Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a Professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an Israeli peace activist, and one of the founders of the Bereaved Families for Peace. After the death of Elhanan's 13 year-old daughter in 1997, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
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Elhanan's daughter, Smadar Elhanan, was the victim of a suicide bombing attack Ben Yehuda Street Bombing in Jerusalem on September 4, 1997.[1] She states that she does not blame the group of suicide bombers for the incident, but rather the Israeli oppression of Palestinians as an indirect cause of her daughter's death.[2] She had commented the following on the death of her daughter:
"My little girl was murdered because she was an Israeli by a young man who was humiliated, oppressed and desperate to the point of suicide and murder and inhumanity, just because he was a Palestinian.[2] There is no basic moral difference between the soldier at the checkpoint who prevents a woman who is having a baby from going through, causing her to lose the baby, and the man who killed my daughter. And just as my daughter was a victim [of the occupation], so was he."[3]
Elhanan is a laureate of the 2001 Sakharov prize for Human Rights and the Freedom of Speech, awarded by the European Parliament.
Peled-Elhanan is the daughter of the late general, Arabic scholar and politician Mattityahu Peled, and married to Rami Elhanan, a co-founder of the Parents Circle - Families Forum.[4]
"Some people are willing to modify their system of classifications, unfortunately in Israel this is not the case. Israel is a nation state and its discourse is monologic to the extreme. It is a multicultural and multilingual society that behaves like a monolingual and monocultural society. Its system of classification is racist and immutable. People are either Jews or non-Jews, and it doesn't matter what they are if they are non-us. They are worth less, not to say worthless. Their blood is cheaper."[2]
"This is the system that dictates the relationships between us and the Palestinians. How else can one explain young people who were educated to love their neighbour as they love themselves killing their neighbours, destroying their educational institutions, their libraries and their hospitals, for no apparent reason other than their being neighbours? The only explanation is that their minds are infected by parents, teachers and leaders, who convince them that the others are not as human as we are, and therefore killing them is not real killing; it has other legitimating names such as 'cleansing' 'purifying', 'punishment', 'operation', 'mission', 'campaign' and 'war'."[5]
Elhanan has conducted extensive research on the textbooks used in Israel. She has stated that Israeli textbooks often portray the world as a divided between Jews and the non-Jews, and finds that Muslims are often misrepresented to Israeli children "only as stereotypical scarf-wearing Arabs, masked terrorists, or third world 'Oxfam images' and refugees."[6] Furthermore, many maps in the books lack a green line and show important sites in the West Bank as a part of Israel. She remarks that "this is merely a sophisticated way of ensuring that the pupil will espouse certain basic political assumptions."[7]
In Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, describes the depiction of Arabs in Israeli schoolbooks as racist. She states that their only representation is as ‘refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists’, claiming that in "hundreds and hundreds" of books, not one photograph depicted an Arab as a "normal person".[8]
An unpublished paper "The Presentation of Palestinians in Israeli Schoolbooks of History and Geography 1998-2003", in which only seven books were examined by Peled-Elhanan was criticized by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, now known as the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education for being "highly selective [in its] use of source material, leaving out all references which contradict [its] thesis," "[a] deliberate misinterpretation of facts" and "[i]naccurate, distorted, and even downright [based on] false evidence." The author Arnon Groiss concluded that "Peled-Ehanan's claim regarding this point is clearly false ... This heavily politicized and thus biased approach distorts the material to produce a picture to her liking." Groiss further criticized the work of Peled-Elhanan for stretching the definition of racism to include cases that researchers would normally categorize as ethnocentrism[9]
Elhanan has stated that Muslims are represented as "...vile, primitive and blood-thirsty..." to the citizens of the United States and Great Britain despite "...the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew."[10]
10 year old Abir Aramin, the daughter of Bassam Aramin, an activist in Combatants for Peace, was killed in January 2007. Nurit Peled-Elhanan commented:
"I sit with her mother Salwa and try to say, "We are all victims of occupation." As I say it, I know that her hell is more terrible than mine. My daughter's murderer had the decency to kill himself when he murdered Smadar. The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques at night."[11]