The Image of Palestine and the Palestinians in Israeli Textbooks [Review of the book Palestine in Israeli school books: Ideology and propaganda in education, by N. Peled-Elhanan]

Education and schoolbooks have been an instrument of primary importance in shaping public narratives and collective national identities – a sense of the “We”, often reinforced by a juxtaposition against an enemy “Other”. In contexts dominated by social and ethnopolitical conflicts, education becomes a contentious policy issue of primary importance. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes no exception in this regard, and in the last two decades Palestinian and - to a lesser extent - Israeli textbooks have become a subject of investigation and, at times, of heated national and international political controversy. Schools and schoolbooks in contemporary Israel can therefore be analysed in comparison with other OECD countries (as in OECD, 2016), or within the conceptual framework of protracted ethnopolitical conflict. Nurit Peled-Elhanan has written a compelling analysis of the image of Palestine and the Palestinians conveyed in Israeli schoolbooks, making the case for their critical appraisal in the context of the conflict. The book, published in the UK and USA in 2012, is partly based on articles written between 2009 and 2010, and has been recently translated into Italian (...)