Adar Cohen, current superintendent of civics education in the Education Ministry was dismissed from his post.
Israel Hayom itemizes some items from the book he approved
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Yisrael Hayom quoted passages from the textbook approved by Cohen that reflect the alleged “post-Zionist” approach. In one passage, the book says that there is a contradiction between Israel’s definition as a Jewish state and its obligation to give equal rights to all of its citizens. The book also says that “The establishment of Israel in 1948 turned the Arabs in the territory of Palestine-Israel from a majority into a minority.”
It reportedly states elsewhere: “A relationship based on control could harm the freedom and equality of those who do not belong to the majority. This is especially true when the majority espouses a selective demographic policy, which entrenches its status over time.”
This passage is seen as critical of Israel’s Law of Return.
The controversial Yotzim L’derech Ezrachit” (On the Road to Civics) approved textbook says: “The Right is generally more cynical, and supports military solutions as important to national security.The Left is generally more humane, and believes in negotiations as the best way to solve conflicts.”
At another point, the book discusses the Nakba Law, which blocks state funding for groups that mourn the creation of the state. “Representatives from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel believe the law impinges on the rights of the Arab minority,” the book reads. “There are also other proposed laws that, if accepted, are likely to harm the Arab minority in Israel, such as the oath of loyalty to the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
In yet another controversial passage, the book tells students, “The Right attaches great importance to the nation and to national heritage… The Right tends to prefer those of the same nation over those of other nationalities and exalts values connected to nationality, and the Left is more supportive of humanism.”
Cohen’s dismissal was a victory for nationalist-Zionist forces within Israel, who welcomed the decision.
Good riddance.
And the parents? Is there a reason why parents are helpless in face of anti-Zionist indoctrination in the Israeli educational system? I’m not familiar with the system but there should be a way for them to let their opinions count when textbooks are full of treasonous notions.
The term “Post-Zionist” is a misnomer. There is a straight line connecting the present “post-Zionists” and the old anti-Zionist Jews of Herzl’s time.
Anti-Zionists opposed his vision of a Jewish state. Many of those who managed to evade the Nazi regime ended up in Palestine. Those early anti-Zionists have a shameful history of opposition to the re-establishment of Israel, even as Hitler was murdering Jews. And later, when survivors languished in DP camps, those anti-Zionists opposed their coming home to Palestine. They did not want them to affect the Arab majority.
They have always disguised their self-hatred under a cover of “concern for the Arabs”.
Their humanitarianism, however, is hollow. It shows in their callousness towards Jewish victims of Arab hatred and terror.
They are not just “leftists” either. They are ANTI-ZIONISTS. Many of them are ardent capitalists engaged in brisk trade with the PA and Gaza.
Deep in their dark little hearts they won’t be satisfied with partition and Two States. They want the full dismantling of Jewish Israel.
The post-Zionist should never have been appointed in the first place. Adar Cohen is free to believe whatever he likes, but he is not free to impose his politics on others, especially not on schoolchildren. He seems to feel that it is his right to impugn and denigrate Jewish self-determination by virtue of the purity of his “humanitarian” stance. No person has the right to side with his country’s enemy and expect his state to continue to employ him. This should also apply to post-Zionists in universities.
The error of his views apart from his politics is that the local Arabs never organised themselves to form a polity, they are no different to other Arabs, they have been given a state in Jordan and Israel offers its Arab citizens equality. To whine about preference being given to Jews to immigrate is no different to the rights of Germans to return to Germany and no-one accuses the Germans of being anti-democratic.
Not the Law of “Regurn”, but the Law of Return. I regret the error.
The “Law of Regurn” is part of the plan conceived in 1917 to give World Jewry exclusive political rights over Palestine. A “National Home” was intended as Step 1 in a two step procedure ending up with the Jews exercising sovereignty in a reconstituted Jewish State. Giving the Jews immediate sovereignty after WWI was thought to be antidemocratic. That was not a bad view. That is because in 1917, although the Jews in Palestine had had a plurality in Jerusalem since 1845 and a majority since 1863, in all Palestine they were only about 60,000 out of 600,000. The French gave the Alawite minority sovereignty over Syria and look at the mess now. Hafez Assad, the father of Bashir Assad the current Syrian President also had to massacre other Syrians to keep control when he was President.
So, the question was how to give the Jews the exclusive political or national rights to Palestine without being antidemocratic? The answer was to give them the political rights in trust, not to vest until the Jews had a population majority. England and America were the possible trustees contemplated in a memorandum of the British Foreign Office dated September 19,1917. Giving them the political rights in trust meant that the trustee had a legal interest and could exercise sovereignty, while the Jews had only a beneficial interest — destined ultimately to vest when the tacit condition of population majority had been attained. That is why the mandate called for a National Home, step one in this two part process. That would give the Jews time to build up the country and attract though immigration from the diaspora, the majority needed for exercise of sovereignty just as any other modern European nation-state. What the British contemplated at the time was very much like the Arabs contemplate for their own state in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem. That would be step one, but the “Greater Goal” as referred to by Abbas Zaki, a member of the Central Committee of Fatah not long ago in an Al Jazeera program, would be to wipe out Israel within the Green Line too.
To facilitate the Greater Goal of the Balfour Declaration, the trustee was forbidden to cede any of the political rights to “foreign powers” but it promptly did so, first temporarily suppressing close settlement on the land in Transjordan and then ceding it to Abdullah and his tribe, recently marched up from the Hejaz in the Arabian Peninsula. This was expressly prohibited by the trust document, the “mandate”. The trust document also required the trustee to facilitate Jewish immigration. So the “law of return”, favoring the immigration of Jews from the diaspora, simply carries out the original intent of the framers of the Balfour Declaration. It distinguishes between immigration of Arabs and immigration of Jews and favored the immigration of Jews to carry out the plan of granting exclusive political rights to the Jews, but in a way that would not be antidemocratic.
You can find a statement of this plan in a memorandum of Arnold Toynbee and Louis Namier of the British Foreign Office dated September 19, 1917, shortly before the Balfour policy was published. It agreed that immediate sovereignty of a minority of Jews was antidemocratic in concept, but when it was carried out by granting the rights in trust, not to be exercised until a population majority was achieved, the antidemocratic argument was “imaginary”.
This was predicted in 1917. Is here any question that it was actually carried out? In the 1948 UNSCOP heaings, the Arabs complained that what was intended would deny the people of Palestine the rights of self government until the Jews constituted a majority of the population in Palestine and that an Arab delegation to London after WWII was told this by Winston Churchill. Again, in the Paris Peace Talks, David Lloyd-George said this was exactly what was intended — to give the Jews a chance to build up the country and the population so that they would end up with a reconstituted state.
The Plan conceived by those framing the Balfour policy was a reasonable way of attaining a grant of exclusive political rights to the Jews without being anti-democratic. The plan is operative only for a for a temporary period — until Jewish population in CisJordan, Palestine West of the Jordan, constitutes a majority of total population. In 1917 the British did not think it unfair. In 1920 the princiipal WWI Allies did not think it was unfair. In 1922, the League of Nations did not think it was unfair. In 1922, a joint resolution of the US Congress approved of iit, and in 1924, the UK and the US entered into the Anglo-American Convention that conferred on it the status of domestic British and American law as well as International Law.
Through 1948 when the British abandoned their trusteeship, the Jews had only about one third of the population. But with the mass voluntary exodus of some 700,000 Arabs without ever seeing a single Jewish soldier, and with the influx from survivors of the Holocaust, and some 800,000 Sephardic Jews from the neighboring Arab state that had been driven out of their homes of many centuries before the Arab arrived there, by 1950 the Jews had attained a majority within the Armistice boundaries. According to Ambassador Ettinger, it would continue to have a majority of 66%, down from 80% even after annexing Judea and Samaria. But the Law of Return is still needed so that eventually, Israel can annex Gaza too. When it does so, it will still have only 22% of the political or national rights originally intended.
The left is more humane? Really? Why does the left support totalitarian movements such as islam and communism which have massacred millions? And negotiations do not solve conflicts where one side’s aim is the annihilation of the other.
Thank G-d! One Avram Burg in Israel is plenty enough but to have his anti-Zionist clone in the Education Ministry was intolerable.