Education, Not Settlements, is the Key to Peace

By Asaf Shariv, Consul General of Israel in New York

All too often, a freeze in Israel’s West Bank settlement construction is characterized as the crucial step to bringing peace to the Middle East. Settlements can disappear, as they did from Gaza four years ago. But education is the key to create a true and lasting peace between neighbors.

We become what we are taught. We are what we have learned. We send our children to school to learn how to read, write and do arithmetic. They will use these tools to study science, geography, history, art, and poetry and many others topics. What we teach our children determines what kind of values they will have and what kind of adults they will become.

As President Barack Obama has stressed, it takes a community to educate the next generation. Teachers must inspire. Parents must keep their kids on the right track. But it is the government’s responsibility to set high standards, support teachers and principals and ensure that students receive all the opportunities they deserve. All children deserve to be taught peace.

This critical fact has long been recognized by the international community. In 1945, the United Nations established UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. This organization supports many activities, all of which have the primary and ambitious goal to “build peace in the minds of men.” The building of classrooms, printing of books, training of teachers is but means to achieving this goal and should serve to advance this objective.

In Gaza, more than 200,000 students attend schools supported and run by the UN. Unfortunately, these students are deprived of the education that will “build peace in the minds of men.”

Gaza shares a border with Israel. Much of Gazans’ food, electricity and fuel come across that border. People cross the border to work in Israel. Yet these children in Gaza and the West Bank use textbooks that do not show their neighbor across the border, the State of Israel. Are the textbooks trying to make Israel disappear by eliminating it from their maps? It is important for these children to learn that they have a neighbor and how to live in peace with her.

Genocide has been, tragically, a recurring fact in the history of the world. Just this year, on the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, the UN decided to teach basic information about the Holocaust to eighth-grade students in Gaza as part of human rights classes. This attempt to “build peace in the minds of men,” to create in the children of Gaza an understanding of the history of their neighbors, was met with resistance from a Hamas spiritual leader. He declared that teaching Palestinian children about the Nazi murder of six million Jews was a “war crime” and that such a curriculum would be “marketing a lie and spreading it.”

To deny history and the humanity of victims of genocide is to prepare for future atrocities.
The critical importance of education in reaching peace in the Middle East was understood by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when they signed the “road map” for peace in 2003. As part of the journey, Phase I required that the Palestinian government end incitement against Israel by all official Palestinian institutions.

Despite this commitment, in 2007, four years after the road map was signed, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton described the Palestinian textbooks used in the 12th grade as “child abuse” and the “glorification of death and violence.”

She went on to say, “I believe that education is one of the keys to lasting peace in the Middle East. … Ever since we first raised this issue some years ago there still has not been an adequate repudiation of incitement by the Palestinian Authority. It is even more disturbing that the problem appears to have gotten worse. These textbooks don’t give Palestinian children an education, they give them an indoctrination.”

For peace to have a chance, children need to be given the opportunity to grow up with love, or at least friendship, and not hate. The first word that every Israeli child is taught in school is shalom, peace. I know that when peace is a word that is taught to every child in Gaza and the West Bank, then peace will be around the corner.

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