ons.”
Telling the untold story
Truly, Isdud represents one of the villages referred to by former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who said in 1969 in a talk to Jewish students in Haifa, "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
Asad Ghanem, head of political science at Haifa University, is one of a number of Israeli educators who have been distributing a new textbook to Arab-Israeli schoolchildren, to tell the untold history of places like Isdud. He says, “We are trying to break the stranglehold of the Education Ministry on the information given to our children, which is always presented from a Zionist perspective". Arab-Israelis, former Palestinians who managed to remain in Israel after 1948, now represent 20% of the Israeli population.
The idea for the booklet came in response to increasing efforts by the Education Minister, Limor Livnat, to force schools to emphasise Jewish heritage and Zionism in the national curriculum. One of her first acts on joining the government in 2001 was to threaten Arab schools with financial penalties if they failed to fly the Israeli flag or play the national anthem during morning services, ignoring arguments that the anthem’s words and the symbol of the Star of David excluded Arab citizens.
In September 2003 she launched a new initiative, requiring all schools to participate in a weekly study program based on “100 terms in Jewish Heritage, Zionism and Democracy”. In particular, all pupils were expected to learn about important Jewish figures, including Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Baron Edmond de Rothschild, as well as to memorise entries on 33 terms considered basic to Zionist history, such as “Jewish democratic state”, “the War of Independence”, “the Law of Return”, and “Jewish National Fund”.
“Not only did much of the curriculum have no relevance to Arab schoolchildren, but it was designed to exclude their history and narrative,” said Dr Ghanem. “Our booklet is trying to rectify that.” He added that Arab education had also been damaged after decades of interference from the domestic security service, the Shin Bet, which has been vetting Arab teachers since Israel’s creation in 1948. The books had to be sent to the homes of Arab-Israeli schoolchildren, as the Education Ministry of Israel would not allow them to be sent to the schools.
On hearing of the booklet’s publication, Livnat said: “The Education Ministry is the only body authorized to determine the content of the education system, and no other body, including the monitoring committee, has the authority to distribute any materials in schools in the Arab sector.” She said she would be seeking the attorney general’s advice about whether publication of the booklet was legal.
Meanwhile, the Education Ministry has issued an instruction to all schools, including Arab ones, to begin teaching the “legacy” of Rehavam Ze’evi, the leader of the extreme-right Moledet party who was assassinated by Palestinian gunmen in October 2001. Ze’evi had repeatedly called for the “transfer – or expulsion – of Palestinians from the occupied territories and “inducements” to “encourage” Arab citizens to leave the region.
An Israeli law passed in July 2005 created a state-funded Ze’evi Heritage Centre and requires schools to establish a curriculum to “honour” Zeev’ memory. The drafters of the legislation argued that they were not interested in his political views but wanted only to teach children about his “love of the land”.
*this article was sourced from reports in Ha’aretz newspaper, Ilam Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel, and Zochrot.