Twenty-fifth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

This study examines the multimoal ways Israeli textbooks legitimate the symbolic, cultural, and physical elimination of Palestinian and Non-White Jewish “others.” The interpretation of findings uses the paradigm of Zionist settler-colonialism and its logic of elimination. The analysis uses the Gardening Metaphor elaborated by Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust), which applies to regimes that wish to create an artificial society on the basis of racial purity. The semiotic means used in textbooks to represent both groups have a lot in common and stem from the same logic and the same project of Jewish racial “purity” which the books are meant to promote. In order to accept such segregationist policy and engage in its practices children are made heterophobic through the use of Holocaust rhetoric of victimhood and Power, that teaches fear of others, extreme nationalism and majoritarianism, and promotes the development of a predatory identity. Social Semiotic principles of inquiry are used in the multimodal analysis and therefore and every sign is understood as motivated by interests and ideologies within Israeli settler-colonial culture. The verbal analysis will include Holocaust language of victimhood (equating all others to Nazis and using “extermination” Auschwitz” and Anti-Semitism regarding every act of Palestinian resistance) and the language of Power. The visual analysis will be applied to artistic and scientific visuals such as photographs, maps and graphs.