Israeli textbooks

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Israeli textbooks have been accused of instilling anti-Arabic attitudes or inciting Israeli children to commit violence or terrorism. As a result of these accusations, analyses of Palestinian textbooks have been performed by various research institutions.

In the article "The Arab Image in Hebrew School Textbooks" by professor Dan Bar-Tal of the Tel Aviv University makes a study of 124 textbooks used in Israeli schools and reports that "over the years, generations of Israeli Jews were taught a negative and often delegitimizing view of Arabs." The two main traits of Arabs in the textbooks are "primitiveness, inferiority in comparison to Jews" and "their violence, to characteristics like brutality, untrustworthiness, cruelty, fanaticism, treacherousness and aggressiveness.". In the 1980s and 1990s "Geography books for the elementary and junior high schools stereotype Arabs negatively, as primitive, dirty, agitated, aggressive, and hostile to Jews … history books in the elementary schools hardly mention Arabs … history textbooks of the high schools, the majority of which cover the Arab-Jewish conflict, stereotype the Arabs negatively. Arabs are presented as intransigent and uncompromising."^[1]^[2]^[3] The problem is most sever in textbooks used by ultra-orthodox schools. The new textbooks used in most schools since 2000 gives a more diverse view of the conflixt.^[4] Palestinians are absent from all Israeli textbooks and are instead called "Arabs".^[5]