2023-11-02 17:26:00
Explaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to students in simple words but with all the nuance that this requires is the challenge facing teachers at the start of the school year. To help them accomplish this delicate task, educational support had to be made available to them. Expected before the All Saints’ Day holidays, this sheet should finally be published this Friday, we learned on Thursday.
A guide to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for teachers: “We must ensure neutrality”
It was therefore necessary to wait 27 days following the Hamas attack on Israeli territory for an educational sheet to see the light of day. However, this sheet is produced by the “Questions vives” project, a collaboration of the Enabel agency (Belgian development cooperation), the High Council for Media Education (CSEM), Amnesty International and RTBF. On its site, the project claims that it produces educational resources within 36 hours of a news event. On this theme, we actually had to wait more than 600 hours to see the color.
Why did it take so long to publish? Obviously, there was a “freeze” in production at the political level, we learn from a concerned actor. The subject is so sensitive that some actors in the process were concerned regarding the consequences that this resource might cause.
On October 18, two days before the fall holidays, the Minister of Education Caroline Désir (PS) announced that the work had already been done, but that it still had to go through “a final validation phase with the federal level ”. This phase lasted more than two weeks. “Given the particular nature of the conflict and the important underlying issues, the documents must be subject to validation by Enabel in conjunction with the FPS Foreign Affairs,” specified Minister Désir.
As the Minister of Foreign Affairs Hadja Lahbib (MR) is not formally involved in the process, it is to the side of the Minister of Development Cooperation, Caroline Gennez (Vooruit) that we must turn to understand why this validation took so long. Here, we will just learn that, the subject being very sensitive, it was decided to take our time and err on the side of caution.
From the tape, we will learn that there was a desire not to add fuel to the fire and that this caution was also motivated by the fact that Belgian workers involved in development cooperation were still on the ground gazaoui.
The ideological differences of the different parties within Vivaldi on the Israeli-Palestinian question may also have manifested themselves during the process of validating the sheet. A letter was therefore sent to Minister Gennez’s office to remind her of Belgium’s official position on the conflict in the Middle East. Remember that, at the end of August, the socialist minister had made statements on the occupied Palestinian territories which had irritated Israel.
Within the political sphere, the fact that a sheet intended to enlighten students on such a sensitive topic was written by actors considered by some to be politically oriented also raised some eyebrows.
If this tool is validated on Friday, it can be quickly communicated to teachers of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation via the e-class platform.
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