Israelis teach children to hunt 'terrorists' in mock Palestinian village

Israeli children are being trained to hunt "terrorists" in mock Palestinian villages, blurring the line between play and military indoctrination.

To keep their children busy in the hot summer sun of West Asia, Israeli parents have a very Israeli solution: they get their children as young as six to dress up as “terrorists” or shoot “terrorists” using an assortment of weapons employed by the Israeli occupation forces.

“A centre in the country called Fauda Base offers children aged six and up the opportunity to become undercover agents, practise shooting weapons, dress up as terrorists, and play as fighters taking over an Arab village,” reports Israeli outlet HaMakom. The summer base is named after the Netflix series, Fauda, which depicts a commander of the Israeli Musta’ribeen (Mista’arvim in Hebrew) unit, pursuing Palestinian resistance fighters. The camp is run in collaboration with Yes, the producers of the television series, and its instructors are alumni of the Israeli occupation forces.

The musta’ribeen are Arabic-speaking and and Arab-looking Israelis who are used by the occupation to infiltrate the Palestinian resistance and civil society in order to extract vital information.

Fauda Base, according to HaMakom, “simulates a day in the life of a fighter in a special undercover unit, and invites participants — whether they are six years old or scoutmasters — to take part in a special operation.”

From HaMakom:

First, visitors to the complex “will hear about a security incident that has occurred and receive an operational order.” In order to comply with the operational order, “participants will have to become an operational combat team in an undercover unit,” and undergo “a series of training sessions that include shooting training, combat in built-up areas, hand-to-hand combat, and more.”

“In our activities, you can shoot all types of weapons used by special forces,” the [Fauda Base] website says. “M4 rifles, Glock pistols, Tavor rifles, Uzis, sniper rifles, Kalashnikov rifles and more!” To get into the atmosphere, they will also receive combat equipment that includes personal weapons, commando uniforms, or undercover clothing — “all depending on their role in the force,” it says. “Some will play terrorists, some innocent civilians, and some undercover.” The participants wear keffiyeh, galabeya, and a variety of beards. They also paint their teeth to make them look dirty or missing.

Finally, the participants move to “Al Mahmoudiyah” — “our village, which includes a small market, a restaurant and several buildings, where Fauda’s special activities take place.” During a conversation with the complex’s representative, it was clarified to us that this is an activity involving “a lot of laughter and fun.”

That “special activity” involves shooting plastic or porcelain balls at “jumping targets”: targets marked in advance in the village area, with the shooting carried out alongside instructors. Another stop is Krav Maga games. While the website states that the activity is allowed for ages 15 and up (and in its English version, ages 12 and up), in a phone call we were told that age six is the lower limit — even for shooting training.

During the course of the 20 months of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israeli children have taken a very prominent role. They have been consistently seen destroying aid meant for the starving and besieged children of Gaza as they die of hunger:

Israeli children have gone on kosher boat rides with their parents to watch fellow Israelis blow Palestinian children to smithereens with thousand-pound bombs shipped by the USA:

And have sung genocidal songs, urging the complete annihilation of Gaza with its million-plus children:

This is all part of a larger trend in Israeli society, which begins teaching its children from a very young age about their supposed chosenness and superiority over all other races, especially the Arabs by whom they are geographically surrounded.

In her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, Israeli author Nurit Peled-Elhanan details how Israeli textbooks present the Palestinians as thugs and the Israelis as victims:

Israeli schoolbooks — in defiance of factual evidence — still present the Palestinians as the ‘thugs’ and the Israelis as the victims and as the protectors of the land.

“Another immutable truth reproduced in the textbooks studied here,” she writes, “Is the colonialist message about Israeli Jews being the emissaries of progress and enlightenment in an environment where primitive Arabs must be civilised or rather cultivated like the ‘neglected’ landscape.”

Peled-Elhanan, elsewhere in the book, writes: “The Israeli-Zionist narrative, as it is reproduced in the school books analysed within this book, reflects the opinion that the Palestinians cannot be viewed but as an obstacle or a threat to be overcome or eliminated.”

This offers a small window into how Israeli society completely dehumanises Arabs.

In this context, the masses of school children taking aims at Arabs with dirty or missing teeth are simply acting out the lessons they learn in the classrooms on a mock battlefield — early preparation for what could be their actual career in just over a decade or less.

In a society where war games pass for childhood, the future is not just militarised — it is morally adrift. And its consequences have been live-streamed to the world from Gaza for the past 20 months.

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