Activists, Lawmakers Demand Investigation Into Biased Question About Israel on New York High School Exam
“There’s clearly an agenda to undermine the State of Israel, to undermine its legitimacy”
This was not an accident. Someone with an agenda put this into the exam.
Algemeiner reports:
Biased Exam Question about Israel Prompts Condemnation and Calls for Investigation
Activists and lawmakers in New York are calling on the New York state Education Department (NYED) to investigate why a recently administered standardized test for high school students included questions which allegedly simplify the history of the founding of Israel.
In January former New York State Assemblyman and founder of Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) Dov Hikind (D) revealed images showing that the Global History and Geography Regents II test, one of five exams required for attaining a high school diploma and taken by over 50,000 students a year, contained questions asking if the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine’s (USCOP) 1947 partition plan to divide Mandatory Palestine between Jews and Arabs was prompted by the Holocaust and whether “Zionists and Jewish immigrants” have benefited most from territorial changes that have taken place since then.
“There’s clearly an agenda to undermine the State of Israel, to undermine its legitimacy,” former NY State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) said on Monday during an interview with The Algemeiner. “It’s the kind of stuff created to foster antisemitism, and it’s happening constantly. The problem is so huge, and I don’t think we have a strategy in the Jewish community for dealing with it.”
Hikind also noted that efforts to found a Jewish homeland date back to the late 19th century, when Theodor Herzl, fearing the consequences of rising antisemitism in Europe, wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and founded the Zionist Organization.
“The questions were designed to test students’ knowledge of geography as it relates to historical events surrounding the creation of the State of Israel, including the impact of the Holocaust on migration to Israel,” Education Department officials told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. “As per standard practice, these questions will not be used on future exams. The department will continue to work with educators and stakeholders across New York to advance equitable access to opportunity while keeping the lessons and atrocities of the past, such as the Holocaust, as a testament to the work we must do together to build a better future for all students.”
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Comments
Last paragraph: “Mistakes were made. Something may possibly have been done by somebody, but there is really nobody to blame.”
“…whether “Zionists and Jewish immigrants” have benefited most…”
Very unlike NY State Higher Ed to imply that “Zionists and Jewish immigrants” are competent, even admirable, by perhaps doing better with their blooming desert part of the partition than their co-partitionists.
A multiple choice question on this might look something like:
Choose one. Justify your answer.
A…
B…
C…
D…
E.. Yes, the Israelis benefited from the mandate by 1) having an initial hold that was not immediately wiped out entire, and 2) making something viable out of their territory ever after. Contra the other part of the partition, which remains crap.
Justification:
Whether this difference in outcome is because of the physical partition is not at all clear. Did the Israeli’s secure themselves greater benefits from similar or worse start, or were they advantaged in what they were allocated? Or were they just better?
One suspects it’s more how they have acted, than the territory. Beyond the territory of the original petition, one can make a stronger claim:
“Israelis, Jews, and Zionists have in the event benefited most from the 80+ years’ pogrom incompetently implemented across the Middle East by various configurations of great powers, neighboring states, fundamentalist and mainstream Islamic religious groups, avowed and effectively terrorist organizations, from time to time the Brits — who had more direct involvement in the ’47 petition than the amorphous “UN” — and of course, ever and always, the UN working against their own partition.”
All territorial expansion of Israel beyond that “mandate” has come from success repelling invasions orchestrated variously to “wipe Israel off the map”, “establish a Palestinian State from the river to the sea” or enact either dogmatic religious requirement, or some realpolitik convenience. Everything they “take” is developed and blooms. Then, what they “return” degenerates into violence and slum, living off donations from elsewhere.
That Israel has been forever after ’47 returning territory — never recognized by the UN as justly acquired or annexed in defensive war — in “land for peace” indicates how they’d rather live. And that nobody much seems interested in letting them.
Now that Israel has found natural gas they’re selling to Europe, one anticipates that Europe in the UN will vote and advocate less against Israel; in fact merely because of their own economic interests, but presented under the fig leaf of policies they have forever-claimed guide their decisions, and since ’47 abandoned and ignored as regards Israel.
One suspects that the “great powers” that created the modern Middle East with enforced partitions and fake states after WW II are mostly annoyed by Israel’s autonomy as a nation. Hardly nice to be reminded of their colonial arrogance, or decline in influence. Better if the successful upstart just gets wiped out.
Good job, Bierce.
Thanks.
The great power “enforced partitions and fake states” really got the most traction after WW I, and has antecedents in colonialism before that, BUT, I couldn’t figure a way to work that in w/o losing the pace, and the focus on the ’47 partition.
Taxpayers want their BILLIONS and BILLIONS of dollars handed over to Israel returned with interest.