Israel cuts 1948 ’catastrophe’ from Arabic texts

The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians call the "catastrophe" of Israel’s creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the education minister said Wednesday.

The reference to "al-naqba," the Arabic word catastrophe, as Palestinians call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation, was inserted by a dovish Israeli education minister in 2007.

The phrase remains contentious six decades later, a symptom of the continuing divisions in Israel. Many Israeli Arabs identify politically with their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, some Israeli Jews accuse Israeli Arabs of disloyalty to the country.

Israel’s current government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line Likud Party, includes members who favor cracking down on Israeli Arabs by ordering loyalty oaths or even moving them out of Israel.

"No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe," Education Minister Gideon Saar of Likud told Israel’s parliament on Wednesday.

Israeli Arab lawmaker Hana Sweid accused the government of "naqba denial."

"It’s a major attack on the identity of the Palestinian Arab citizens of the state of Israel, on their memories and their adherence to their identity," he told the Associated Press.

Teachers will be free to discuss the personal and national tragedies that befell Palestinians during the war, Saar said, but textbooks will be revised to remove the term, he added.

The decision applied to a third-grade textbook for Arab schoolchildren. Jewish textbooks make no mention of the term.

Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said Saar’s decision showed insecurity.

"Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident. We need not be afraid of a word," Sarid said.

The 1948 war saw Arab nations invade the newly founded Jewish country after a United Nations decision to partition the British-controlled territory of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Jewish forces won, seizing territories beyond what the U.N. had allotted to it, while Egypt and Jordan took what was left of the territories the U.N. intended for a Palestinian state.

More than 700,000 Palestinians are thought to have fled or been expelled from areas that came under Israeli control.

Official Israeli histories of the country’s establishment, especially those written for schoolchildren, have typically focused on the heroism of Israeli forces and glossed over the Palestinian flight, attributing the mass exile to voluntary escape if mentioning it at all.

In recent years, several Israeli historians have published books claiming that while many Palestinians did flee of their own accord, many others were forced from their homes as fighting raged.

Palestinians demand the right to repatriate the surviving refugees and more than 4 million descendants to their original homes in Israel.

Israel rejects the demand, saying the refugees should receive compensation and be resettled where they now live or in a Palestinian state.

The Arabs who remained inside Israel now make up about 20 percent of the country’s population of 7.3 million.