Borrowing from a proven formula, Molly Resnick is using mothers and children to fight for her beliefs. In two days last month, the former NBC news producer reached more than 1,500 Long Island yeshiva students in a program she’s been delivering to schools, synagogues and camps all over the country as part of her campaign to end the violence in the Middle East.



MATCKH, Mothers Against Teaching Children to Kill and Hate — Resnick’s version of the activist group MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving — is a program against hatred, she says.

“Peace in Israel is a sham unless the Palestinians stop teaching their children to hate,” says Resnick, the mother of three children ages 12, 18 and 20. “We have to expose what they’re doing and get the world to stop them. Then and only then will peace be a possibility.

“If Palestinian children are taught from the time they are 4 or 5 years old that Israelis are vermin, of course it becomes easy for them to kill. If they’re inculcated with hatred from the minute they enter elementary school, of course it becomes second nature for them to go out and kill.”

To packed auditoriums at the high school and middle school at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, and at the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County, Resnick launched into her brief but pointed program. TV footage documented Palestinian children learning in school about jihad, or holy war, becoming holy soldiers and readying their guns well after Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo agreement. Clips from a “60 Minutes” interview with Arafat included the Palestinian leader yelling for jihad, saying, “If anyone is growing weary, let him stay home and send me his children.”

The young audiences gasped as they watched.

“Their educational system shows no signs of Israel on the maps,” Resnick told them, adding later that “words describing Jews as robbers, thieves, conquerors and more are being taught to more than 1 million impressionable children.”

The example that really stuck was her description of how the Palestinian textbooks have woven hatred into lessons: For instance, in math: “If there are five Jews and you kill three, how many are left?” she read.

Resnick empowered the teenagers to become activists, asking each to write a letter to a Palestinian child on small pieces of paper she distributed.

“If the PLO is instilling a passion to hate,” said Rabbi Yehoshua Marchuk, coordinator of student activities at the HAFTR Middle School, “we have to instill a passion to defend what’s right. With young passion, you can do anything.”

Resnick, a Bulgaria native raised in Israel, came to the United States in 1972.

A few years ago while visiting New York — she was living in Detroit, having left NBC News — Resnick read an op-ed piece in the New York Post about Arafat’s network of teaching hate.

“As a past news producer, my gut told me it would be front-page news in every paper the next day. I never saw anything else about it,” she recalls.

In 1998, she and other mothers in the Detroit area visited local Jewish schools and camps in an effort to eradicate the teaching of hatred and killing, to be replaced by a peaceful coexistence. A recent move back to New York redirected her efforts to children on the Eastern seaboard.

At the Long Island programs, toward the front of the auditoriums hung brightly colored, geometrically configured pieces of construction paper, laminated and fashioned into a “quilt,” the penultimate goal of her visits to the schools. The papers feature the hand-written notes.

“Dear Palestinian,” one read. “Don’t hate me just because I’m a Jew. I don’t hate you. I’m no different than you.”

Resnick has more than 20 such quilts. When she nears 200, she will take them to Washington and present her case to Congress and Palestinian representatives.

“We want America to stop giving them money until they change,” she said. “Why should we assist people who teach hate?”

What did the students think?

“Twenty-thousand letters can make a difference,” said Scott Warhit, a HAFTR ninth-grader.

“I’d be scared to be friends with [the Palestinians],” said Lily Senders, 15. “Hatred can’t be un-brainwashed. I think we need to start again with the next generation.”

Said Whitney Mosery, 14: “I wanted not to believe everything we saw, but with so many cases of kids who’ve died because they’re fighting this holy war, it’s impossible not to believe it.”

Resnick says her grassroots program “will help ignite the flame of activism in our children.” She apparently was successful on the Island.

“There are two groups in school that go to Washington now to lobby Congress,” said 11th-grader Bryan Salamon. “We can take this with us and lobby for it now.”

Said Hillel Samlan, 14: “We can definitely make a change if Congress sees what this is about.”

A letter written and signed by a group of high school students was sent to newspapers and TV stations. It concluded: “The only way to end the hate and violence is to teach children tolerance at a young age. If the Palestinians are truly seeking peace, they need to start with the basics — their own children — and work their way up. As Golda Meir once said, ‘We will have peace with the Arabs only when they love their children more than they hate us.’ ”

Stanley Blumenstein, the general studies principal at HAFTR, said: “The kids who heard this today and wrote letters are changed in their own hearts.

“I’m pleased with the reaction of our students because the natural instinctive reaction is to hate, and here they’re taught that perhaps hate doesn’t work and they’re coming up with other ways to deal with the issue.

“And look at them,” he said. “They’re starting to think like activists already.”

The MATCKH Web site is www.matckh.org.