On propaganda and education
Over lunch last week, a friend told me about a disturbing incident that took place shortly before she made `aliyah*.
Her university was sponsoring a series of Israeli-Palestinian student dialogues in which she had decided to take part. The theme for one of the sessions was connection to the Land, and each participant was asked to bring in some sort of literature — a word used loosely in this case to mean text, art, or anything else — expressive of his or her connection. The panel saw photos of kibbutzim, Arabic poetry about al-Quds**, and such.
The problem arose when my friend presented her selections: Libi Bamizrach by Rabbi Yehudah Halevi (1085?-1140 C.E.) and Psalms 137:5-6 ("If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . .") and provided dates to go with them. The Palestinian participants, as she tells it, just about bit her head off, saying that these texts were Zionist forgeries from the early 20th Century, and that Jews had no ancient history in Palestine.
I can understand not having heard of R. Yehudah, but the book of Psalms? There are plenty of arguments that the Hebrew Bible is not as old as it claims to be, but the latest date of redaction that I've heard proposed (until now) was some time in the 2nd Century C.E.. (Perhaps Elf can lend me a hand there.)
I'm not really sure how anyone can be kept this ignorant at an American university, particularly when the subject of ignorance is fairly important to one's own religion. (As I understand it, Islam considers the Bible to be a flawed but important secondary scripture.) What's really scary is that, as my friend pointed out, these are the people who decided to come to the dialogue. Imagine what's going on in the heads of the people who didn't.
* lit. "ascent." Colloquially, to make `aliyah is to emmigrate to Israel.
** Arabic name for Jerusalem. Roughly "the Holy Place."
Her university was sponsoring a series of Israeli-Palestinian student dialogues in which she had decided to take part. The theme for one of the sessions was connection to the Land, and each participant was asked to bring in some sort of literature — a word used loosely in this case to mean text, art, or anything else — expressive of his or her connection. The panel saw photos of kibbutzim, Arabic poetry about al-Quds**, and such.
The problem arose when my friend presented her selections: Libi Bamizrach by Rabbi Yehudah Halevi (1085?-1140 C.E.) and Psalms 137:5-6 ("If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . .") and provided dates to go with them. The Palestinian participants, as she tells it, just about bit her head off, saying that these texts were Zionist forgeries from the early 20th Century, and that Jews had no ancient history in Palestine.
I can understand not having heard of R. Yehudah, but the book of Psalms? There are plenty of arguments that the Hebrew Bible is not as old as it claims to be, but the latest date of redaction that I've heard proposed (until now) was some time in the 2nd Century C.E.. (Perhaps Elf can lend me a hand there.)
I'm not really sure how anyone can be kept this ignorant at an American university, particularly when the subject of ignorance is fairly important to one's own religion. (As I understand it, Islam considers the Bible to be a flawed but important secondary scripture.) What's really scary is that, as my friend pointed out, these are the people who decided to come to the dialogue. Imagine what's going on in the heads of the people who didn't.
* lit. "ascent." Colloquially, to make `aliyah is to emmigrate to Israel.
** Arabic name for Jerusalem. Roughly "the Holy Place."
posted by Lawrence | 4:29 AM
2 Comments:
Well, if you're that sure of what you know, what's the harm in dialoging? Especially is you don't know you're wrong. I remember reading an essay by a Catholic convert to Judaism who flipped at all the ridiculous misinformation and ideologically doctored history her children were being fed about the Spanish Inquisition, and railed off at the rabbi, who listened understandingly. Later, she had a child doing a report of some sort on a similar subject, and she found herself reading one of the books...and realizing to her chagrin that SHE was the one who'd be taught the modified history. She hadn't had any ideological ax to grind herself; it was just what she had always been taught, and she'd never found reason to question it.
That said, how do these people explain the seventeenth-century Puritans? They were very big on Psalms.
Rachel: I agree that the battle to convince the other side to get up and leave is a waste of time, no matter who happens to be doing it. It's like the arguments between fundamentalists and atheists trying to prove logically the God does(n't) exist.
I guess what really bugs me is that people are being taught that we were never there in the first place; that Zionism is just a conspiracy to conquer Palestine by convincing the world that we actually have a history there. (As if anyone would want Palestine for any other reason.)
Anyone who insisted that the Arab connection to the land is an imaginary one, and that they arrived about a century ago under false pretenses, would be rightly called an idiot. Why are people getting away with it when they do it to the Jews, who have just as demonstrable a history here?
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