School Books Once Again on the Frontline of the...

School Books Once Again on the Frontline of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Harriet Salem

March 3, 2016

*** A book included on a new recommended reading list for Israeli high school students tells readers that Arabs wanted to throw all Jews into the sea — continuing a long-held practice by both sides of using education to instil mutual hatred in the next generation...

The inclusion of the book — which is labelled "anti-Arab and pro-theocracy" by Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli daily — is the latest in a series of recent measures backed by Israel's right-wing Eduction Minister, Naftali Bennett, that have been seen as adding an increasingly nationalist flavor to the country's schooling system.

In December last year the Education Ministry sparked outrage in literary and liberal educational circles by banning a book that tells the story of an Israeli Jewish translator and a Palestinian artist who fall in love in New York, but eventually part ways when she returns to Tel Aviv and he goes back to West Bank.

Appeals to overturn the ban were denied by the Ministry which maintained that the book was not appropriate for teaching in Israeli schools because "intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threatens the separate identity" and teenagers did not have the mental capacity to understand the "significance of miscegenation" (interracial relationships)...



https://news.vice.com/article/schoo...frontline-of-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict