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Education, Not Settlements, Is the Key to Peace

[New York Jewish Week] Asaf Shariv - 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. But education is the key to creating a true and lasting peace between neighbors. We become what we are taught. We are what we have learned. What we teach our children determines what kind of values they will have. As President Barack Obama has stressed, it takes a community to educate the next generation. All children deserve to be taught peace. This critical fact has long been recognized by the international community. In 1945, the UN established UNESCO to "build peace in the minds of men." 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 UN schools in Gaza. This was met with resistance from a Hamas spiritual leader who 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 when the "road map" for peace was signed in 2003. 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 Palestinian textbooks used in the 12th grade as "child abuse" and the "glorification of death and violence." 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. When peace is a word that is taught to every child in Gaza and the West Bank, then peace will be around the corner. The writer is Israel's consul general in New York.
2009-10-16 06:00:00
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