The Layalina Review
VOL. V NO. 16, July 17-July 30, 2009 The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians call the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the education minister announced on July 22, according to Reuters. The reference to "Al-Nakba," echoes for the Palestinians as the defeat and exile in the war over Israel's 1948 creation, which was controversially inserted into the textbooks in 2007 by a dovish education minister. The term remains highly contentious six decades later. When former education minister Yuli Tamir introduced the term, some hard-line Israelis accused her of making Israel look apologetic for its own existence. Tamir "is expressing a sort of political masochist spirit and ... a total lack of national pride," Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman said at the time. Lieberman is now Foreign Minister. "No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe," Education Minister Gideon Saar told Israel's parliament. Israeli Arab lawmakers consider it a denial of history, as well as a “major attack on the identity of the Palestinian Arab citizens of the state of Israel, on their memories and their adherence to their identity.” Teachers will be free to discuss the personal and national tragedies that befell Palestinians during the war, said Saar, who represents the hard-line governing Likud Party. However, textbooks will be revised to remove the term, he added. Saar said in an interview to the BBC, "There is no reason that the official curriculum of the state of Israel should present the establishment of the state as a 'holocaust' or 'catastrophe.'" Jafar Farrah, director of Israeli-Arab advocacy group Moussawa, told the BBC that removing the word “Nakba” from textbooks would not stop Arabs from using it, but would only further complicate relations. Far-right members of the Israeli government are pursuing legislation to make it illegal in Israel to commemorate the Nakba, as Palestinians and their supporters do every 15 May. Reuters explains that following the 1948 war and the ensuing victory of the Jewish state against Arab nations, Israel seized territories beyond those allotted by the UN. More than 700,000 Palestinians are thought to have fled or been expelled from areas that came under Israeli control. While Israeli textbooks have emphasized the heroism of their military forces and glossed over the flight of Palestinians, “attributing the mass exile to voluntary escape if mentioning it at all,” Palestinians keep demanding the right to repatriate the surviving refugees and more than 4 million descendants to their original homes in Israel. Banning “Al-Nakba” from the Israeli textbook signals a major step backward in Israeli-Palestinian relations, as it erases the experience of the country’s Arab minority, remarks Ian Black for The Guardian. If anything, the term is a vivid reminder of irreconcilable historical narratives about what happened in 1948, along with the circulation by Israel’s current foreign minister Agvidor Lieberman of a photograph of the Palestinian nationalist leader Haj Amin Al-Husseini meeting Hitler in Berlin during the Second World War. “Both are the direct result of hardening political attitudes in Israel,” insists Black. He notes that the occurrence stems from a revisionist attitude among Israel’s “new” historians who claim that Palestinians are responsible for their own misfortune. Black goes as far as to say that the “Nakba denial” is “as resonant and emotive to Palestinians as the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’ (for Holocaust) is to Israeli and Jews.” If the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is to be resolved, understanding the Arab perspective is essential to understanding that Zionism symbolizes a movement of liberation for the Jews and that it is not another “manifestation of western colonialism.” Likewise, this applies to Al-Husseinis meeting Hitler, when he asked eastern European leaders to bar Jewish emigration to Palestine. Lieberman uses this old story in the service of his own cause – rebuffing pressure by Barack Obama to halt illegal Jewish settlement in occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, according to Black. “This crude and diversionary line of thinking is directly related to Netanyahu's insistence that he will not give in to international demands to freeze Israeli settlement activity,” he argues. The future will remain bleak as long as history is being used and abused to justify current actions.
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