You won't have heard about this on any of the standard media outlets; indeed it doesn't even seem to have made it to Al Jazeira for some reason, but yesterday in Jerusalem the Max Rayne Hand in Hand Bilingual school was subject to yet another arson attack, only the latest in a series of such attacks against the school which has been targeted by ultra-right wing Israeli groups. Nazis. They sought out all the bilingual books they could find and burnt them first. Does this remind you of anything?
What they don't like is that by promoting education as a means to achieving understanding and tolerance between Arabs and Jews in Israel, the school might actually bring about peace between the two groups. And they don't want that. They want the utter destruction of the Palestinian peoples. You think I exaggerate perhaps? Then consider this graffito which was scrawled on one of the school's walls which was not destroyed:
"There's no co-existing with cancer"
I don't know about you, but whenever I hear about books being burnt I feel a great cry of anger rise up from deep inside me. I first felt this when I was a teenager and learnt about the great Nazi book burnings in the 1930s. They didn't just burn anti-Nazi propaganda, they burnt anything they didn't like: Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, many other works of literature now thought to represent the finest distillation of human thought ever put on paper. What they didn't understand, and what the latter-day Nazis in Jerusalem also fail to appreciate is:
YOU CAN'T BURN AN IDEA
Hang in there you brave men and women who run that school. You are the future of Israel and I salute you.
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