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All They Are Teaching Gives Peace No Chance

At a few Gaza schools, children get an education in hate
Anna Badkhen
April 25, 2002
Gaza City -- Six days a week, kindergarten teacher Samira Ali El Hassain tells her class of 30 5-year-old boys and girls what makes the world go round.

"Here is how an egg becomes a chicken," she says to a student. "Here is how to draw a circle," she tells another.

Hassain then quizzes the class about a previous, more serious lesson. "Who are the Jews?" she asks.

The children know the answer by heart: "The enemy!" they reply in unison.

"And what should we do to them?" Hassain asks in a voice that is as casual as when she discussed chickens and eggs.

"Kill them!" the children cry out.

Hassain works at a school run by Al-Mujamma Al-Islami (the Islamic Association), an Islamic charity group created in 1973 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the militant group Hamas. Such schools represent about 10 percent of Gaza kindergarten classes and are the only ones to teach such vitriol.

Signs that extol violence are found everywhere these days in the streets of Gaza City, the capital of the Palestinian-dominated Gaza Strip.

On the walls, graffiti calls on residents to "kill the Jews" and "die like shahid (martyrs)" -- the men and women who have died trying to kill Israelis. Instructions on how to become a shahid are spray-painted, along with photos of weapons, exploding buses and portraits of men wrapped in explosives.

And if that isn't enough to convince Gaza's children -- many of whom spend their days roaming the dusty streets, playing in sandbag barricades, shooting toy assault rifles and throwing stones at each other -- hatred of Israelis is part of their kindergarten lesson plan.
TEACHING RESENTMENT

"I tell them that they are Palestinians, that they must defend their land when they grow up, that this land belongs to them and not to the Jews, our enemies," said the 35-year-old Hassain. "Every morning, I ask them: 'Did you watch the news? Do you love the enemy who massacres the Palestinian people? Would you want to make peace with them when you grow up?' "

Her 24-year-old colleague, Istama Showish, imparts a similar message.

"We teach them that Jews who live in Jerusalem and Palestine are occupiers, that they have taken even the air that we breathe," she said.

Al-Mujamma Al-Islami has won the hearts of many poor Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by donating food and clothes and setting up affordable schools. The kindergarten where Showish and Hassain teach costs just $7 a month, about half the cost of a regular day-care facility here.

But Yassin, the organization's founder, who uses a wheelchair and lives in a compound in the slums of the city, is also indelibly linked with Hamas -- which claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest suicide bombings in Israel, including the March 27 attack that killed 25 Israelis at a Passover meal.

Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a top Hamas political leader, denies that his group is linked with Al-Mujamma Al-Islami. But he clearly supports the association's anti-Israeli curricula for 5-year-old children.

"You see? Even children want to sacrifice themselves for the sake of Palestine," Rantisi recently told The Chronicle at Hamas headquarters in Gaza City. "We are using our own, simple means to say to the aggression of a strong army: 'Stop.' ''

In an incident Tuesday night that shocked many Palestinians and has raised questions about whether groups like Hamas are manipulating young people in a dangerous fashion, three Gaza City boys -- one 14 and the other two 15 -- were killed by Israeli troops near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim. The army said they had been carrying pipe bombs, an ax and knives in an attempt to attack Netzarim.
EDUCATION MEANS PEACE

Two hundred miles north of Gaza, Sundos Battah is appalled by such incidents. One of 9,000 Israeli Arabs living in the Gilboa region near the West Bank, he sees education as a primary force for peace.

For the past nine years, Battah has been involved in a program that brings together Jewish and Palestinian children from 11 to 17 years old three times a year. He hopes such programs will become the basis of peaceful coexistence in this war-torn land.

"They play, they paint, they do sports," said Battah, who coordinates the project on the Palestinian side. "As soon as they get together, they forget about the political situation."

But Battah says the Israeli incursion in the West Bank has made his work "very difficult."

"We have to explain to our children the violence they see on television in a way that won't ruin their budding relationship with the Jewish children," he said. "We must not let it deteriorate to the level of the Gaza children."

Sigal Vaitsman, a 14-year-old Jewish high school student who participates in the project, said, "We should be more mature -- then we can solve things around a table, not with bombings."

Nur Saleem, 17, an Israeli Arab from the Gilboa village of Muqeble, agrees and says the role of schoolteachers is crucial to peace: "If teachers preach hatred for the Jews, or hatred for the Palestinians, we will repeat things that we have learned at school when we grow up."
LEARNING TO DIE

Back in Gaza, however, the kids at the Al-Mujamma Al-Islami kindergarten class started a new game last week called "martyr's funeral."

"One of them pretended to be a martyr, while the others lifted him up and pretended that they were burying him," said Showish. "We tell them that the shahid are very good people, our heroes. We tell them that they must grow up and do the same."

Khitam Ajrami, an expectant mother, says she will tell her unborn child the same thing.

In the cool shade of her stripped-down home in the Jebaliya refugee camp, a mile north of Gaza City, 20-year-old Ajrami mulls over the words she will tell the child she expects to bear in two months. Last month, her husband, Najib, was shot to death by Israeli soldiers when he tried to blow himself up at the Jewish settlement of Dugit in Gaza.

"I will tell the baby that his father died a martyr," Ajrami said, smiling shyly from under her green-and-yellow scarf. "I will teach him to love our country, to know that the Jews occupy our land, that we are right, and the Jews are wrong. I will teach the baby to hate Israel.

"If the occupation continues, I will teach my child to do what his father has done."

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