Denial of Palestinian national identity is a core message of Israeli textbooks
The presentation of Palestinians in Israeli schoolbooks of History and Geography 1994-2003
by Nurit Peled-Elhanan
The Arabs refuse to live in high buildings and insist on living in one-storey land-ridden houses "
The Arab society is traditional and objects to changes by its nature, reluctant to adopt novelties […] Modernization seems dangerous to them […] they are unwilling to give anything up for the general good. ( ibid)
Geography of the Land of Israel: 303- "Management of land use in the Arab sector
Palestinians represented either in a racist stereotypical way, or as absent people
The Palestinian occupied territories are depicted on all maps as part of the state of Israel but their Palestinian inhabitants are missing from maps, photographs and graphs.
Israeli school books present the ideal of an Arab-free land
These 'Arabs' are presented as 'the enemy from within' and therefore, as one Geography book explains, they must be kept from 'invading state lands', for they threaten to 'create a non-Jewish sequence which would separate these areas from the state of Israel' (Geography of the Land of Israel, p. 240).
Schoolbooks teach about "the 'State of Israel' which has...divine legitimation"(Bar-Gal 1993b:430). This is highly reinforced by frequent quotes from the Bible, that reiterate the divine promise...It also emphasises the supremacy of the divine promise over international laws and decisions.
Arab cities within the state of Israel are also omitted.
Palestinian territories are represented on maps as part of Israel: the inhabitants of these same territories are either non-existent or depicted as "foreign" workers.
Racist cartoons
Israeli schoolbooks never show Palestinian faces...distant or cartoon-like figures followed by a camel, a herd of barefoot children, wearing traditional dress and kafieh. (Figure no.10).
"The Arab society is traditional and objects to changes by its nature, reluctant to adopt novelties […] Modernization seems dangerous to them […] they are unwilling to give anything up for the general good."
Promoting the ideal of an Arab-free country: The Legitimation of massacres
The report about the massacre of Kibieh in 1953, headed by Ariel Sharon, who entered with his 'special unit' - the 101 - into the village and murdered 69 men, women and children, as a reprisal for the villagers' trials to cross the border and reach their original villages for their crops, is often termed "punishment" and is always accompanied by heroic photographs of the killers, many of whom are today's venerated leaders.
The schoolbooks which were published after the Oslo peace agreement inculcate Jewish exclusive rights of the Land
Full analysis in Kibush ('Occupation')
'The presentation of Palestinians in Israeli schoolbooks of History and Geography'