Textbooks in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Open-knowledge reference entry
Textbooks in Israel and Palestine have emerged as an issue within the larger Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Textbooks in Israel have been found to contain narratives that dehumanize Palestinian Arabs, or provide justification for or skip over historical topics related to Israeli occupation of Palestine, such as war crimes like the Deir Yassin massacre.
Studies on Palestinian textbooks have highlighted hateful imagery and content. In response to such findings, from 2019 to 2023 the European Parliament passed four resolutions denouncing the Palestinian Authority for the content of its textbooks and stipulating that any future financing for education be conditioned on improvements.
Israel has used the topic of Palestinian textbooks as a Hasbara tool against the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians say that their textbooks rightly focus on their own national narrative, which includes the privations of life under occupation.
Council for Religious Institutions in the Holy Land study
A comprehensive three-year study (2009–2012) of Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, regarded by its researchers as "the most definitive and balanced study to date on the topic," found that incitement, demonization or negative depictions of the other in children's education was "extremely rare" in both Israeli and Palestinian school texts, with only 6 instances discovered in over 9,964 pages of Palestinian textbooks, none of which consisted of "general dehumanising characterisations of personal traits of Jews or Israelis". Israeli officials rejected the study as biased, while Palestinian Authority officials claimed it vindicated their view that their textbooks are as fair and balanced as Israel's.
The study, published in 2013 by the Council for Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, an interfaith association of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, produced different results. The study was supervised by a psychiatrist, Prof.
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