Israel can't demand that Arab states mark the 1967 borders yet not do so in its own educational system. This isn't the first time an attempt to introduce a bit of balance into school textbooks has been attempted in Israel, btw. I hope the reinstatement isn't reversed...
A textbook caseJuly 2001
The Israelis have withdrawn from the school curriculum a textbook giving a balanced view of the nation’s history, only a few months after international media accused the Palestinian Authority of using anti-semitic schoolbooks. These did have omissions, but their real error was to refute Israel’s version of Palestinian history.
By Elisa Morena
"There is no alternative to destroying Israel." This quote forms the banner headline of the website of the American lobby Jews for Truth Now (1). Last November and December this group published an insert in several American and Israeli papers featuring the slogan and giving as its source an encyclopaedia Our Country Palestine, mentioned in new Palestinian school textbooks for 11 year-olds (2). The lobby linked the intifada directly to "anti-semitic indoctrination" of Palestinian children from the earliest age. It also asked the United Nations to set up an international commission of enquiry into "racist teaching in Palestinian books, which also call for genocide".
The starting point for the controversy, which started last autumn at the time of the intifada, was a report by an American non-governmental organisation, The Centre for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), entitled The New Palestinian Authority School Textbooks for Grades One and Six (3). The study claimed that the textbooks did not once try to teach peace and coexistence with Israel, rather the reverse. The conclusion, translated into numerous languages, was clear: the Palestinian Authority was instilling a culture of hate in its children that explained the fanaticism of the Palestinians.
Since the June 1967 war and the start of Israeli occupation schoolchildren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have used Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks respectively, with modifications imposed by Israel which sought to eliminate anti-semitic and anti-Zionist references. In 1991, at the time of the Madrid conference, the Palestinians began the groundwork for the new ministries that came into being three years later with the setting up of the Palestinian Authority. Eighty Palestinians, from both the territories and the diaspora, started work on a first, unified Palestinian school curriculum for the West Bank and Gaza.
In 1994 this was one of the main concerns of the new deputy minister for education, Na’im Abul Hommos. "The educational system that we inherited was in a sorry state," he explained: "overcrowded classes, lack of teachers and antiquated textbooks dating from pre-1967, teaching Gaza children, for instance, about the greatness of the Egyptian kingdom and its 20m inhabitants
."
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