Earlier this fall, Israel's education ministry told a principal at an Israeli high school to cease using a history textbook that gives both the Israeli and Palestinian sides of Arab-Israeli conflict. The textbook was banned from the national high school curriculum in 2009, the Monitor reported.
At the crux of the issue is the recounting of the 1948 war, known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Palestinians and Israeli Arabs as the nakba, or "catastrophe." While Israelis say that Palestinians left their homes in present-day Israel voluntarily, Palestinians say that they were forced out. This textbook tells both of those versions. The inclusion of the word nakba in an Israeli textbook is problematic, said Education Minister Gideon Saar last year, because it undermines the legitimacy of Israel.
"No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe," said Mr. Saar, reversing a 2007 decision amid a rising tide of nationalist sentiment in the government. "There is a difference between referring to specific tragedies that take place in a war – either against the Jewish or Arab population – as catastrophes, and referring to the creation of the state as a catastrophe."
