Follow the author
Elie Podeh
The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Israeli History Textbooks, 1948-2000
by Elie Podeh (Author)
Israeli history textbooks in the past contained many biases, distortions, and omissions concerning the depiction of Arabs and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Today these misrepresentations are gradually being corrected. This study encourages the depiction of a balanced portrait in all textbooks.
By reviewing curricula and textbooks used in the Israeli educational system since the establishment of Israel, the author assesses the impact of Zionist historiography and the Zeitgeist on the portrayal of Arabs in textbooks. The study unravels the biases, distortions, omissions, and stereotypes through the analysis of several major historical events such as the 1948 war, the refugee question, the 1967 war, and the peace process.
Review
.,."this book is written in an interesting fashion with a great attention to research. One wonders what the effect of recent events will be on future Israeli--and Palestinian--textbooks."-Choice
"This is an important book. It is not merely a description of these textbooks, but also an explanation of the catalyst of the conflict...This book comes at the right time...Elie Podeh's study provides an oppurtunity to take a comprehensive look at the contents of history and civics books that have been used to educate Israeli elementary and secondary school students from 1948 until 2000."-Middle East Journal
About the Author
ELIE PODEH is Senior Lecturer, Department of Islam and Middle Eastern Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
TopAbout this itemReviews
Product details
Publisher : Bergin & Garvey (January 1, 2002)
Language : English
Hardcover : 201 pages
===
=
Elie Podeh
Born in 1959, Professor Elie Podeh is a Bamberger and Fuld Chair at the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a senior research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace. He serves at present as the President of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI). He is a board member of Mitvim – the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies. His academic interest is the contemporary Middle East, and his particular fields of interests are Egypt; inter-Arab relations; the Arab-Israeli conflict; education and culture in the Middle East. He served as the Chair of Islamic and Middle East Department at the Hebrew University (2004-2009) and editor of Hamizrah Hehadash (New East, 2000-2008) – the Hebrew journal of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI). He has published and edited ten books and more than sixty academic articles in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Among his publications: The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Israeli History Textbooks, 1948-2000 (2002); Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt (2004); The Politics of National Celebrations in the Arab World (2011); Chances for Peace: Missed Opportunities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2015); and The Third Wave: Protest and Revolution in the Middle East (Hebrew, 2017). Prof. Podeh is a frequent commentator on Middle Eastern affairs in the Israeli and foreign media, publishing periodic articles in Haaretz and Jerusalem Post.
====
====
“The education system set curricula aimed at imbuing Israeli citizens with a love of the fatherland and enhancing their faith in the just of the State’s cause.” (Eyal Naveh, The Twentieth Century, History for Ninth Grade, 1999) “As known to all, it is easier to bear the myths and legends than the bare reality.” (Tahar Ben-Jelloun, L’enfant de Sable) “The temptation is often overwhelmingly strong to tell it, not as it really was, but as we would wish it to have been.” (Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented) “If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. The day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.” (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
CONTENTS
- Preface 1
- The Study of School Textbooks 1
- Textbook Research in the West 1
- The Present Study 7
- Attitudes in the Israeli Education System toward Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict 21
- Attitudes toward Teaching History 21
- Attitudes toward Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict 26
- Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Case Studies 75
- The Cultural Heritage of Islam 75
- The Ottoman Empire and the Image of the Turks 77
- The First Aliyah Period (1882–1902) 80
- The Second Aliyah Period (1904–14) 83
- The First World War Agreements 86
- The British Mandate in Palestine (1920–48) 91
- The 1947–48 War 102
- The 1956 War 110
- The 1967 War 113
- The Post-1967 Period 116
- The Arab Minority in Israel 118
- Conclusions
- Epilogue 155
- Appendices 157
- Bibliography 179
- Index 197
PREFACE
In Israel, curiously, it is considered odd for a historian of the Middle East to focus on Israeli history and culture. An inherent division exists in our academic institutions between the study of Israeli history and Judaism, on the one hand, and Middle Eastern history and Islam, on the other. This separation (the result of a number of historic circumstances that will not be analyzed here) is largely artificial and is detrimental to both students and scholars, especially in a period when the “iron curtain” that has separated Israel from the Arab world is gradually falling away. The conviction that this division is anachronistic has led me to explore the linkage between Israel, the Arab states, and the Middle East in various areas.1 One such area is the field of education. In May 1997, an academic poll revealed that 40% of Jewish high school students “hate” Arabs and 60% “felt a strong urge to take revenge.” The study also showed that there had been a gradual increase in the articulation of negative Jewish attitudes toward the Arabs since the 1970s.2 Although the reasons for these worrying results are multifaceted, it is likely that biased school textbooks constitute an important factor in the adoption of negative attitudes toward the Arabs. In an era in which wars and violence have characterized the Arab-Israeli conflict, and personal Jewish-Arab encounters have been a rare phenomenon, school textbooks have become a key medium for acquaintance with the “other.” For many Israelis who have not met personally with Arabs, school textbooks, along with children’s books, historiography, and the media have constituted a central prism through which the image of the Arab and information on the Arab world have been filtered. Conceivably, these conceptions accompany the student into adulthood and affect his later political views as well. “We cannot have a perception of the present,” wrote one
scholar, “that is not strongly influenced by a version of the past—some sort of version—which we have internalized in the course of growing up, and articulated in our adult lives. Such versions vary and matter because they determine how we understand and behave towards events that occur in our own present world.”3 This research is an attempt to analyze the presentation of the ArabIsraeli conflict and the image of the Arab as reflected in Israeli history and, in certain cases, civics textbooks in the Jewish education system since the establishment of Israel in 1948.4 A period of more than fifty years may be viewed as long enough to reveal how and to what extent the historical narrative has been transformed. Although the study of school textbooks is generally the province of scholars in the field of education, this study is carried out from a historical perspective. It is hoped that the historical method will provide a better understanding of the explicit and implicit biases of commission and omission to be found in the textbooks. Admittedly, the aims of this study are not merely academic, as its findings are relevant to the ongoing efforts toward a peaceful solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a novel by Margaret Atwood, the heroine observes that “the whole point about being a historian . . . is that you can successfully avoid the present, most of the time.”5 In this historical analysis there is no attempt to avoid the present. I believe that biased Israeli and Arab textbooks have fostered and maintained a kind of silent conflict between the parties. Although this battle of textbooks has not resulted in physical injuries, it has contributed indirectly to the exacerbation of the armed conflict. More important, the negative repercussions of this silent conflict may be abiding, lasting long after the guns fall silent. Therefore, my hope is that better textbooks—free of bias, prejudice, inaccuracies, and omissions—on both sides of the conflict will result in a better atmosphere, congenial to the successful consummation of peaceful relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. “If there were favorable change in curricula,” wrote Alouph Hareven, a leading educator, back in 1978, “then a new generation of Arabs and Israelis would arise whose perception of one another is different from that of the previous generation. Conversely, if such a change were not to take place, in all probability the next generation of Arabs—and maybe the next generation of Israelis—will be educated according to the same [biased] attitudes prevailing today.”6 Over twenty years later, the new history textbooks do indeed generate hope that the young Israeli generation will be exposed to a different kind of approach. Naturally, the same process must take place on the Arab side as well. This study owes much to the support and help of friends and colleagues. I would like to thank my students in my courses on Arab-Israeli relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who, by their frequent observations along the lines of “this is not what I had studied at school,” impelled me to unearth the reasons for it. Special thanks are due to Mrs. Naava Eisin, at the
Aviezer Yelin Archive for Jewish Education in Israel and the Diaspora at Tel Aviv University, who provided me with valuable material and was kind enough to guide me on the workings of the Israeli education system. I would like to thank Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University, who enriched my thinking by his insights and consistently encouraged my research. Dr. Falk Pingel, deputy director of the Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, was kind enough to invite me to participate in a conference on Israeli-Palestinian textbook revision. My stay at the institute’s library, which is second to none with respect to the study of textbooks, helped me to overcome my initial gaps in the theoretical sphere of international textbook revision. I would like to state my indebtedness to the late Professor Hava Lazarus-Yaffe. As the first Israeli scholar to analyze Arab textbooks, and the author of valuable textbooks on Islam used in the Jewish school system, she was deeply interested in the findings of the present research. She read the first draft of this manuscript meticulously, and, by her comments, helped me recognize and divest my own biases. I would also like to thank Dr. Yoshua Mathias, who formerly headed the history team at the Curriculum Planning Department in the Ministry of Education, and Mr. Itzhak Komem, a Jerusalem high school teacher, both of whom read an earlier Hebrew version and offered important insights. Professor Ami Ayalon of Tel Aviv University and Professor Ella Landau-Tassron of the Hebrew University offered important comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Thanks are due also to Professor Moshe Ma’oz, former head of the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, at the Hebrew University, and Professor Amnon Cohen, the present head of the Truman Institute, both of whom supported my research through the David Ben-Rafael fellowship. The Institute was also kind enough to publish a short Hebrew version of this study in the Gitelson Peace Publications Series in January 1997. Dr. Susan Varda Gitelson, who established this series in memory of her father, has keenly supported projects to facilitate Israeli-Arab understanding. I would like to thank the Faculty of Humanities and the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University for helping fund this project. I would also like to thank the following institutions for permissions to use illustrations and photos appearing in the book: Ministry of Education, Hagana Archive, Central Zionist Archives, K.K.L. Photo Archive, Government Press Office, Keter Publishing House, and Rafael Bass. Thanks to my research assistant, Nimrod Goren, who was instrumental in acquiring these permissions. I am also thankful to Judy Krausz for her editorial assistance. Lastly, I wish to dedicate this book to my mother-in-law, Ruth Kedar, who has taught me the meaning of tolerance and giving.
Elie Podeh October 2000
NOTES
1. E. Podeh, “Rethinking Israel in the Middle East,” Israel Affairs, Vol. 3 (Spring/Summer 1997), pp. 280–95. Reprinted in E. Karsh (ed.), From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel’s Troubled Agenda (London: 1997), pp. 280–95. 2. Ha’aretz, 26 May 1997. 3. P.J. Rogers, “Why Teach History?” In A. Dickenson, P.J. Lee and P.J. Rogers (eds.), Learning History (London: 1984), p. 20. 4. On the Israeli education system, see Y. Iram and M. Schmida, The Educational System of Israel (Westport, CT: 1998). 5. M. Atwood, The Robber Bride (Toronto: 1993), p. 32. 6. A. Hareven, “Are Confidential Relations between Israel and the Arab States Possible at All?” In A. Hareven (ed.), If Peace Comes: Risks and Prospects (Jerusalem: 1978), p. 27 (Hebrew).
CHAPTER 1 THE STUDY OF SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS TEXTBOOK RESEARCH IN THE WEST
===
No comments:
Post a Comment