I am From Palestine

In the previous post, I spoke about how Paulo Freire uses his made-up problem of banking education as a deceitful Motte and Bailey argument in favor of turning education into ideological indoctrination. In the following video, we see a similar use of Freire’s tactic on behalf of Palestinian propaganda. 

The basic story we have here is about a little Palestinian girl named Samidah who goes to school and is faced with the fact that the class map only shows Israel so she does not know which country to mark as her country of origin. When Samidah tries to explain the problem to her teacher, she simply responds that Samidah must be from Israel. When she goes home, her father explains to her that they really are from this wonderful place called Palestine and that one day they will return. Samidah imagines herself in this special place called Palestine, buying food in a marketplace, and seeing the sunset over the Golden Dome. The next day, the girl goes back to class with additional Palestinian gear than just the necklace she wore at the beginning and unfurls a map that has Palestine instead of Israel.

What struck me about this video was that I have been in many American public school classrooms, and I have never seen them use a map that did not differentiate the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. Furthermore, I have a hard time imagining a teacher so ignorant as to not know the difference between Israel and Palestine. This is not Azerbaijan versus Armenia.

Why would the filmmakers make a film about a made-up problem? The purpose is to distract us from the solution. Contrary to appearances, the film's solution is not that we should acknowledge Palestinian identity and even that they have a legitimate claim to part of the land. When the girl goes back to class, she does not bring a map that shows the West Bank and Gaza and explain how these places are not part of Israel. Instead, her map eliminates Israel and replaces it with Palestine.

This raises the question of what the girl and by extension the filmmakers imagine is supposed to happen to all the Jews in Israel when it is replaced by Palestine. It is interesting to note that the imagination montage does not include any obviously Jewish people. One gets the impression that they have mysteriously disappeared. As with most Palestinian activism, its real purpose is not that Palestinians should be able to live in peace, dignity, or even independently but that the State of Israel should be eliminated. Ever since October 7^th, there should be no illusions that this means anything but mass murder.

What if this movie was about a cute blond-haired German girl who imagined living happily on her Lebensraum farm in Ukraine with other Germans, whose ancestors had been “unjustly” forced to flee their homes after World War II? It would be obvious that this was Nazi propaganda and that the film, even though it never says so explicitly, is calling for millions of Ukrainians to be murdered. Ukrainians presently living on the land are not going to simply leave to rectify a historical injustice and will have to be killed. As such, there is no moral difference between such a film and one that explicitly glorifies mass murder beyond the fact that the latter has the virtue of being intellectually honest.