A screenshot from the online video course required by Israel’s education ministry to high school students wishing to travel on school trips. The onscreen caption claims that anti-Semitism in Europe has grown because of the migration of Muslims.
'Israel’s education ministry is requiring all high school students, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, to take a propaganda course and test as a condition for going on overseas school trips.
Adalah, a legal advocacy group for Palestinians in Israel, sent a letter last month to the ministry of education demanding that it remove the requirement and end the hasbara course.
“The Israeli education ministry is trying to turn high school students into agents of propaganda charged with spreading extreme racist ideology,” Adalah attorney Nareman Shehadeh-Zoabi stated.
“This is outrageous and illegal.”
Adalah is acting on behalf of the Masar Institute for Education which runs schools in Nazareth.
One of its schools used to run an exchange program with a high school in Sweden, designed to foster international dialogue and cultural exchange.
But the school had to stop the program as the only way to avoid subjecting its students to the Israeli government’s racist, and specifically anti-Arab, propaganda.
Students are forced to watch a series of videos before being tested.
Questions are designed to inculcate “a radical and racist political worldview that views Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as terrorists and threats,” Adalah states.
Each question has only one “correct” answer that is a “political stance that the student must adopt.”
“The videos are a kind of blunt brainwashing that attempts to shape the worldview of adolescents as the course designers see fit,” the letter adds.
The course is particularly offensive for Palestinian students, who are “forced to internalize humiliating statements about themselves and their families” in order to pass, which Adalah calls a “blatant insult” and a violation of the law.'
Read more: Teens forced to take Israel propaganda course before overseas trips
