#uncle meena

[eretzyisrael]

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

A book meant to teach empathy succeeds in subtly but unmistakably teaching hate.

Astoundingly, two of the fourteen stories in a book about worldwide human rights are centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The other story, "No Trumpets Needed," is more balanced than "Uncle Meena"- a hopeful if extraordinarily naive tale of how a Palestinian kid who is struck mute when his (obviously innocent) brother was killed by Israelis still works to send a message of peace across the security barrier with kites, and the Israeli settlers respond back in kind. (In fact, grassroots peace initiatives are virtually all initiated by the Israeli side; the Palestinians regard them as "normalization" and actively work against them.) This story does mention Palestinian terror in passing but it doesn't say the real reason why the barrier exists. The author blithely and falsely says that it is to "separate Arab from Jew" but not to protect Israelis from being blown up. The only link to the Biblical past of the region is ascribed to the mute Palestinian child, who is a shepherd.  Even in this far less offensive story, the only people who are humanized are the Palestinians; the Jews remain an abstraction.

When viewed as a whole, this book by Amnesty promotes the lies that Jews have no rights to the land, Jews have no history in the land, Jews are anti-Muslim, Jews kill Palestinians for no apparent reason beyond hating Muslims, Palestinians have no freedom because of Israel, and Palestinians are saintly victims.

The very Universal Declaration of Human Rights that forms the theme of the book was written specifically in response to the Holocaust, and now is being used as a tool to teach children to hate anyone who supports a tiny place on Earth where Jews can live fully as Jews in their own ancestral land.

Children who read this book are not sophisticated enough to understand how they are being manipulated. I can easily imagine that rabid anti-Israel Jews in college today first learned about the conflict from this book.

Giving children anti-Israel propaganda in their school reading is immoral, and Amnesty should be taken to task for inciting kids into hating Israel.

[eretzyisrael]

Children's Story Teaches Conditional Acceptance of American Jews

It’s not only that “Uncle Meena” promotes a one-sided, misleading narrative on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – though it certainly does this. The Palestinian author and her Palestinian characters, for example, fail to mention terrorism faced by Israelis, even as they criticize Israeli security measures that arose in response to such terrorism. Perhaps that’s understandable. They have the option to present their narrative without interference from inconvenient or contradictory information, and they seize the opportunity.

But American students pushed toward the view that Palestinians killed in conflict with Israel have “died in the struggle for our freedom,” as the narrator puts it, will gravely misunderstand the conflict if they’re not also exposed to the reality that many of these so-called freedom fighters were heavily armed, illiberal members of fundamentalist, antisemitic terror organizations that, in an effort to wipe Israel off the map, target Jewish civilians in flagrant violation of international law. There is not even a hint of this reality in the story.

Noora, meanwhile, might not know or care that Grandma can generally pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan; or that after an era of largely free travel, restrictions on Palestinian passage from the West Bank into Israel were imposed in response to Palestinian violence during the first intifada, and later were part of an agreement between Palestinian and Israeli leaders to allow for greater Palestinian autonomy; or that the Temple Mount on which the al Aqsa Mosque stands is the holiest site in Judaism; or that some Palestinians harass and curse Jews visiting this holy site. These are key elements of the story — just not this story.

Noora’s ignorance or indifference isn’t reason enough to impose the same onto American school children. To introduce the Arab-Israeli conflict only from the view of one side’s partisan is to indoctrinate and mislead students. This is what Barakat’s story does, as does an  anthology published by Amnesty International that includes “Uncle Meena” but no mainstream Jewish perspectives, and as do some teachers who introduce Barakat’s story in their classrooms.