NOVANEWS
Haaretz
A soon-to-be-published report on revisions made to high school civics textbook shows that the new revised edition places a greater emphasis on presenting Israel as a nation-state for Jews than on presenting Israel as a democratic country.
According to the report’s author, Dr. Halleli Pinson of the University of Haifa, the changes made to eight chapters of the textbook Being Citizens in Israel are far-reaching. While the previous edition attempted to give students a nuanced outlook, the new edition, which began to be used in Israeli schools last year, is missing important information.
Dr. Yousef Jabareen of the Nazareth based Arab Center for Law and Policy – Dirasat said that many Arab civics teachers were having difficulty teaching the new version “but since the material is a part of the matriculation exam, they have no choice.”
The decision to revise Being Citizens in Israel was due to claims that the book’s previous edition was critical of the state. Prof. Asher Cohen, a fellow at the Institute for Zionist Strategy, one of the organizations that criticized the previous edition, now heads a committee in charge of preparing the civics curriculum. Another member of the institute, Dr. Aviad Bakshi, is the only academic adviser to work on the book’s revision, as Haaretz revealed last week.
Pinson’s report, entitled “From a Jewish and Democratic State to a Jewish State Period,” states that while the institute claimed that the previous edition was biased, it is now, due to the institute’s involvement, suffers more significantly from “ideological biases, concealing of data, and the presentation of a monolithic approach.”
Haaretz has learned that the Education Ministry was pressured into publishing the revised chapters without the usual evaluation by academics. The ministry said in response that the new chairwoman of its Pedagogical Secretariat Rahel Matuki would “rectify the evaluation process and the book’s approval as early as this year.”
One major problem with the revised chapters, according to the report, is that Israel’s character as both a Jewish and a democratic state are hardly mentioned. Several sections open by presenting Israel as a Jewish state, and even when the word democratic appears “it is made clear to students by the way the material is organized and emphasized that Israel’s definition as a Jewish state precedes that of a democratic state,” Pinson says. According to Pinson, the revised chapters are based on the model of a Jewish ethnic-cultural state as the preferred model.
In Chapter 4, justifications described as “liberal” are presented for a nation-state. For example, with regard to minority rights, it states that such rights must be “strictly maintained,” but immediately thereafter states that “minorities have a right to their own culture in their communities but don’t have the right to have their culture formulated into the general identity of the state.”
“Not only is this approach not liberal,” Pinson says, “but one could wonder whether it is even consistent with a democratic regime.” Another claim in favor of an ethnic nation state, also presented as liberal, is that there is a greater chance for social solidarity among members of the same ethnic group. “Natural solidarity among Jews can be utilized in a Jewish nation state to increase welfare legislation for the benefit of the weaker segments of society,” the book states. It also explains that if Jewish solidary causes Israel’s citizens to legislate social laws or institute a minimum wage, all citizens enjoy these laws, no matter what their nationality.”
However, Pinson says that “the Israeli reality, in which various groups are excluded and discriminated against, attests to the opposite.”
Pinson says the book adopts “a discourse that was accepted up to the 1980s, that saw Arab citizens as a collection of religious-cultural or language groups, not an ethnic minority” and emphasizes the Arab-Palestinian identity the way old textbooks once did. For example: “the Arab minority in Israel is part of the Middle East biggest group.”
Pinson says the information presented in the book about the Arab minority is “disconnected from any social or political context.” For example, it notes that Arab participation in the workforce is low compared to the rest of the population and that their “contribution to the GDP is only 8 percent, although they are 20 percent of the population.” Pinson believes that presenting this information without relating it to discrimination and inequality – concepts that are hardly mentioned in the revised chapters – leaves students with a disturbing implied message – “as if the Arab minority itself is responsible for its low participation in the workforce, and this should be seen as an indication of their [sense of] belonging to the state.”
The book does note that gaps between Arabs and Jews leads to “low income, poverty, lack of jobs and industry and obstacles to establishing Arab business initiatives,” and that Arabs are under-represented in the civil service, but no real explanation is given for this situation.
Pinson says the book also justifies occupation and deportation; for example, Chapter 1 states that “the lands of the state were determined in various ways, including diplomatic agreements, occupation and separation of states.” The mention of diplomatic agreements together with occupation conveys a message that does not conform to international conventions to which Israel is a signatory,” Pinson says.