The Kite Makers — by Norman Harman
Colonial rule survives by giving its crimes respectable names. Its discourses reserve a gentle vocabulary for the obedience it demands of those it subjugates—pacification, civilization, development, reform. Its language conceals racial domination and organizes consent for it. It severs native resistance from the colonial violence that produced it. It presents that resistance to the world as a defect in the colonized—a disorder of the native character that colonial rule is thereby licensed to treat.
Palestinian resistance has long received this treatment. Framed in a way that deliberately detaches it from the Zionist dispossession and occupation that produced it, resistance is reduced to “terrorism,” an irrational disturbance. At the same time, the Palestinian people are presented as childlike and fanatical—too immature to govern themselves, too dangerous to be left alone—and therefore in need of correction. In Gaza, “deradicalization” is the respectable name for that correction.
In December 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Israel must “deradicalize the whole of Palestinian society.” It was the last of three prerequisites he set for what he called peace: Hamas destroyed, Gaza demilitarized, and Palestinian society remade. For Israel, defeating the resistance is not enough. Peace, in this vocabulary, means remaking the Palestinian people: reconciling them to Zionist dispossession, compelling them to recognize as legitimate the state created and maintained by it, and emptying them of the will to fight for justice. What must be renounced, on those terms, is return, restitution, and resistance.
Netanyahu’s prerequisites have since become a governing plan backed by the Security Council. Resolution 2803, adopted in November 2025, welcomes the Board of Peace—a colonial trusteeship chaired by Donald Trump—as Gaza’s transitional administration. The Palestinian committee that runs day-to-day affairs answers to the Board, as do the bodies that handle reconstruction and public services. The Board sets the terms of redevelopment and coordinates its funding. It conditions reconstruction on Palestinian disarmament.
The plan the resolution endorses opens with the declaration that Gaza “will be a deradicalized terror-free zone” but never defines deradicalization. A former head of research at Israel’s internal security service, writing for a Washington think tank, proposes educational and religious reform, communication under international supervision, and the transformation of Gaza’s “public agenda”—reshaping what its people care about and talk about. The proposal calls for shutting down Gaza’s media channels, conducting intelligence operations to locate “the infrastructure that enables organized incitement,” and enlisting Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and their media to lead the effort.
Colonial domination requires remaking the colonized. Force alone is not enough. The colonized must be severed from the language, memory, and history that make them who they are, that name who oppresses them, that remember what was taken, that give resistance its meaning, and that can organize a people to take it back. This is older than Zionism. Empire after empire has practiced it.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist and theorist of decolonization, described how conquest secures itself: “The night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.”
In 1596, while Shakespeare wrote for the London stage, England’s other celebrated poet drew up a plan to make the conquest of Ireland permanent. Edmund Spenser—author of The Faerie Queene—was also a colonial official and a planter on confiscated lands in Ireland’s Munster province. Military victory, he knew, would not finish the work. He understood what the Irish language preserved: “The speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish.”
The language had to go. The names had to go. Spenser urged their replacement so that the Irishman would “quite forget his Irish nation.” The bards had to go. They kept alive the record of resistance and made those who resisted glorious. The conquest of the land required the conquest of memory.
Under English rule, the eighteenth-century Penal Laws barred Catholics from running schools or teaching. Catholic education survived in informal and illegal “hedge schools”: classes held in cabins, barns, private homes, and sometimes outdoors. The National Schools, established in 1831, were the softer instrument. They excluded Irish from the curriculum and enlisted local teachers to administer an English-language education designed by the colonial state.
Famine, emigration, and economic coercion accelerated the decline of the Irish language. In 1841, an estimated four million people spoke Irish. By 1891, the census counted about 680,000. The schools gave that decline its hierarchy. English meant advancement—the courts, the market, work abroad. Irish belonged to a world without a future.
In the same centuries, Atlantic slavery began its assault on language and memory with forced separation. The trade tore millions of Africans from their societies and carried them in chains to the Americas. Ngũgĩ calls Europe’s contact with Africa a dismemberment. It cut African personhood in two: the continent on one side, the diaspora on the other.
Through sale and resale, slaveholders dispersed speakers of the same languages. They broke apart the families and communities that sustained language and memory. They assigned captives new names and suppressed the drums and other practices through which the enslaved communicated and remembered.
Those languages linked the enslaved to one another, to the worlds from which they had been taken, and to freedom imagined beyond the plantation. Ngũgĩ calls their destruction linguicide, the linguistic equivalent of genocide. “The liquidation was clearly and consciously meant to deny slaves their languages both as means of communication and as sites of remembrance and desire.”
In the decades after emancipation, the United States turned the same instruments against Native nations, joining the seizure of land to the seizure of children. The Western Shoshone historian Ned Blackhawk writes: “For half a century, displacing children and alienating reservation lands defined U.S. policy.” By 1926, nearly 83 percent of Native school-age children were attending boarding schools.
Federal authorities took Native children from their families and nations and sent them to schools operated by the government and the churches it enlisted. Officials cut their hair, replaced their names, punished them for speaking their languages, and taught them that they no longer belonged to peoples entitled to land, sovereignty, or a future of their own. The railways that carried settlers into Indigenous territory carried Native children out of it.
Richard Henry Pratt, the U.S. Army officer who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, gave the program its most notorious formulation:
“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
The Native child could be “saved” only by destroying the Indigenous person within. The boarding school was conquest carried into the child.
Wherever conquest must be made permanent, the method is the same: Seize the land, then attack the institutions through which the dispossessed remember what was taken and teach the next generation to reclaim it. In Palestine, Zionism has followed this colonial script.
In Gaza, Israel’s genocide has targeted the institutions of Palestinian education. Israel destroyed Gaza’s university system, damaged or destroyed nearly every school, and killed over a thousand teachers and education staff. The Board of Peace, charged with making Gaza “deradicalized,” will have authority over what replaces them.
Israel shelled and burned Gaza City’s Central Archives, which held 150 years of records. UNESCO’s preliminary count, limited to what it can verify, records that 164 cultural sites were damaged or destroyed. Israel bombed the Great Omari Mosque, Gaza’s largest and oldest, destroying its manuscript library, which held works dating to the fourteenth century. Thirteen days into the genocide, Israel bombed the Church of Saint Porphyrius while civilians sheltered inside. My relatives were among them.
Israel destroys the archives, the libraries, the museums, the universities. Israel destroys the mosques, the churches, the cemeteries, the neighborhoods, the crops—the inhabited record of a continuous Palestinian presence—to erase a history that exposes the lies used to justify Israel’s creation, and to put myth in its place.
Israel romanticizes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It denies that Zionism is a foreign culture implanted on stolen land. It detaches the Zionist project from its inherent violence, from the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967. It installs the Jewish people as history’s only victim. It manufactures a land without a people, and a homeland in Palestine that is exclusively for Jews. Any new curriculum in Gaza will be written to protect that invented past.
The night of the sword and the bullet has not ended, and the morning of the chalk and the blackboard is already being planned. The plan does not say who will write Gaza’s curricula, train its teachers, or decide which histories its schools may carry. It leaves those decisions to the Board, whose mandate is a “deradicalized” Gaza.
The Board reportedly sent Tony Blair to Ramallah to ask the Palestinian Authority to remove the word “Palestine” from its curriculum, on the understanding that it would otherwise not be treated as capable of reaching an agreement with Israel. The replacement it proposed was “Samaria.” Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, refused.
Trump’s administration is now drawing up a plan to change Gaza’s education system with Emirati counterparts and with Palestinians unaffiliated with the Authority, and to make part of the reconstruction funds depend on it.
Netanyahu’s Wall Street Journal op-ed demanded that “the whole of Palestinian society” be “deradicalized.” That demand extends beyond Gaza to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
In the occupied West Bank, IMPACT-se, an Israel-based advocacy organization, produces reports on the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum. The reports set maps of historic Palestine, the Nakba, and the keys of return alongside material they identify as antisemitic or violent. The keys refer to those carried by Palestinian families displaced during the Nakba, many of whom expected to return within days once the Zionist massacres ended. Passed down through generations, they became tangible reminders of stolen homes and symbols of the Palestinian claim to return.
IMPACT-se’s latest review covers 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides used in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, including in schools operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The review also objects to maps that omit Israel. IMPACT-se presents those reports to the governments on whose funding the Authority depends as evidence that Palestinian education remains unreformed.
The Israeli researcher Assaf David, of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, points out the double standard: Palestinian textbooks are judged for describing Israel as a military occupier, while comparable scrutiny is not applied to Israeli ones. “The very notion of examining only Palestinian textbooks with a fine-tooth comb, while completely ignoring their mirror image in Israeli textbooks, is fundamentally tendentious,” he writes.
IMPACT-se also reviews the curricula of Arab states. Saudi Arabia revised its textbooks: The name Palestine was removed from the maps, the lesson defining Zionism as a racist European movement was dropped, the chapter on the Palestinian cause was discontinued, and “the Zionist enemy” was changed to “the Israeli occupation army.” IMPACT-se praised the changes. Its chief executive, Marcus Sheff, who held the rank of major in the reserves of the Spokesperson’s Unit, the Israeli military’s communications arm, said the new textbooks encourage “tolerance, peace and greater equality.” In July, IMPACT-se counted the deletion of the sentence “the Muslims will never give up Jerusalem” among the improvements.
The Authority’s curriculum is judged by the same standard. For seven consecutive years, the European Parliament has condemned the Palestinian Authority over what it calls incitement in its textbooks. Since 2024, E.U. support has been conditioned on an Authority reform program that includes the curriculum. In April 2026, the European Parliament called for future education funding to be frozen until the textbooks were revised. The terms on which Palestinians may remember their own history have become a condition of funding.
Funding is also used for extortion in Israeli law. The 2011 “Nakba Law” authorizes the finance minister to cut the funding of any state-supported school, university, or municipality that commemorates Israel’s establishment as “a day of mourning,” imposing a penalty of up to three times the amount spent on commemorating the massacres, dispossession, and mass displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.
A Knesset law bars graduates of Palestinian universities from teaching in Israeli schools and in occupied East Jerusalem. The committee debates made the purpose explicit: the “Israelization” of Palestinian education. Amit Halevi, a member of the Knesset who belongs to the Likud party and is one of the law’s sponsors, complained that Palestinian-trained teachers failed to “cultivate Israeliness.” This September, for the first time since East Jerusalem was occupied in 1967, every incoming class in its public schools began the Israeli curriculum in place of the Palestinian one.
The Zionist project’s process is to seize land by violence, coercion, extortion, and manipulation. Where the seizure is complete, the law follows, stripping what is Arab from property, memory, and language—to Judaize and de-Arabize it by transferring property out of Palestinian hands, planting forests over villages Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948, replacing Arabic place-names with Hebrew ones, and putting Jewish settlement and Jewish sovereignty in their place.
The Nation-State Basic Law of 2018 made Hebrew “the State’s language” and demoted Arabic to “a special status.” Arabic had shared official status with Hebrew, binding on the courts, the ministries, the road signs. It was the language spoken across the land since before the Israeli state existed; now, it is reduced to one the state merely tolerates.
The same Basic Law declared national self-determination in the state “unique to the Jewish people.” Two million Palestinian citizens of Israel, a fifth of the population, now hold a citizenship the law ranks beneath Jewish nationality—supremacy written into the state’s Basic Law. Land, memory, language, and status are allotted by ethnicity, and about a hundred Israeli laws say so. That is apartheid. It is the order Palestinians are commanded to accept as peace.
In his 2017 “Decisive Plan,” Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel’s finance minister and a West Bank settler, laid out the three choices this order leaves Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Those who gave up pursuing their national aspirations could remain as individuals under Jewish rule. Those unwilling to do so would receive Israeli assistance to “emigrate.” Those who continued to resist would face an army that, he wrote, would defeat them by “killing those who need to be killed.”
Submit, leave, or die.
Netanyahu calls the first of Smotrich’s three choices “deradicalization.” It is submission prescribed as therapy. To remain, Palestinians must recognize as legitimate the state that expelled them and call their own resistance a crime. They must stop mourning what Israel took from them. They must teach their children to do the same. A curriculum built to those terms cannot carry the Palestinian account of what happened, or any argument for self-determination.
Asked recently in Washington whether he supported a Palestinian state, Netanyahu answered “No.” He repeated his plan: “disarm, demilitarize Gaza and deradicalize it.” Only then, he said, could Palestinians have a chance at “a new life.”
The submission Netanyahu demands does not enforce itself. Genocide, expulsion, and foreign rule return, repackaged as ceasefire, reconstruction, and peace. The Board of Peace restores rule by colonial viceroys, empowered to govern Gaza and “deradicalize” its people.
The intended product of “deradicalization” is a certified Palestinian: one whose memory no longer sustains claims to return, sovereignty, or restitution—or the will to resist. That is Netanyahu’s “new life.” Israel marks an entire people’s consciousness as the last weapon it means to confiscate.
Language carries culture. Culture preserves memory. Memory gives a people the terms by which it judges its condition. The school is where a language is kept or surrendered, where the past is transmitted or withheld, and where children learn to see the world either as their people have known it or as their rulers demand it be seen. To preserve the inheritance of language, memory, and history—and to challenge the lies of the past and those of the present—is already an act of resistance.
The school has never been peripheral to colonial conquest. It will not be peripheral to Palestinian liberation.
Such an eloquent response to the question: Why do the humanities matter?
Thank you for this, Abu Alya.
“Culture is what colonizes,” I wrote in a piece this week on mental colonization. Books before the guns.
An excellent rundown of the cultural pressures and the re-education plans Israel has in store.
I can only think of one word in response:
Never!