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.”

The Textbook of Memory, the first of three parts that make up this work, examines the state educational systems in the post-Oslo era in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian society. In contravention with the stipulations of 1993 Declaration of Principles, which declared that Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) should foster mutual understanding and tolerance, Part I reveals the existence of incompatible narratives in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks based on a negation or minimization of the other’s seminal history. Beyond examining the presentation of the other’s historical narrative in the Israeli and Palestinian curricula, the two chapters that make up Part I emphasize the exclusive and ethnocentric presentation of both societies’ own foundational history. Through an analysis of the presentation of the in-group’s own history and (the existence of) the out-group’s historical narrative, Part I of this study identifies the ways in which schooling contributes to – and justifies – the continuance of conflict narratives. By outlining the existing content pertaining to the 1948 War and the Holocaust in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, the chapters’ dual analyses illuminate the mechanisms that remain hidden from those socialized and indoctrinated by these narratives.