Today there are more than 1.8 million Israeli and 1 million Palestinian in school in Israel and the territories. What do they learn about their own people, and about “the other”? What do their history textbooks teach them about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
History books teach much more than the objective chronicle of past events, says Ruth Firer, director of peace education at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They present children with a narrative — the story a people tells about its own history and the history of others.
“Historical narratives form and nourish the self and national identity,” says Firer. “It is crucial that we examine them so that we are aware of the messages that we instill in our children.”
Both Israeli and Palestinian textbooks have been at the center of controversy in recent years. Efforts to revise standard Israeli history textbooks have been attacked, most notably in Yoram Hazony’s “The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul,” for promoting a “post-Zionist” ideology. At the same time, books used in Palestinian schools have been criticized for containing inflammatory anti-Israeli rhetoric incompatible with the peace process.
Firer and her colleague Professor Sami Adwan, professor of education at Bethlehem University, completed a five-year study of Israeli and Palestinian ninth-grade history and civics textbooks. The study focused on each nation’s presentation of its own story and its depiction of the other side. According to Firer, the project goes beyond a mere tallying of stereotypical presentations to analyze the social and political messages that the texts seek to convey to pupils.
The results are both deeply encouraging and profoundly disturbing, they say.
Despite charges of post-Zionism, says Firer, most Israeli textbooks still strongly reinforce the classical Zionist understanding of Jewish history and redemption. This narrative rests on three principles: that the Jews have been victims throughout history, that only Zionist Jewish national sovereignty can bring an end to Jewish suffering, and that the Zionist resurrection and renaissance, brought about by pioneers and fighters, has changed the course of Jewish history.
In contrast, most Palestinian textbooks, published in Jordan and Egypt, present the Palestinians as passive victims of history.
“We tend to see ourselves as a helpless people, caught up in world events too big and too powerful for us,” says Adwan. “And because we see ourselves as victims, there is very little reflection or self-criticism.”
Both sets of textbooks, Adwan and Firer agree, tell narratives in which the “good guys” defend themselves from the “bad guys,” and go to war only when they have no choice. In some cases, each set of texts presents identical events and dates but offers conflicting interpretations.
For example, the Israeli textbooks present the Balfour Declaration as a legitimization of the Zionist endeavor. The Palestinians, on the other hand, view the declaration as an international French, English and German conspiracy against them. And while Israeli textbooks view pre-state Israel’s acceptance of the partition plan as proof of its desire for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, Palestinian textbooks either justify its rejection or ignore it completely.
The terminology used reflects and arouses different and nearly diametrically opposed emotional associations. While the Israeli textbooks call the 1948 war “the War of Independence” or “the War of Liberation,” the Palestinian textbooks refer to it as “Al Nakba” (The Catastrophe). The Israeli textbooks discuss aliyah, but the Palestinian textbooks call it the “forced Judaization of Palestine.”
Adwan and Firer were distressed to find that both sets of textbooks fail to include discussions of peaceful periods, instead presenting history as a series of crises and conflicts. For instance, one of the Israeli textbooks devotes nearly a dozen pages to the years 1919-1921, when pre-state Israel struggled against the British, and to the Arab riots of 1929 and 1936 to 1939. But the years 1921 to1929, during which Arabs and Jews largely coexisted in peace and even friendship, are hardly mentioned. This, says Firer, is typical.
“The number of pages reflects the message,” she adds. “The narrative of crisis and catastrophe is maintained, and the children are never taught about the sub-narrative of coexistence.”
Despite the many parallels, however, there are developments in the Israeli textbooks that do not appear at all in the Palestinian textbooks.
Until about a decade ago, Firer says, the Palestinians — referred to as Arabs, if they were mentioned at all — were largely absent from the Israeli textbooks. Yet, since 1995 a series of controversial ninth-grade textbooks, most notably “The Twentieth Century” by Ayal Naveh and “Journey to the Past” by Kezia Tabibyan, have been approved by the Ministry of Education. Drawing largely on recently declassified Israeli archives, these more critical texts challenge some of Israel’s most common myths regarding the establishment of the state.
In contrast to the widely held belief that Israel’s victory in the War of Independence was one of the few over the many, Naveh states that the Israelis were numerically and militarily superior. Tabibyan’s book states that in contrast to the persistent claim that the Palestinians left their villages of their own accord, the residents of Ramle and Lod were forcibly expelled.
Most stereotypical references to Palestinians are now modified in textbooks used in Israel. More significantly, some of the newer textbooks recognize the Palestinian people and Palestinian nationalism. Some even encourage students to write essays from the Palestinian point of view, and to consider the price that the Palestinians have paid for the Zionist renaissance. In Naveh’s book, for example, pupils are challenged to imagine that they are Palestinian refugees.
Firer notes in her study that not all Israeli schoolchildren are exposed to this kind of thinking. The Ministry of Education offers schools a list of approved textbooks. As a result, many Israeli children, particularly those in the religious streams, still learn from the more traditional, less self-critical books. But by and large, Israeli textbooks promote an orientation toward peace.
Itamar Marcus, director of research for the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, a private watchdog group that reviews textbooks in the Middle East, says that Palestinian textbooks do not reflect this process. Marcus is also a member of the Anti-Incitement Committee, established in late 1998 by Palestinians and Israelis with American participation, as part of the Wye accords. He has also completed a survey of Palestinian textbooks.
“The Palestinian textbooks are very clear,” Marcus contends. “They deny the right of the Jewish people to exist as a nation, and they present Israel as a dangerous colonialist implant in the Middle East. As a result, the Palestinian textbooks conclude that the destruction of the state of Israel is a historically justified act of self-defense.” Marcus says that the textbooks are filled with hate. “In one of the homework exercises, the students are ask to respond to the question, ‘Why do we have to fight the Jews and kick them out?'”
Adwan argues in response that the Palestinians are still in the early stages of creating their own national narrative. The textbooks he reviewed, he says, were written by Jordanians and Egyptians –both countries with a vested political interest in downplaying Palestinian nationhood and nationalism. Major events in Palestinian life are given only marginal attention.
As an example, he shows that the Egyptian textbooks devote much more attention to the 1973 war than to the 1967 Six-Day War — undeniably a definitive event for the Palestinian people as it led to the Israeli occupation. They barely mention the Palestinian refugees who fled in 1967, some for a second time.
In the Israeli texts, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict takes up approximately 25 percent of the total space devoted to the Israeli-Arab conflict. But in the textbooks in use in the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict receives a mere 7 percent of the space devoted to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Palestinians educators often note that the Palestinians are taught more about Uganda than about Palestine, Adwan says. “We are not rewriting our textbooks, as the Israelis are. We must write them from the beginning. Our own textbooks do not even reflect the agony of our own people. We are not amending our national narrative — we must create it.”
“But what narrative are they building?” Marcus challenges. “It is a narrative of hate. If I were a Palestinian child, and I studied these textbooks, I, too, would hate the Jews.”