Jordan, Israel Compromise on Textbooks

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — (Reuters) — Israeli occupation officials abandoned plans to introduce their own textbooks into Jordan West Bank schools next month after opposition by Jordanion teachers. Large numbers of new textbooks—based on the curriculum used in Arab schools in Israel—were printed to replace Arab textbooks, which were found to contain strong antiIsraeli sentiments.

Several hundred Jordanian teachers threatened to boycott classrooms at the start of the new school year on Sept. 1 unless the old books could be used. An Israeli official acknowledged that the plan to use new textbooks was abandoned, although many were printed. As a compromise, offending pages and passages in the old books will be removed or blacked out.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping.

Context added by this archive

SCHOOLBOOKS THREAD — the short one, and the only clipping in the batch in which the Palestinian side wins anything concrete. Four paragraphs, and all four matter. Who is censoring: 'Israeli occupation officials' — and that phrase is Reuters' own, in the first four words of the story, unhedged.

No other clipping in the thread names the actor that way; the others say 'Israeli educators', 'Israeli authorities', 'the Israelis', 'the Israeli Education Ministry'. Reuters says occupation officials. What happened: Israel printed 'large numbers' of its own replacement textbooks, based on the curriculum used in Arab schools inside Israel.

Several hundred Jordanian teachers threatened to boycott the classrooms unless the old books could be used.

Israel backed down — 'An Israeli official acknowledged that the plan to use new textbooks was abandoned, although many were printed.' The compromise: 'offending pages and passages in the old books will be removed or blacked out.' That last sentence is the one to show Maria.

Everywhere else in this thread the censorship is invisible by design — Ya'acov Sarid tells two American wires that whole books had to be reprinted precisely so that the children would not see the gap and ask questions (s105_1, s109_2).

Here the teachers' boycott forces the opposite outcome: the old books stay, and the deletions are made visible, blacked out on the page in front of the child. The Palestinian teachers lost the passages and won the evidence that something had been taken. Is any Palestinian quoted: no. The several hundred teachers act, and change the outcome, and are not given a word.

The only person quoted even indirectly is 'An Israeli official'. Note also that Reuters calls them 'Jordanian teachers' and the schools 'Jordan West Bank schools'; the children are not mentioned at all and the word Palestinian does not appear.

Cite this clipping

"Jordan, Israel Compromise on Textbooks," The Macon News, 2 September 1967. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1967-072. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1967-072