Israel Rewriting Arab Textbooks To Erase Anti-Zionist Propaganda

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TEL AVIV (AP) — Some 235,000 children whose Arab schools were closed by the Middle East wargo back to school Monday under Israeli supervision, and with books carefully rewritten to eliminate anti-Zionist propaganda. The educational experiment in Arab territories occupied by Israel is being watched by Israelis, Arabs and the world beyond the Middle East.

Some of the children will have no books. Israeli authorities still are printing thousands of new texts on history, geography and literature. And some will have no teachers. Most of the more than 7,000 Arab teachers have indicated they will work under the Israelis, but many have refused. No Israeli teachers will work in the Arab schols.

"If teachers don't have books, they'll just have to teach without texts or on the subjects for which we have cleared books," an Israeli Education Ministry spokesman said. Arab books were scrutinized by Israeli educators for weeks. Of 134 types of books seized in the Israeli-occupied west bank territory, only 56 were found acceptable.

Only 39 of 129 from the Gaza Strip were cleared as free of anti-Zionist material. Israeli officials said most of the objectionable material was found in history, geography and Arab literature books.

But officials said in one arithmetic book they found 8-year-olds were given the following problem: "If our defense forces killed three Zionist terrorists and captured another when seven attacked our town, how many were left?" In such a case the entire book has to be reprinted under the Israeli rule.

"We have to reprint even if there is only one sentence we find objectionable," said Ya'acov Sarid, director-general of the Israeli Education Ministry. "If we just crossed it out or snipped it out the children would ask questions." The new textbooks are printed in Arabic and generally the Israelis say they have not changed the Arab curricula.

Israel does, however, intend to introduce Hebrew gradually into Old Jerusalem, the sector of the holy city seized from Jorbrew will be introduced in other occupied areas "if the parents request it." The 200,000 Arab children on the west bank of the Jordan River and the 100,000 in the Gaza Strip will receive free schooling.

But in Old Jerusalem, parents will have to pay fees based on size of family and amount of family income.

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

THE FOURTH HEADLINE on the Blanche dispatch, and the most explicit of the four about the operation: s112_1 'Israel Opens Schools For Arab Children' (kicker 'Some Books Rewritten') s104_2 'Israel Revises Slanted Arab Textbooks' s105_1 'Israelis Censor Arab Textbooks' s106_2 'Israel Rewriting Arab Textbooks To Erase Anti-Zionist Propaganda' <- this one This desk used two decks' worth of headline and named the whole action: Israel, rewriting, to erase. 'Erase' is the paper's word, not the wire's — the AP copy says 'rewritten to eliminate anti-Zionist propaganda'.

The headline is not hostile to Israel and not hostile to the books; it is simply the most complete description of what happened that any of the four desks wrote.

This clipping and its slide-mate make the best single pairing in the batch. s106_1, the Reuters item, is four paragraphs long and reports that several hundred Jordanian teachers threatened a boycott, that Israel abandoned the replacement textbooks, and that as a compromise 'offending pages and passages in the old books will be removed or blacked out'. s106_2, on the same slide, carries Ya'acov Sarid explaining why Israel wanted whole books reprinted instead: 'If we just crossed it out or snipped it out the children would ask questions.' Two wires, same week, same slide — the policy and the resistance that broke it, and the reason the resistance mattered.

Is any Palestinian quoted: no, in either. Across both clippings the Palestinian teachers act decisively and are never once given a sentence.

Cite this clipping

"Israel Rewriting Arab Textbooks To Erase Anti-Zionist Propaganda," The Detroit News, 27 August 1967. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1967-073. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1967-073