Why do Palestinians teach their children to hate Israelis?

3. Why do Palestinians teach their children to hate Israelis?

This question assumes that Palestinians are inherently violent, and is deeply rooted in anti-Palestinian, anti-indigenous racism.

Palestinians do not necessarily “hate” Israelis. For more than a century, Palestinians have gone out of their way to extend compassion, courtesy, and our tradition of hospitality to Israelis.¹

Palestinian resistance and the struggle for liberation is not about “hatred” for Israelis. Rather, it is about undoing the oppressive structures Israel and its imperial allies have constructed to eliminate Palestinians, destroy communities, and extract and control resources across Palestine and Syria. These structures manifest in the form of systems that exert themselves across Palestine and interrupt daily life — not only in the sense that displaced Palestinians cannot return to their homes, or the disruption of a rich, collective social life in Palestinian society, but also in the most mundane aspects of basic existence. Palestinians cannot move between cities without passing Israeli checkpoints, settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, carrying Israeli-issued IDs, moving around in cars with distinct license plates that mark them for additional stops and harassment (and limit their geographic mobility), and passing Israeli-controlled gates at the entrances to cities and villages. Palestinians also live under constant surveillance, whether it is carried out by Israelis or their subcontractors of domination in the Palestinian Authority, who enforce zionist hegemony by punishing Palestinian resistance.

One doesn’t need to be Palestinian to imagine the feelings of frustration, anger, injustice, and indignity that come with having one’s land and future stolen by a colonial state. Palestinian resistance is not about “hatred”, but rather about dismantling a system that maintains violence against us on a daily basis, and a declarative act of belief in a just future. Anyone who has experienced injustice or can imagine it, should be able to understand this distinction.

Notes