On How Israel’s Education System Teaches the Palestinian Dehumanisation

Introduction: Education as a tool for colonialism.

In March 2025, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights reported the “ratcheted up settlement of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem”. It has been difficult to argue for another lens to view the circumstance ever since.

Colonialism is “the practice by which a powerful country controls another country or other countries” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary). The framework offered by this concept can also investigate societal interrelations to oppression and genocide. As such, it leads to inquiries upon the national acceptance of violence and mass displacement.

Much footage of Israeli soldiers mocking the destruction of Gaza were released since the mass displacement and bombardment following October 2023. Most of them responded with the capital’s chanting “death to Arabs” in Jerusalem’s annual merch (ABC News Australia, 2025). Although such lack of sympathy isn’t holistic of the Israeli Jews, it does open up new waves of hatred towards the community as a form of obsession. The constant antagonism of “Arabs” brings about fear and leads to a collective sense of rage towards this marginalized group.

This agony leads to the inquiry: how did some Israelis come to seek the fetishism of a necropolitical (Mbembe, 2011) regime?

The most accepted answer among post-colonialist and counter-current literature is: they have been conditioned to.

And it all starts in education.

This article aims to tackle two of the most salient aspects of how Israeli’s educational system teaches the dehumanisation of Palestinians.

1.    The Weaponisation of the Holocaust.

In 1953, the Knesset (Israel’s General Assembly; parliament) approved the Yad Vashem (“A memorial and a name”) Law. It read: "Yad Vashem is established to commemorate the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, memorialise destroyed Jewish communities, honor resistance fighters and rescuers, and ensure the preservation of their memory for future generations." (Article 2, Law, 5713‑1953).

Never once did it mention the aim of turning a collective trauma into vengeance. Hence, it could not have predicted the transformation of memory and resistance into hatred and fear. Nor could this law solely be used to explain the 48% of Israeli Jews fearing Israeli Arabs, while 82% of Israeli Arabs didn’t state fear towards Jewish Israelis in that same study (PCPSR, 2017).

However, this doctrine didn’t age well. The memory of the Holocaust is currently taught to Israeli Jews from nursery school to 12^th grade. More than empathizing to the victims and relating to their experience, they are taught to personally identify with the Holocaust. The complete antagonism between the Jewish condition under the Nazi rule and under Israel’s national development seems altogether irrelevant. For what matters to the Israeli Ministry of Education is the assumption that "every Jewish Israeli citizen is a Holocaust survivor or a potential victim of future Holocaust-like events" (Eyal Naveh, 2017, p. 175).

Rage is taught with the aim of making Israeli students fear a second Holocaust and seek survival in colonisation. The mandatory Holocaust memorial journeys are often causes of hospitalisation, psychotic symptoms or even full-blown PTSD (Mimouni-Bloch, 2013).

Suffering then becomes both normal and normative – the aim is to treat the journey as a “rite of passage” (Efrat, 2016). The transformation of trauma and memory into a collective integration process would then lead to the belief that the more one connects to Nazi oppression, the more Jew one would become.

As such, “The national memory is meant to support political and social arrangements in the present” (Resnik, 2003). Thus, education means for the propagation of memory as a political tool. In other words: the Holocaust is then used as a weapon for justifying illegal occupation.

Little can beat the education system’s teachings of personal identification to a Holocaust victim. The tie between primary childhood and collective trauma is made to be hardly breakable. The reimprisonment of Israeli students as Holocaust survivors reflects on the socially constructed collective memory of the region. The “sites of memory” – also called “Les Lieux de Mémoire” by Pierre Nora in 1992 – turns Israelis into narrative victims. The 11,5% of West-Bank poverty compared with 63,7% in the Gaza strip – predicted by the United Nations Development Programme to rise to 74,3% in 2024 – seem irrelevant to contradict this national sentiment of constant fear of survival.

2.    Deconstructing Palestinians: the figure of the “Arab”. 

One might question: who is the mass destruction of the weaponisation of the Holocaust targeting?

Given the disconnection between Palestinians and German Nazi’s, it would rationally make no apparent sense to blame the “Arab” for the Holocaust suffering. However, for addressing such a question, one could argue that rage is cyclically passed down to the weaker side of a society. And the defenceless, in this case, are the Palestinians.

Israel’s educational system uses language and representation to dehumanise Palestinians and pass down rage - reflected by the 12,482,041 hate posts in Hebrew Against Palestinians solely in 2024.

The Israeli professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan calls out for the educational system renaming the Palestinian as “Arabs”. This generalisation strips the citizen naked of the dignity of belonging to a nation. In turn, this coincides with the erasure of a homeland as a whole. If we remember correctly from George Orwell, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” (Orwell, 1946).

But what if Big Brother still has a tele-screen to show Palestinians as “farmers, refugees or as masked and painted as terrorists” (Peled-Elhanan, 2024)? Then the fact that Israelis never, or hardly ever, meet this population face to face would further corroborate the belief of the inexistence of humanity between such populations. The lack of representation of real Palestinian citizens by the mass education system shows an attempt of the Israeli schools to recreate the popular imagination of what hides behind the figure of the “Arab”.

Finally, let’s call to the table Orwell’s Ministry of Truth to explain the teaching of remodelled versions of maps that lack geographic accuracy to international consensus. As maps with no marks of illegally occupied Palestinian territory become the norm, the actual treaties of International Recognition lose their value. How can a person remember a non-existent place? The same way that Winston Smith remembers life before The Party took over. One can only hope that such brain-washed victims don’t come to love their Big Brother too.

Conclusion: Sovereignty in between the gun and the human eye.

Beyond the political science and international relations notion of international sovereignty, the heart of self-proclamation’s ultimate expression pulses “in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” (Mbembe, 2011).

Since mass systematic brainwashing education is not enough to explain the negligence of some of the Israeli population to genocide, we cannot conclude brainwashing to be enough of an explanation to the attempt of the erasure of Palestine’s existence. But, at least, this explanation is prompt to give meaning into the massive hatred shared by Israelis on satirical videos about rape, child death and the bombarding of Gaza’s houses. In turn, this text aimed to turn our nihilism into absurdism and hopefully make Camus proud.

Correspondingly, I choose to believe that the human eye is connected to our hearts and not brains. For brainwashing can corrupt the mind, but our tears will always be made equal by water. History is cyclical but it is not immutable. The weaponisation of the Holocaust to shoot at a persecuted and structurally mystified population is not enough to erase a nation. Because Palestine is an idea: it is the rose that will be born out of used and old arms once they end up in open-air garbage dumps. Those millions of residuals of cold irons will remember the worm hearts through which their bullets perforated. Their coldness will then give way to a livable warm environment, watered by a rain of tears.