Textbook cases

Nathalie al Zyoud, a master’s student at SAIS, reports on Tuesday’s presentation here by Bruce Wexler, Yale professor emeritus of psychiatry and  principal investigator for the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land study “Victims and Our Narratives,” a study of portrayal of the “other” in Israeli and Palestinian school books. 

School books shape attitudes about others and a sense of one’s own community, identity and homeland. These views are often reflected in the public statements of community leaders and are reformulated as accusations by each side in public debates. Textbook narratives can also promote rather than obstruct peace.

While Palestinian authorities were very receptive to the project, Israeli authorities refused to engage in the research.

The multi-confessional research team created a standardized method to rate the content of State-run secular and religious institutions using a curriculum approved by the Israeli Ministry of Education, as well as independent ultra-orthodox Israeli schools that used their own school books, the latter attended by 25% of Israeli children.

Between 1948 and 1994, Palestinians were restricted from creating their own educational material and used Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks under the supervision of the Israeli Ministry of Education.  After the Oslo accords, Palestinians were given the authority to create their own school books. So the study looked at the Palestinian curriculum in public schools, attended by 76% of Palestinian children, private schools, and schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which all used the same textbooks. Islamic institutions, attended by about 800 students all together, were omitted from the sample because they used Jordanian school books. The study did not examine religious books. Scientific and mathematics books were also omitted.

The Team had a 93% agreement rate between examiners and very high inter-rater reliability.

The study found that, as to “characterization of the others,” Israeli state schools in general had more literary descriptions about the other then Palestinian school books. When characterizations did occur; Palestinian and Ultra-orthodox Israeli school books had more pronounced negative and very negative depictions of the other. Israeli state school had more positive references about the other.

When raters examined the content of very negative language for terms that dehumanize, or demonize the other, they found that most textbooks primarily characterized the other as the enemy when they used very negative language.

Looking at the characterizations about the actions of the other, the same pattern occurred:  there was less negativity in Israeli state books.

While narratives depicting events about the other were not necessarily deemed false, schoolbooks opted to depict the negative truths about the other rather than highlight the positive truths. This has the potential of creating expectations about the behavior of others. When positive acts were mentioned, they referred to individual actions of the other, rather than group actions.

When textbooks portrayed the self-community, the opposite trend was noted, although in the Israeli state curriculum there was also a fair amount of self-criticism that was absent in the other school systems.

Few references were seen to Christianity in Israeli state schools, almost no references about Christians in Ultra-conservative Israeli schools and slightly more positive characterizations in Palestinian texts. Both Israeli and Palestinian school books depicted each other’s religion in neutral terms.

Photographs in Palestinian school books completely ignored Israel and focused on pictures with meaning to Palestinians. Maps in school books were indicative of the current territorial conflict: 95% of Palestinian maps did not mention Israel.  In Ultra-conservative schools 95% of maps had no borders and 65% of Israeli state schools also used maps without borders. The only Palestinian schools to have maps with borders and labels were UNRWA schools.

Once completed, the research team sought to promote the study’s findings and disseminated the results broadly within both communities. The results triggered a lot of criticism, particularly from the Israeli Ministry of Education (MOE), despite the results depicting Israeli textbooks in a slightly more positive light.  The Israeli MOE felt that hatred was incited elsewhere in Palestine and deemed the study biased, unprofessional, and significantly lacking in objectivity. The Palestinian Prime Minister, in his public statement, expressed satisfaction that the study confirmed that Palestinian textbooks did not contain blatant provocations, but committed to a full review of the state’s textbooks.