Column One, by Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post)
“The Education Ministry…. now led by Yuli Tamir, one of the founders of Peace Now, … last month announced that in accordance with her educational vision, school children will learn fewer facts, since there is no real historic truth.”
Excerpts;
Since Deputy Premier Shimon Peres was the father of the Oslo process, it can come as no surprise that he has been the central engine behind the corruption of the establishment. Today, Peres openly mocks the rule of law by basing his campaign for the presidency on his promise to pardon Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Fatah commander and convicted mass murderer.
After inaugurating the Oslo process, then-foreign minister Peres worked steadily to undercut the Zionist foundations of the state bureaucracy. The most obvious example of this was his decision to close the Foreign Ministry’s public diplomacy department. That department had been responsible for making Israel’s case to the world based on Jewish history, the history of the Zionist movement, and the history of the Arab world’s war against the Jews in the Land of Israel.
For Peres, ensuring public support for his embrace of the PLO – a terrorist organization founded in 1964 to destroy Israel and to nullify the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in its homeland – necessitated a rejection of history. Still today, Peres insists that history must be rejected. Just two weeks ago he said, “If it were up to me, I would cancel all history studies.”
Under the thrall of Oslo and the control of anti-Zionist professors, the Education Ministry quickly began toeing the line. Now led by Yuli Tamir, one of the founders of Peace Now, the ministry last month announced that in accordance with her educational vision, school children will learn fewer facts, since there is no real historic truth.
As Prof. Anat Zohar, the head of the ministry’s pedagogical secretariat put it, “Until now, classrooms didn’t deal with developing thought, only with the transfer of knowledge. Today, with the expected change, the learner will become active. The knowledge will be built in terms of context.”
“Olmert is part of the problem. The corruption scandals that engulf Olmert and his colleagues in Kadima are the fuel that drives the anti-Zionist takeover of the national establishment.”
So since everything is now contextual, there can be no value distinction between the a-historical, false Palestinian narrative and Jewish history.
Wednesday, Ma’ariv’s columnist Ben Dror Yemini published a front page jeremiad entitled “From independence to suicide.” Yemini reported that three taxpayer-funded bodies – the Rabinovich Fund, the Jerusalem Cinematheque, and Channel 8 – have hired the anti-Israeli and arguably anti-Semitic former Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan to make the official movie marking Israel’s 60th birthday next year.
Yemini asserted, “Anti-Zionists, who make up perhaps a half a percent of the public, control 70% of the cultural institutions in Israel.”
Yemini ended his dirge with an impassioned plea to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to end the disgrace and cancel the deal. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he wrote, “You have the opportunity to act as a Zionist and a nationalist, to prevent this enormous travesty. Do not let this opportunity pass.”
But what Yemini failed to note is that Olmert is part of the problem. The corruption scandals that engulf Olmert and his colleagues in Kadima are the fuel that drives the anti-Zionist takeover of the national establishment.
BUT FOR all this, there is reason, great reason, for hope in this country. This hope was clearly evident on Sunday when hundreds of young people from all walks of society came together at the Kedumim cemetery to pay their final respects for Prof. Yosef Ben-Shlomo. Ben-Shlomo, who died at 77 after a prolonged bout with cancer, is widely considered to have been the greatest teacher and scholar of his generation.
Due to his staunch loyalty to Jewish and Zionist values, Ben-Shlomo – who headed Tel Aviv University’s Jewish Philosophy Department until he was coldly encouraged to retire eight years ago – was isolated and ignored by his colleagues in Israeli academia. Upon retirement, he turned down an offer to teach at Harvard and opted to become the chief pedagogue of the secular pre-army leadership training academies that his former students were establishing.
At the onset of the Oslo process 14 years ago Ben-Shlomo challenged Israeli society to prove that Zionism is not a passing fad. He took up his own challenge by becoming the life force behind the academies that swiftly began filling the void left by the school system. In eight short years these schools have inculcated thousands of Israeli youngsters with Jewish, Zionist and humanist values.