Aging British musician Roger Waters (founding member of Pink Floyd) has launched an education resource on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Dublin, in collaboration with the Irish solidarity group Sadaka – the Ireland Palestine Alliance.
Waters told a packed audience in Dublin that he “wholeheartedly endorsed” a teaching pack entitled “Palestine & Israel – How will there be a Just Peace?”
“Palestine & Israel – How will there be a Just Peace?” was produced as a joint initiative between Sadaka and the Curriculum Development Unit Education for Reconciliation Project. The resource is intended to support young people in critically exploring injustice and peace building within a framework of Human Rights and International Law. The resource meets Transition Year requirements in the Republic of Ireland and the Local and Global Citizenship curriculum in Northern Ireland.
Are you feeling that tingle of joy normally associated with love among peoples?
“I have studied the education pack.. it is extremely well laid out, extremely informative and eloquent in a way that kids will understand… all we can do is encourage our young people to approach life with open minds and to nurture the kernel that they all have within, which is concern for their fellow man,” Waters said at the event.
But wait, there’s more: Mairéad Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, co-founder Peace People, Ireland, wrote: “I believe when young people see the suffering of others, they have a natural instinct to help, but often don’t know what to do. This valuable resource will give them the knowledge, which brings confidence and courage, to seek solutions based on nonviolence and human rights. It is a necessary tool of education for young people living in an age fast moving from the false belief that violence and war works, to one based on the law of love, dialogue and International Law.”
Ah, the power of unbiased truth…
Marie Crawley, chair of Sadaka, said that Waters’ endorsement of the pack is “immeasurable in its importance and will be hugely influential with young people around the country as we encourage schools to use this resource.”
Here are some of the nuggets Irish students will get from this package of truth:
Lesson 3 includes a timeline of events. It actually acknowledges the Holocaust—which won’t sell so well in any Arab market—but it also does the dripping thing – entering small lies into the “information” to end up eventually with a seemingly ironclad case. It turns out, according to this timeline, that the reason there was disagreement on the part of the Arabs with the UN partition plan of 1947, was that it unfairly gave the Jews more land than they were entitled to, demographically.
The whole throw the Jew into the sea thing is miraculously absent here…
Here’s a link to the PDF version of the package – read it for yourself. But if you need a poignant example to take away from this educational experience, I would just offer here, verbatim, the complete list of recommended books for the truth seeking Irish student. It represents a gallant effort to present both points of view: the view that all Israelis are murderous monsters, vs. the view that all Israelis drink the blood of babies:
Books
Carter, Jimmy (2006) Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. New York: Simon and Schuster
Chomsky, Noam and Pappe, Ilan (2011) Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War against the Palestinians. London: Pengiun Books
Finklestein, Norman (2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. New York: Verso Books
Karmi, Ghada (2002) In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story. New York: Verso Books
Pappe, Ilan (2007) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications
Shlaim, Avi (2000) The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. London: Pengiun Books
Thomas, Mark (2011) Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel’s Separation Barrier. For Fun. London: Ebury Press
Yes, Virginia, a theme emerges…