Old Wounds, New Textbooks
from Part I - The Textbook of Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2021
Chapter 3 examines the development of the first Palestinian curriculum in the aftermath of the establishment of the first Palestinian Ministry of Education in 1994. A close reading of Palestinian educational plans’ content and the elucidation provided by officials reveals that the incorporation of the 1948 War and its catastrophic effects on Palestinian society – highlighted in the continual usage of the term al-Nakba – were considered crucial to furthering national identification and a historical consciousness among Palestinians. Nevertheless, this chapter reveals that the conservative educational outlooks favored by the Palestinian Ministry of Education coupled with the influence of Israeli lobbying efforts led to the production of educational content that lacks an in-depth historical analysis of the 1948 War and the mass displacement that ensued. Notwithstanding the existence of a tepid Nakba narrative, the latter part of this chapter illustrates that the Nakba’s societal significance can be found in the overt and intentional omission of the Holocaust in the Palestinian curriculum. Reactionary educational policies in the domestic sphere are deemed a materialization of Zygmunt Bauman’s victimhood politicization – a quid pro quo, which, as a result of Israeli educational and societal treatment of the Nakba, brings about a retributive omission of “their narrative.”
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