If You Think Prospects For September Are Scary--Try Visiting Balata

That is what Haaretz'a Avi Issacharoff did, and Issacharoff finds the Palestinian indoctrination at Balata to be frightening:

"We give the kids courses on the right of return and teach them that the Israelis stole their lands. We've sent hundreds of camp children into Israel to see the villages and towns that were taken from us. We took them to Jaffa, Ramle."


"Our message is that without a doubt they will return to the places from which they were driven out," he says.

He [Taysir Nasrallah, a senior member of Palestinian Authority ] points to his family's village on a map of Israel marked with villages from 1948. Earlier this week 35 children completed a leadership course at the center.

They prepared presentations with the map of Israel in relief. For them it has always been and remains the map of Palestine. Suddenly September seems a lot less frightening than the more distant future.

What is it about preparing Arabs for peace that the Palestinian leadership finds so difficult?
Evelyn Gordon notes that the indoctrination itself goes beyond talk about the 1967 lines--Palestinian children in the West Bank are being taught that Israel itself is illegitimate:

Jaffa and Ramle aren’t West Bank settlements; they are towns in pre-1967 Israel. And these are the locales Israel’s “peace partner” is teaching Palestinian children to consider their own. Indeed, Issacharoff reported, Nasrallah’s “dream is to have the [community] center move to Jaffa when the day comes”; hence its name: the Jaffa Center. Moreover, children are regularly assigned presentations involving a map of Israel, but “for them it has always been and remains the map of Palestine.”

Then there’s the fact the children are being taught “Israelis stole their lands” – in other words, that Jews have no right to a state in any portion of what is today Israel; they are thieves who must be stripped of their ill-gotten gains. That’s hardly a message conducive to peaceful coexistence.

As Gordon points out, we are not talking here about Hamas, from whom we would expect such things--we are talking about the West Bank, which Obama keeps insisting is Israel's peace partner with whom Israel must negotiate based on the 1967 lines.

From the look of things before requiring Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Netanyahu will have to ask that Abbas agree that Israel has a right to exist.

And I wouldn't bet that the answer would be in the positive.

Technorati Tag: Israel and West Bank.