An Education For Death

Gregory Zeimer, a teacher at an American school in Berlin before the Second World War, took it upon himself to study Nazi education, and published a book during the war about it entitled “Education for Death.” Its basic premise is that the focus of the educational system was the production of ideologues, soldiers, and willing martyrs. It was an educational program bred for violence and war.

The United Nations was an organization born of the chaos of the end of the Second World War. Its stated goal was the maintenance and preservation of peace. How strange, then, that one of their organizations, UNRWA, has a curriculum that draws so heavily on the themes present in the education of the Nazis, the very organization whose war caused the UN’s origin.

Perhaps even more strange is that an ostensibly peaceful organization has a curricular program that is so specifically hostile to peace. In a recent perusal of UN Watch’s UNRWA curriculum report, with excerpts from courses taught in Grades 1 – 9, to both genders, in and outside Gaza, they are shockingly and scarily similar in some fundamental ways. They are both fixated on geography and reconquest, a glorification of death, the notion that sacrificing one’s life for the ideological ‘cause’ is prescient and purposeful, and hold an obsessive hatred of Jews. 

War and conquest are at the heart of both education systems, inevitably tied in with a glorification of dying for the ‘cause.’ In Hitler’s Germany, boys were literally bred as soldiers, destined to die in support of Hitler’s military conquest. The notion of land was the ideological root of Nazism, born in many ways out of the miniaturization of Germany and the displacement of German-speaking peoples into new countries. Further, baked into the Nazi worldview was the necessity of Lebensraum, the Germanification of territories in the East that should be rightfully ‘returned’ to them. Teachers were full of stories of alleged misdeeds committed against German speakers in the Polish corridor or Czechoslovakia.

So too, to say that land and conquest are integral to UNRWA’s curriculum is, frankly, an understatement. The UNRWA maps do not even acknowledge Israel’s existence, much less strive for the creation of a peaceable two-state solution. In geography and social studies classes, from grades 1 to 9, all geographical and geopolitical references to the land refer to it as Palestine in its entirety, a land indivisible and rooted in Islam.

The UNRWA Islamic education exam asks students whether the statement “liberating the Al-Aqsa Mosque and making sacrifices for it is an obligation for all Muslims” is true or false (with the answer being ‘true’). The notion of “liberation” “sacrifice” and “obligation” are all deeply ideological in nature, and are apparently the requirements for not just Palestinians, but Muslims as a collective. This connection to the land and the reclamation of the entirety of pre-state Palestine as a whole is fundamental to UNRWA’s existence; it is the only refugee organization that refuses resettlement and relocation, instead maintaining the notion of a “right of return” in perpetuity. Or, in the words of the UNRWA curriculum, “explain the grammatical mark of the underlined word in the following sentence: ‘I will not give up a centimeter of my land.’”

From UN Watch Report, available online. p. 39.

Dehumanization of Jews is, unsurprisingly, part and parcel of both as well. The Nazis are infamous for this, of course, given their genocide of some 6 million Jews in 6 years. But that capacity for death begins in a classroom; it begins with ideological shaping. Jews were systemically othered in the education curriculum, reframed as an insidious enemy whose destruction is a requirement for the national and ideological continuation of Germany. Per the Nazis, the United States, the press, the news, sports, Hollywood, and the banks were all part of one nefarious Jewish plot to take over the world. There was a fixation on the “Judaization” of institutions of power. They were the key enemy, behind all other enemies — Soviet Russia, Imperial Britain, Capitalist America. The Versailles treaty, the economic crisis, the Great Depression, the loss of the First World War. Jews were put outside the German universe of obligation, and reframed as vermin — and, after all, do you need to feel guilty about killing a cockroach? 

While UNRWA does not necessarily go that far, Jews [framed as “Zionists”] are seen entirely through three lenses: illegitimate usurpers, liars and distorters, and child-killers. In a strange irony, a study of the Koran reveals descriptions of Jews as the “sons of Israel” and references the Jewish Temple, but simultaneously, any Jewish connection to the land of Israel is categorically denied. Any acknowledgment of said history is seen as a “Judaization of education of Jerusalem” in order to “erase its Arab-Islamic identity and fabricate geography and history.”

In the 6th grade, students are taught that the “occupation gave its settlement Canaanite names to steal Palestinian history and heritage, to falsify it.” Israel is not a legitimate country or member nation of the UN, it’s merely “the occupation.” Jews are the boogeyman of fictional stories used for reading comprehension, such as a teenager who meets a “Zionist officer” on the seaside and is killed in a “fountain of blood which erupted from his chest.” The only history that is presented is one entirely of Zionist aggression; the Arabs in the story are eternally innocent and/or vengeful, always the oppressed, never the oppressor; always the victim, never the perpetrator.

Intrinsic in this is the weaponization of history where only one side is demonized, and Jews feature as both figurative and literal boogeymen responsible for all of the imagined and real evils of a society. Just as Jews were not responsible for the Great Depression, Israel is not solely responsible for the position that the Palestinians are currently in — while yes of course they bear responsibility for part of it, the choices of their leadership, continual wars, the apathy of other Arab nations, and a refusal to compromise have also led them to their present position. But framing them thus negates peoples’ own need for introspection or a more careful consideration of actions. It also erases the need to learn painful lessons from one’s own history, or reckon with poor choices of your ancestors. It is a rage-filled and morally comfortable position. And one that’s fomenting a continuation of a conflict and a refusal to accept history, accept the results of wars started and lost. 

Tied into this desire for conquest is of course the glorification of death and martyrdom. Across the UNRWA curriculum, this is evident. Seventh grade boys are taught a Mahmoud Darwish poem that describes Israel as the “despicable enemy/ occupier” which will ultimately be expelled “with blood and flesh” from “Palestine.” Students in grade 5 learn a text called I Love My Village, in which the village is described as “mixed with the blood of the martyrs.” Fill-in-the-blank answers reveal that “self-sacrifice is the most important meaning of life, especially for a people that suffers from [the occupation’s] disasters of siege, suppression, harassment, destruction and arrests — for the purpose of achieving [freedom], establishing the State, and determining [fate].

A grade 9 reading comprehension story features a story about a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus near the West Bank city of Ramallah that killed 30 civilians; it’s celebrated as a “barbecue party” (haflat shiwaa). Embedded throughout is the narrative of terrorists described as “martyrs” “fighting leaders” and “heroes.” Descriptions of life without martyrdom is of “weakness.” A text describes Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and says that “each of us wishes to be like them.” Armed struggle is described as a “divine right.” And perhaps most alarmingly, a reading comprehension text in Grade 7 declares that “drinking the cup of bitterness with glory is much sweeter than a pleasant long life accompanied by humiliation.” A sentence in a Grade 5 Arabic grammar text describes “I will commit jihad to liberate the homeland.” 

The Hitler Youth, similarly, were taught from an early age to anticipate joyfully the coming death in service of Adolf Hitler. Students were advised that they were “Hitler soldiers” and that they were to “grow up and be a fighter for the Fuhrer.” The daily oath commanded them to be “willing to ready and give up my life for him, so help [me] God.” Sections of texts in this education system included such quotes as “to us will be granted the privilege of lying in this holy German soil as Hitler’s conquering soldiers.” A teacher remarked to his class that his class “may all have to die for Hitler before [they] are twenty, but is that not a wonderful privilege?” 

Both of these organizations are fundamentally skewing death as a glorified objective; to die for the ideology of one state, be it a Nazi German or an Islamic Palestinian, is the greatest honor. And the outcomes are clear. In Nazi Germany, at the bitter end of the war, Hitler’s young were some of the last fighters in the Battle of Britain, with children as young as 9 armed with antitank warfare. While Israel gets plenty of (at times legitimate) criticism for being the engine to create more Hamas, what does this UNRWA curriculum do if not breed students directly into Hamas itself? And how, then, can we possibly expect anything other than a continuation of war with this glorification of death and violence inculcated from such an early age? If they are educated in the United Nations schools that their future is one of jihad and destruction, of conquest and return, of illegitimate history, and dehumanization?

UNRWA states its curriculum is designed to inculcate the values of “tolerance” in their charges, creating a next generation of Palestinian youth that are “innovative, questioning, thoughtful and open-minded.” At least the Nazis were honest about their educational goals. They never said they were anything other than what they were: a system designed to create more soldiers and breeders. And in both, history plays a critical role. And just like Zeimer once said about a fanatic boy he met in 1938, “I could not blame the boy for feeling as he did. His emotions had been aroused to the boiling point with stories that would touch any boy’s sense of justice. That they presented only one side of the historical events, he had not been allowed to realize.” 

How true that remains today.

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All source material: Zeimer, Education for Death, found here. UN Watch report, found here.