Post by Sayf Udeen Ismaeel on Aug 9, 2009 17:17:21 GMT -5
1948 no catastrophe says Israel, as term nakba banned from Arab children's textbooks
Israel's education ministry has ordered the removal of the word nakba – Arabic for the "catastrophe" of the 1948 war – from a school textbook for young Arab children, it has been announced.
The decision – which will alter books aimed at eight- and nine-year-old Arab pupils – will be seen as a blunt assertion by Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud-led government of Israel's historical narrative over the Palestinian one.
The term nakba has a similar resonance for Palestinians as the Hebrew word shoah – normally used to describe the Nazi Holocaust – does for Israelis and Jews. Its inclusion in a book for the children of Arabs, who make up about a fifth of the Israeli population, drives at the heart of a polarised debate over what Israelis call their "war of independence": the 1948 conflict which secured the Jewish state after the British left Palestine, and led to the flight of 700,000 Palestinians, most of whom became refugees.
(Read on...)
"Revisionist Israeli historians" isn't exactly what I'd call them.
Changing history is never okay, especially when it's for the sole purposing of giving atrocities against the person the smell of roses. Guh.
