Victims of our own narrative?

In February, a prominent study funded by the US State Department concluded that Israeli and 'Palestinian' school textbooks were equally biased in their treatment of 'the other.' An exhaustive study in the Tower destroys that myth.

Despite the media presentation, however, something about the study, and the media reports on it, didn’t ring true. As a product of more than a decade of Israeli schools I can attest to the fact that the Israeli public education system certainly has its share of problems. But of all the issues—ranging from crowded classes to plummeting standards—one thing I never encountered was ignorance or hatred of “the other side.” Indeed, this is true of Israeli society in general. Even a surface-level familiarity with Israeli culture and academics provides enough information to know that the Palestinian perspective is represented in the arts and media and factored into the Israeli political process and legal system. Faced with a purportedly objective study that completely contradicted my own experience with the Israel’s education system, I felt compelled to examine the report in depth.

What I found isn’t pretty. The report is not only flawed, but also dishonest. It systematically exaggerates the faults in Israeli textbooks and downplays those found in the Palestinians’. Its methodology tends to distort the raw data rather than analyze it, usually to the detriment of the Israeli education system. Put simply, it makes every possible effort to create the impression that Israeli and Palestinian attitudes toward each other are the same, even when this is demonstrably untrue—according to the study’s own research data. It is no surprise that the State Department, which funded the study in its early phases, has endorsed neither the composition of the committee nor the report’s findings.

This is an important issue, not only because of the need for scientific accuracy in such studies, but because the presentation of “the other” in Palestinian and Israeli texts is an absolutely essential topic. In many ways, it is the essential question in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Are both sides building societies that can sympathize, or even empathize, with “the other”? If so, it could mean an (eventual) end to years of war. If not, then we may well be facing decades of further violence and the absence of any lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world.

Read it all.