Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli philologist, professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, translator, and activist. She is a 2001 co-laureate of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded by the European Parliament. She is known for her research on the portrayal of Palestinians in Israeli textbooks, which she has criticized as being anti-Palestinian. Elhanan supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Biography Nurit Peled-Elhanan was raised in a leftist family in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood. She described her home growing up as a leftist-Zionist home. Her grandfather, Avraham Katsnelson, signed Israel's Declaration of Independence. She is the daughter of Matti Peled, an Israeli Major-General, scholar of Arabic literature, a member of Knesset and a noted peace activist.

Peled-Elhanan is married to graphic designer and peace activist Rami Elhanan, with whom she has four children. Their daughter, Smadar, was killed at the age of thirteen in the 1997 Ben Yehuda Street Palestinian suicide attack in Jerusalem. The story of Smadar from the point of her father is told in Colum McCann's 2020 novel Apeirogon.

Peled-Elhanan's brother, Miko Peled, is an activist for Palestinian rights, and author of the 2012 book, The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.

Career Peled-Elhanan has translated Albert Memmi's Le racisme (1982) and Marguerite Duras' Écrire (1993) into Hebrew.

Her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, was released in the U.K. in April 2012.

In the 2010s she was a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the David Yellin College of Education. The latter suspended her in 2023.

Recognition She is a 2001 co-laureate of the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

In 2007 she received the Paul K. Feyerabend Award.

Opinions On Israeli curriculum In her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, which was released in the UK in April 2012, Nurit Peled-Elhanan describes the depiction of Arabs in Israeli schoolbooks as racist. She states that their only representation is as "refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists," claiming that in "hundreds and hundreds" of books, not one photograph depicted an Arab as a "normal person."

On the curriculum in Arab schools in Israel As a lecturer in language and education, Peled-Elhanan has written and lectured widely on curricula and textbooks. She claims that the state-approved curriculum in Arab schools in Israel is highly censored, and that "the teaching of Palestinian history, or the Nakba, even in Arab schools (Nasser and Nasser, 2008), is forbidden -- a prohibition that has recently been formulated as a law (the Nakba Law). . . ." Peled-Elhanan also asserted that entire pages of textbooks are left blank as a result of this censorship, and “even if they wanted to [teach about Nakba, they can’t because] they are censored."

In a 2013 interview for Ground Views about her study of Israeli textbooks, she said that Israelis were educated to “legitimate massacres” and glorify the military exploits of Sharon, Barak, and Rabin. In 2014, she wrote “Israeli leaders who worship nothing but Power and Death should know that no words will ever wash this blood off their hands, that nothing will ever exonerate them.”

In the same 2007 address to the Women in Black movement, she said of Israeli mothers:“[They] are nothing but golems that have turned on their creators and are more terrible and cruel than they, who dedicate their wombs to the apartheid state and the occupation army, who educate their children in unmitigated racism and are prepared to sacrifice the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders’ megalomania, greed and bloodthirstiness. These mothers are also to be found among the teachers and the educators of our day.”

BDS Peled-Elhanan supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel