Palestinian Textbooks
By MIFTAH
October 29, 2005
New Page 1
Historical Overview
After 1948, the West Bank
was annexed to Jordan and Gaza was administered by Egypt. Accordingly, West
Bank schools followed the Jordanian curriculum, while Gazan schools adopted the
Egyptian. In 1967, Israel occupied both areas and maintained the existing
curricula for Palestinian schools. It did attempt unsuccessfully to bring its
own curriculum into Jerusalem, and it also reviewed Jordanian and Egyptian
books, censoring material that it found objectionable. In 1994, Palestinian
education in the West Bank (including, to a limited and unacknowledged extent,
Jerusalem) and Gaza was transferred to the new Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
The PNA immediately established a “Curriculum Development Center” to formulate
its own approach. While the Center was working, two interim measures were
taken. First, the Jordanian and Egyptian curricula were restored temporarily in
their entirety. Second, a supplementary series of texts covering National
Education was hastily written for grades one through six to compensate for
the non-Palestinian nature of the temporary curriculum.
Palestinians are
criticized for books produced by the education ministries of others.
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There has
been a flood of accusations for several years over the content of
Palestinian textbooks -- that the textbooks incite children to hatred and
violence towards Israeli Jews, and fail to promote the values of peace,
tolerance and coexistence. This claim has been widely accepted as a fact
mostly in the United States and Israeli official circles. Such claims are
based on reports by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), a
Jewish organization with links to extremist and racist Israeli groups that
advocate settlement activities in the Palestinian territories, expulsion
(transfer) of Palestinians from their homeland, and claims that Palestinians
are all "terrorists" and that peace with them is not possible. Israel's
supporters now are intensifying their orchestrated crusade against
Palestinian education in preparation for the House International Relations
Committee's planned consideration of the Foreign Relations Authorization
bill, FY 2006-2007.
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Palestinians assumed control of their own educational system only in 1994,
following the Oslo Accord that gave them limited autonomy.
Until then, they had to rely on Jordanian textbooks in the West Bank and on
Egyptian texts in the Gaza Strip. These books were severely censored by the
Israeli occupation authorities until 1994: The word "Palestine" was removed,
maps were deleted, and anything Israeli censors deemed nationalist was
excised. Furthermore, Palestinians inherited from the Israeli authorities a
dilapidated educational system badly in need of repair. No investments in
educational infrastructure had been made since the beginning of Israeli
occupation in 1967, resulting in a significant decline in the quality of
education, as well as in access to educational resources.
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In
1994, the Palestinians established the first curriculum center on the basis
of a formal agreement between UNESCO and the newly established Ministry of
Education of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The center, directed by
the late Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, began its work in October 1995 with a team of
researchers analyzing the existing curriculum. They consulted with educators
and teachers throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip and produced a
blueprint containing the basic principles that should govern a unified
Palestinian curriculum.
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In
September 2000, for the first time in Palestinian history, 29 Palestinian
texts for grades one and six were introduced into schools.
In addition, 16 textbooks for grades two and seven were introduced in
September 2001. The Ministry of Education plans to introduce texts for two
grades at the beginning of each school year to ensure that the transition is
smooth and incremental. In the meantime, Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks
will be used in the remaining grades.
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The
new Palestinian textbooks were found to reflect Palestinian life and
reality, as well as the diversity within Palestinian society.
They talk about
Palestinian culture and tradition, and focus on building Palestinian
identity as part of the Arab world. The texts teach Palestinian students to
respect human rights, justice, peace, equality, freedom, and tolerance, in
terms of both self and others. They caution students to avoid extremism and
stereotypes, and encourage them to treat all people equally. The books also
encourage tolerance among religions and ask students to respect the freedom
of religion. The students are taught to protect all religious places as
well. Palestinian students are warned in the texts about the terrible
results of wars and conflict, and are encouraged instead to resort to
negotiation and peaceful forms of conflict resolution. They are told that
wars only leave people with death and destruction. The texts discuss the
Oslo Accords as a step toward peace and as a sign of breaking the enmity and
the long period of conflict. Students learn about Gandhi and his form of
civil disobedience, and are asked to relate to other stories of peaceful
forms of conflict resolution. We found no incitement for the use of violence
at all.
Palestinian Text Books and the Two-State Solution
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The
new Palestinian textbooks define the future independent Palestinian state
within the 1967 borders as described in UN Resolutions.
The few maps that are
included mainly show the PNA areas, although some mention Israeli towns and
cities. At the same time, students are taught to cooperate and develop good
relationships with neighboring states. Arab East Jerusalem (Al-Quds Al-Sharif)
is presented in the textbooks as part of the Occupied Territories and the
future capital of Palestine. The books portray Jews throughout history in a
positive manner and avoid negative stereotypes. However, according to the
everyday experience of Palestinians, modern-day Israelis are presented as
occupiers. The texts include examples of Israelis killing and imprisoning
Palestinians, demolishing their homes, uprooting fruit trees, and
confiscating their lands and building settlements on them. The texts also
talk about the right of return for the 1948 Palestinian refugees when
describing how those refugees live in camps.
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In
preparing the books, the ministry has tried to incorporate five basic
principles suggested by Ali Jarbawi.
The first of these principles is that the curriculum should be predicated
not on giving students facts as if they were eternal truths that must be
memorized, but on encouraging them to become critical thinkers. Second,
students should be encouraged to make independent judgments and intelligent
choices, with careful attention to be paid to individual differences within
the classroom. Third, the new curriculum should generate a concept of
citizenship that emphasizes individual rights and responsibilities and that
establishes a linkage between private interests and the public good so as to
encourage responsible and intelligent political participation. Fourth,
democratic values such as justice, personal responsibility, tolerance,
empathy, pluralism, cooperation, and respect for the opinions of others
should be emphasized. Fifth, students should be taught how to read primary
texts, to debate, link ideas, read maps, interpret statistics, and use the
Internet as well as how to verify facts, sources, and data critically and
scientifically.
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In
the application of these principles, the new textbooks--as can be seen from
the two grades that have been issued so far--rely less on facts and more on
a student-centered approach.
By and large, they avoid dealing with unresolved political issues. They do
not provide a map of Israel because the latter has yet to define its
borders, and they do not provide a map of Palestine because its borders
remain to be negotiated. The texts do, however, reflect the Palestinian
narrative, which is basically that of the native in conflict with a settler
colonial movement. The narrative presents the establishment of the State of
Israel in most of Palestine in 1948 as a disaster (nakba) for the
Palestinians, a majority of whom became uprooted and were forcibly expelled
from their homes.
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The
Palestinian narrative, while not contested by objective non-Arab and
non-Zionist scholars or even Israeli scholars associated with the "new
historians" revisionist interpretations of 1948, is one that mainstream, and
especially right-wing, Zionists reject.
It is therefore probably inevitable that the new educational materials used
in the schools under the PA would attract the attention of Israeli and
pro-Israeli groups that view even benign attempts to depict the Palestinian
narrative as evidence of an "anti-Israeli bias." The most prominent of these
is a Jewish-American nongovernmental organization called the Center for
Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), whose research director, Itamar
Marcus, lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.
Israeli Text Books and incitement
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Palestinians and Arabs as “murderers,” “rioters,” “suspicious,” and
generally backward and unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative
stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule rather than the
exception in Israeli Israeli school textbooks as well as children’s
storybooks, according to recent academic studies and surveys, portray
schoolbooks.
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Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied 124 elementary,
middle- and high school textbooks on grammar and Hebrew literature, history,
geography and citizenship. Bar-Tal concluded that Israeli textbooks present
the view that Jews are involved in a justified, even humanitarian, war
against an Arab enemy that refuses to accept and acknowledge the existence
and rights of Jews in Israel.
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“The early textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant,
cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate
the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were
delegitimized by the use of such labels as ‘robbers,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ and
‘killers,’” said Professor Bar-Tal, adding that there has been little
positive revision in the curriculum over the years.
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Bar-Tal pointed out that Israeli textbooks continue to present Jews as
industrious, brave and determined to cope with the difficulties of
“improving the country in ways they believe the Arabs are incapable of.”
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Hebrew-language geography books from the 1950s through 1970s focused on the
glory of Israel’s ancient past and how the land was “neglected and
destroyed” by the Arabs until the Jews returned from their forced exile and
revived it “with the help of the Zionist movement.”
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“This attitude served to justify the return of the Jews, implying that they
care enough about the country to turn the swamps and deserts into blossoming
farmland; this effectively delegitimizes the Arab claim to the same land,”
Bar-Tal told the Washington Report. “The message was that the
Palestinians were primitive and neglected the country and did not cultivate
the land.”
Conclusion
While we,
argue, of course, that school textbooks are an important element in peace
education, the main "textbook" is life outside schools and the oral
presentations by teachers that reflect the public's general feelings. Currently,
such oral and real-life instruction is far from conveying genuine peace
education messages. Since the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has not been
resolved, modifying textbooks is problematic. As part of a true peace process,
both Palestinians and Israelis have to revise their textbooks to clearly reflect
the values of peace education.
The claim
that the new Palestinian textbooks incite students against Israel has been
widely accepted as truth in the United States and Israel. The report on which
such claims were based was issued by CMIP, a Jewish-American organization with
known links to the Israeli settlement movement in the West Bank. Yet none of the
American politicians who repeated the allegations or the Western donors who
hastened to cut off funding for Palestinian textbook development bothered to
have the report's claims checked against the actual texts. If they had, it would
immediately have been clear that the report was based on innuendo, exaggeration,
and downright lies. Indeed, the real message of CMIP's campaign against the
textbooks is that peace with the Palestinians is impossible, that Israeli
settlement in the occupied territories must go on, that force is the only
language that Palestinians can understand.
In fact,
the new Palestinian school textbooks make a special effort to promote tolerance,
openness, and democratic values. The PA Ministry of Education, despite the
extraordinary conditions of siege and violence under which it is operating,
introduced new textbooks for two more grades in September 2001. The new
textbooks, according to those who have seen them, demonstrate the same concern
for promoting tolerance, openness, and democratic values. But even if all the
grades in Palestinian schools carried absolutely exemplary textbooks, and even
if all the teachers preached amity and concord, it is doubtful that such values
could take hold in the ever deteriorating conditions of recent years. For
ultimately, the Israeli occupation, with its daily cruelty and humiliation, is a
far more powerful text than any schoolbooks could possible be. As Sami Adwan
remarked, "How can a Palestinian write in a textbook that Israelis or Jews
should be loved, while what he is experiencing is death, land expropriation,
demolition of homes, and daily degradation? Give us a chance to teach loving."
In a
forthcoming study, Nadim Rouhana argues that conflict reconciliation, as opposed
to conflict resolution or conflict settlement, seeks to achieve a kind of
relationship between the parties founded on mutual legitimacy. For this to
occur, issues of justice, truth, and historical responsibility as well as the
restructuring of social and political relations need to be addressed.
Sources:
1.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in History and
Civics Textbooks of Both Nations
by
Ruth Firer,
Sami Adwan
2004
2.
What Did You Study In School Today, Palestinian
Child?
by
Akiva Eldar
in
Ha'aretz,
2 January 2001
3.
Israel or Palestine: Who teaches what history? A
textbook case
by
Elisa Morena
in
Le Monde Diplomatique,
July 2001
4.
Palestinian education: Western Civilization will
become a pile of rubble
by
Itamar Marcus,
Ruthie Blum
21 September 2001
5.
Democracy, History and the Contest over the
Palestinian Curriculum
by
Nathan J. Brown
November 2001
6.
What Do Palestinian Textbooks Really Say?
by
Nathan J. Brown
2002
7.
Palestinian Schoolbooks
by
Council of the European Union
15 May 2002
8.
The International controversy regarding
Palestinian textbooks
by
Nathan J. Brown
9 December 2002
9.
Itamar
Marcus again: Jerusalem Post editorial about Palestinian schoolbooks
by
Gabriel (Gabi) Baramki
7 September 2003
10.
Israelis' textbooks fare little better than
Palestinians'
by
Akiva Eldar
in
Ha'aretz,
9 December 2004
11.
'Palestinian textbooks not anti-Israel'
by
Ruthie Blum
in
Jerusalem Post,
16 December 2004
12.
Palestinian textbooks: Where is all that
'incitement'?
by
Roger Avenstrup
in
International Herald Tribune,
18 December 2004
13.
PNA:
Incitement in Palestinian Textbooks 'a Myth': 'Israeli Children Are Taught to
Hate Arabs, Trained to Kill Them'
by
PMC (Palestine Media Center) staff
11 June 2005
14.
The myth of incitement in Palestinian textbooks
by
Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education
in
Electronic Intifada,
13 June 2005
15.
Confronting Israeli Myth-Making
by
Kathleen Christison,
Bill Christison
in
CounterPunch,
22 June 2005
http://www.miftah.org
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