In 1997, her daughter Smadar, aged 13, was killed during a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem. “Terrorist attacks like this are the direct consequence of the oppression, slavery, humiliation and state of siege imposed on the Palestinians”, she told reporters in the aftermath of Smadar’s death. She and her family work with the Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved Families for Peace. Professor Peledhas critically dissected the ideological content of Israeli school books for the past five years. She considers children as victims of Israel’s militaristic, settler-colonial culture. Her radical views have exacted a professional cost. “University professors have stopped inviting me to conferences. And when I do speak, the most common reaction is, ‘you are anti-Zionist’”! “Change”, she said, “will only come when the Americans stop providing us with 1 million US dollars a day to maintain this regime of occupation, racism and supremacy”.

At a mass rally of Women in Black in September 1997, she addressed the gathering:

Wars are waged for no other reason than the insanity and megalomania of the so-called leaders and heads of state. For them children are no more than abstract notions: You kill one of mine, I will kill 300 of yours and the account is settled… “Satan has not yet devised a Vengeance for the death of a young child” said the Jewish poet Bialik, and that is not because Satan has no means to do so, but because after the death of a child there is no more death for there is no more life. The child takes the war and the future of the war into his little grave to rest with his little bones…I wish to revive two slogans that were misused by the Israeli right wing and have not been heard since the present government came to power. The first is that “Brothers are not to be forsaken”. Our brothers and sisters in the refugee camps and under occupation, who are deprived of food and livelihood and of all their human rights, should not be forsaken now. The other slogan is, “The uprooting of settlements tears the nation apart”. Uprooting of olive groves and vineyards, the demolition of houses and confiscation of land will tear apart our already endangered species of peace-seeking people and will bring it to extinction. And when this species no longer exists, there will be nothing left to write, nothing left to read, nothing left to say except for the muted story of slain youth.

This interview with Professor Peled took place during the fourth international session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) in New York City, November 6-7, 2012. The theme for the fourth session was “US Complicity and UN Failings in Dealing with Israel’s Violations of International Law Toward the Palestinian People”. Speakers included former adviser to Palestinian negotiators Diana Buttu, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, author and activist Ben White, the Palestinian Center for Human Right’s Raji Sourani and others.

The RToP was launched in Brussels on March 4^th 2009 chaired by Stéphane Hessel, ambassador of France and among the initiators were Ken Coates, Chairman, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Leila Shahid, General Delegate of Palestine to the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg and Professor Peled. Speaking at the press conference in Brussels, Professor Peled remarked:

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