The new civics curriculum for high schools in Israel: The discursive construction of Palestinian identity and narratives

Abstract

The Israeli education system is divided and segregated along the lines of nationality and religiosity. While Israeli society and its education system, in particular, have generally been subjected to the influence of globalisation, including universal discourses of citizenship, in many ways it remains highly particularistic and nationalistic. To a large extent, what we see today in terms of school curricula in Israel stands in contradiction to the main trends in civic education in the developed world. It expresses a move towards neo-nationalistic religious (neo-Zionist) discourse which overtly gives preference to the Jewishness of the state over and above its commitment to democratic universal principles. This article will focus on these recent discursive changes. It will examine the space, or rather the lack of it, that is given to the Palestinian identity and narratives in the official civics textbook for high schools. The article explores several discursive practices adopted by the textbook in reinforcing the marginal position of Palestinian citizens, constructing them as the ultimate ‘others’ and undermining their civic status and rights.

Keywords

citizenship education discourse analysis Israel Palestinian minority textbook

Introduction

Over the past decade, the compulsory secondary school civics curriculum, and in particularly the official civics textbook, have been at the centre of a heated political debate that took place within the Ministry of Education, the Education Committee of the Knesset, as well as in the media. In 2015, prior to the publication of the revised version of the official textbook that was introduced in 2016, a newspaper headline denounced, ‘More Judaism, Less Democracy: Israel’s Education Ministry Rewrites High-school Civics’ (Kashti, 2015). Indeed, any curriculum is a site for social and political struggle (Popkewitz and Brenan, 1998), and particularly, in citizenship education which touches on the very nature and boundaries of membership in the citizenry collective. However, to a great extent the public debate about the current civics curriculum in Israel was, and still is, particularly vocal (Cohen, 2017).

The debate over the curriculum has even reached the doorstep of the Israeli Supreme Court. In 2016, a group of academics and teachers petitioned the court to put a halt to the distribution of a glossary for the Matriculation exam published by the Ministry of Education in 2015, listing the main concepts and their definitions, civics teachers should use when teaching for the matriculation exam in civics. During the first hearing, in July 2016, the Supreme Court have raised its concerns with regard to the representations of the Palestinian minority in this glossary. The glossary reflects to a great extent the main changes that were introduced in the revised version of the official textbook – Being Citizens in Israel: A Jewish and Democratic State (Ministry of Education, 2016 – hereafter ‘Being Citizens’).

The aim of this article is to examine the representations of the Palestinian minority, its identities and narratives, as constructed by the revised official civics textbook. The article examines two main themes: the space or rather the lack of it, given to Palestinian citizens, and what sometimes also referred to as practices of omission; the strategies the textbook employs to normalise and justify the marginalised status of the Palestinian citizens. More specifically, the analysis will be contextualised within the current nationalistic religious discourse in Israeli politics that transforms the definition of Israel as both, and equally, ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’, into a new definition of citizenship according to which the Jewish character of the state supersedes its democratic one. This article first contextualises the analysis and discusses the characteristics of Israeli citizenship and the Israeli education system and the changes they undergone in the past two decades. It then reviews key findings in the research on the representations of Palestinians in Israeli textbooks and provides a socio-historical account of the Israeli civics curriculum. The methodology section addresses the article’s approach to textbook analysis and the specific sample and method of analysis employed in this study. This is followed by two sections discussing the themes mentioned above. Finally, I offer some concluding remarks and speculate about the impact of these changes on both Jewish and Palestinian identities.

Israeli citizenship, the status of the Palestinian and the Israeli education system

Israel is defined as both Jewish and democratic state. From the outset, this definition embodies an inherent tension between inclusive civic discourse that draws on liberal notions of citizenship and exclusive mechanism, mostly distinguishing between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, based on ethno-republican notions of citizenship (Shafir and Peled, 2002; Pinson, 2007b). However, while this dual definition of Israel was the dominant civic discourse until recently, over the past two decades, scholars have observed that an ethno-religious discourse driven by right-wing parties and interest groups, including the Jewish settlers movement in the territories, have gain prominence (Mustafa and Ghanem, 2010; Ben-Porat, 2013). These forces subscribe to the belief that the ‘Biblical Land of Israel’ is paramount, even divine, and thus supersedes the democratic principles of the state of Israel (Ben-Porat, 2013) and redraw ‘the boundaries of citizenship in Israel in such a way that meaningful citizenship is available to Jewish citizens only’ (Rouhana and Sultany, 2003: 19).

This entailed a move from a ‘Jewish democratic’ state to a ‘Jewish’ state vision which means that the Israeli public sphere is instilled with religious ethno-national values and commitments that subordinate secular, liberal and democratic values (Ben-Porat, 2013; Yemini et al., 2014). An example for the results of these processes, can be found in the recent ‘National Law’, a new foundational law legislated in July 2018, that de facto determines exactly that Israel definition as a national Jewish state should be given preference over its commitment to liberal democratic ideas and civil equality and that the commitment of the state to its Jewish citizen should be given preference over its commitment to its non-Jewish citizens. These changes foster what Ram (2003) refers to as neo-Zionist approach and ultimately also shift citizenship education from a state-centred and rights-centred discourse to a nation-centric education (Pinson, 2013).

Palestinian Israeli citizens (often referred to as Israeli Arabs) have always suffered from material inequalities and lack of recognition of their national narrative and cultural heritage. Agbaria and Jabareen (2013) argue that Palestinian citizens in Israel are subject to politics of contempt, a term they use to describe the situation where the inequalities from which Palestinian citizens suffer do not go unnoticed by the state, despite that the state does not take meaningful actions to ratify these inequalities. This is especially evident when it comes to the education system. Indeed, the education system in Israel has always functioned in an ethno-nationally divided and conflict-ridden society (Alexander et al., 2010). However, in recent years, the changes to the Israeli civic and political discourse, the shift to the right and the emboldened nationalistic orientation have left their mark on the education system in general (Hanna, 2017) and the civics curriculum in particular (Cohen, 2017). To a great extent, the current debate about the official textbook and the new version that was published in 2016 is yet another arena in which these changes can be observed.

Israeli official state education system is divided into different sectors each serves different group within Israeli society¹. While this might be seen as a sign of pluralistic education system, de facto, the Israeli education system can be described as segregated along the lines of nationality and religiosity. Whereas Jewish religious groups enjoy high level of autonomy in relation to the operation of their education systems and the content of the curricula studied in their schools, the Palestinian minority does not enjoy the same autonomy. The Arab school system in Israel suffers from inequalities in terms of resource allocation as well as lack of recognition of the national identity of the group it serves (Agbaria and Jabareen, 2013). Indeed, the school curriculum in Arab schools in Israel is completely deprived of any national content (Al-Haj, 2005).

Textbooks’ representations of the ‘other’ and the representations of Palestinians in Israeli textbooks

Nasser and Nasser (2008) argue that official textbooks, especially in conflict-ridden societies such as Israel, are crucial for understanding how ethnic relations are regulated and should be seen as ‘powerful resources for shaping identity formation and inter-group relationship’ (p. 628). A useful way to examine the ways in which textbooks and curricula shape the culture of conflict and inter-group relations in conflict-ridded society is the typology offered by Davies (2003), which is based on extensive comparative study in diverse national contexts. She distinguishes between two continuums according to which she classifies different curriculum initiatives. One is a continuum between negative and positive perceptions of the conflict and the other is a continuum between passive and active approaches to education about the conflict. On the negative-active axis of this typology, we can find, for instance, ‘hate curriculum’ – curricula and textbooks – where the enemy, the ‘other’ is described in denigrating terms and one own’s nation is portrayed as heroic; the ‘other’ is portrayed as the aggressor while ‘we’ as the victims. Similarly, she identified practices such as reinforcing national and transnational stereotypes as a form of negative-active education. Slightly different, she described omission of the other as an example of a negative-passive curriculum. To a great extent, the ongoing representations of Palestinians (or Arabs) in Israeli textbooks fall into what Davies (2003) refers to as negative-active or negative-passive curricular initiatives.

The representations of Palestinians and the Palestinian narrative in textbooks in Jewish schools often can be characterised as stereotypical at best (Bar-Gal, 1993; Bar-Tal, 2013; Peled-Elhanan, 2008), contributing to the dehumanisation of Palestinians and fostering their image as the enemy within. Bar-Gal (1993) and Frier (2004) both suggest that over the years there has been a change in the stereotypical representations of Palestinians in Israeli textbooks. However, while these representations might have become subtler and more politically correct, they are still present. One aspect of this change was the move from stereotypes of the enemy or the colonial gaze of the Palestinian as primitive backward people, to their representation as lacking individuality, agency or voice. Bar-Gal (1993) claims, for instance, that the ethnocentric approach that characterised Israeli geography textbook gives room to a representation that attributes positive changes in Arab settlements to the state. In other words, the state is describe as ‘saving’ the Palestinian community from ‘mediaeval world’ bringing them to modernity.

Peled-Elhanan (2008) discusses several strategies employed by Israeli history and geography textbooks, as means of othering Palestinians. To name the central ones,

Legitimation of the Jewish hegemony: for instance, by naming Israel/Palestine as the Land of Israel or the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, and most profoundly by referencing the Bible as a source of legitimation.

Dissimulation: presenting events only from one perspective, offering a mono-narrative. For instance, the omission of the Palestinian Nakba.

Naturalisation: presenting historical events as outcomes of natural processes, ignoring the causality that led to them.

Dichotomization: creating a binary between Jews and Palestinians reinforcing the perception that they are not part of the same citizenry.

Genericization: the use of generic terms for all types of ‘other’ while ignoring differences in religion, religiosity, culture and class.

Many of these strategies, as it will be demonstrated later, also employed by the revised version of the civics textbook. While there is a continuation between the representations of Palestinians in the revised civics textbook and that found mostly in history and geography textbooks by previous studies, there are also notable differences. First, the use of ethno-national neo-Zionist interpretation of Israeli citizenship and how this discursive change in Israeli citizenship is used to justifying the exclusion of Palestinian citizens by the textbook. Second, as opposed to geography and history, where there are diffident curricula and textbooks studied in Jewish and Arab schools, the civics curriculum is unified across all state education sectors, and supposedly the official textbook (or its Arabic version) is meant to be used also in the Arab schools. Finally, while the representations of the Palestinian in the previous version of the official textbook (Ministry of Education, 2000) was more ambivalent and in some cases also recognised the Palestinians as a national minority and the Palestinian narrative (Pinson, 2007a), the current version of the textbook (Pinson, 2016) have taken a sharp turn. In order to fully understand that turn I now provide a socio-historical account of the civics curriculum in Israel.

The socio-historical review of the civics curriculum in Israel

During the 1990s, due to concerns raised about the lack of democratic education and subject to the growing influence universal human rights discourses, the Ministry of Education revised the civics curriculum for high schools. This curriculum, alongside the ongoing commitment to the Jewishness of the state, also fostered a universal and liberal notion of citizenship (Ichilov et al., 2005; Pinson, 2007b). It was decided, therefore, as a symbolic act, to create a unified curriculum, across all state education sectors as a means of strengthening a common notion of Israeli citizenship (Cohen, 2017). To that affect, a unified, single official textbook was published in 2000, which has put more emphasis on liberal democratic discourses of citizenship and on developing critical thinking (Cohen, 2016). However, as I have argued elsewhere (Pinson, 2007a, 2007b), the construction of the notion of Israeli citizenship in the 2000 version can be described as ambivalent, offering Palestinian citizens inclusion based only on a thin liberal ideal of belonging. The 2000 version of the textbook, on the one hand, emphasised liberal inclusive ideas of citizenship and gave room to the Palestinian narrative and identities, but at the same time reinforced exclusive mechanisms, which distinguished, according to national affiliation, between different types of citizenships. For instance, the 2000 textbook, when discussing the social relations between Palestinian and Jewish citizens explicitly stated that excluding the former from political decision making and public debates, based on their ethno-national affiliation, is undemocratic. However, several pages later, when discussing the political debate in Israel between doves and hawks, described it as a debate relevant only to the Jewish majority, and thus, de facto gave legitimacy to the exclusion of Palestinian citizens from the political debate about Israel’s boundaries (Pinson, 2007b).

The more universal orientation that characterised the 1990s curriculum and the official textbook published in 2000 began to crack already in the early 2000s. However, the main turn occurred in 2009, with the publication of a position paper written by the Institute for Zionist Strategies² focusing on the official civics textbook (Gaiger, 2009). The report’s main argument was that citizenship education, as shaped by the official 2000 textbook, damages ‘patriotic and Zionist education and the commitment of the students to the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish nation-state’ (Gaiger, 2009: 2). This report attributed these flaws to the influence of post-modern and post-Zionist academic discourses on citizenship education which prompted a democratic, liberal vision of citizenship. The report has not only triggered the debate over the civics curriculum, but also resulted in the publication of a new version of the textbook in 2016. Thus, the publication of the revised official textbook should be seen as a backlash to the universal democratic orientation of the 2000 version (Pinson, 2016; Cohen, 2017).

The analysis of the new version of the official textbook does not only have the potential to shed light on discursive changes to Israeli citizenship in general, but it is also important for developing an understanding of the changing educational contexts in which students shape their civic identities. Previous studies (see, for example, Sabbagh and Resh, 2014 and Pinson, 2004) have demonstrated how national identity of Israeli students as well as religiosity among Jewish Israeli adolescents, shape different notions citizenship. Sabbagh and Resh (2014) in a survey conducted in 2010 and 2011, prior to the introduction of the changes discussed in this article, have found that while Jewish religious adolescents tend to draw heavily on ethno-republican notions of citizenship, secular Jewish and Palestinian youngsters evoke a more liberal conceptions of citizenship. They explain this trend in the different educational contexts of these groups and also in the introduction, since the 1990s, of universal liberal democratic values in school curricula especially in the secular Jewish and Arab school sectors. While it is difficult to measure the effect of textbook on students’ identities, the analysis of the changes to the curriculum enrich our understanding of the context in which students construct their identities and provide the ground for future studies on both students and teachers responses to the curriculum.

Methods and analysis

The civics curriculum and textbook should be seen as one site out of many in which the concept of Israeli citizenship and the meanings of Israeli identity – of ‘being Israeli’ – are negotiated and discursively constructed. It is a powerful site in which the state appears both in its unifying and segregating powers. Curriculum documents as well as textbooks are important educational artefacts from which we can learn about the broader social and political struggles in a given society (Soysal, 2002). Textbooks represent the knowledge, values and norms the education system seeks to pass on (Alayan and Al-Khalidi, 2010). Some might argue that today, in the age of information technology, the importance of textbooks is declining. However, due to their authoritative and objective image, they still act as a powerful tool in shaping teaching and learning processes, especially in Israel where textbooks maintain their hegemonic status due to the centrality ascribed to them by students when preparing for the matriculation exams (Kizel, 2013).

This article draws on the analysis of the revised version of the official civics textbook published in 2016. Being the only official textbook and the most widely used, the textbook provides a good representation of the official knowledge as constructed by the Ministry of Education and of the changes that took place in civics education (CE) in Israel in recent years. The examples used in this article are taken mainly from the only chapter that directly addresses the status of minorities in Israel (chapter 9), two sub-sections in other chapters (chapters 7 and 37) that also focus on the status of non-Jewish minorities in Israel as well as other references to the Palestinian minority throughout the textbook.

The analysis employed Fairclough’s (2009) approach to discourse analysis. It compares different articulations of discourses in the text as part of a specific event or as part of a network of practices in a stable and continuous discourse. Special attention was given to the discursive technique, such as language, rhetoric, categorization, framing, prior hidden assumptions, the structure and organisation of the text (Fairclough, 2009) that were used by the textbook in constructing the representation of the Palestinian citizens. The analysis also draws on Peled-Elhan’s (2008) framework – this part of the analysis is deductive. The findings were examined also in reference to the representations of the Palestinian minority in the previous version of the official textbook (Ministry of Education 2000).

The researcher’s positionality

The author is positioned within the critical sociology of education and, as such, also adopts a critical perspective on the attempts to reconcile the tension between Israel’s Jewishness and democratic characteristics without taking into account power relations. The author has also been involved in the debate about CE in Israel in the past decade. The author is a Jewish academic, who has been studying the CE curriculum in Israel for almost two decades. More recently the author was commissioned to review the revised textbook by Israeli non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working for a greater civic equality. In 2013, the author published a report on a draft of the textbook, which attracted a lot of media attention and attacks by right-wing parties, including the current head of the civic curriculum committee. The author has spoken in numerous public events and worked with groups of critical teachers, including Arab teachers supporting them in their struggle against the current changes to CE in Israel.

The space (or lack of it) given to the Palestinian minority

If the 2000 version of the textbook can be equated with tightrope walking on the fine line between inclusion (strengthening a liberal concept of citizenship) and exclusion (strengthening the Jewish identity) while emphasising the definition of Israel as both Jewish and democratic state (Pinson, 2007b), then the revised textbook (Pinson, 2016) renders the liberal notion of citizenship, almost completely redundant. The framework of a common curriculum promoting shared citizenship is supposedly preserved, but the 2016 textbook adopts a number of overt and covert practices of exclusion towards the Palestinian minority while reinforcing their marginal status in Israeli society. These practices include not only the omission (Davies, 2003) of the Palestinian national narrative but also de-contextualization of the discussion of their status in Israel, what Peled-Elhanan (2008) refers to as naturalisation. Furthermore, at certain points throughout the discussion, there is a usage of dividing practices that are manifested, for instance, in addressing the Palestinian minority as inhabitants (rather than citizens) – what can be seen as dichotomization (Peled-Elhanan, 2008) by reinforcing a binary between Jewish and Palestinian-Arab citizens and fostering a perception that the latter are second class citizens and not part of the same citizenry. The Palestinina minority is also othered by constantly referring to them as ‘non-Jewish groups’ (i.e. using strategies of genericization, Peled-Elhanan, 2008), and as having rights that are different from those of the Jewish majority, at least in terms of group rights. To a large extent, in the current version of the textbook one can find expressions of mechanisms typical of textbooks in societies in a protracted conflict, such as exclusion of the narrative of the other (Davies, 2003).

Throughout the new textbook, the national narratives and identities of the Palestinian minority in Israel are rarely addressed. It is interesting to see that even, in the chapter that is dedicated to ‘non-Jewish’ groups in Israel, the national identities are played down. The textbook uses simultaneously three strategies in the ways in which it constructs the Palestinian/Arab citizens in this chapter. First, it is important to note that there are two chapters dedicated to identity markers of different groups in Israel. One focuses on Jewish citizens (chapter 8) and other focuses on non-Jewish groups (chapter 9). In that respect, the textbook employs what Peled-Elhanan (2008) identified as dichotomization. Second, the textbook label them as ‘non-Jewish groups’ strengthening the binary between Jews and Palestinian citizens but homogenising all minorities under this label. However, the textbook also adopts a third discursive strategy that was common in Israel up to the 1980s, which views the Arab minority as an amalgamation of religious, cultural and linguistic groups, as appose to a national minority, employing in a sense a ‘divide and conquer’ approach. This can be seen from the outset, from the chapter’s introduction which reads, ‘In this chapter we will learn about the Arab, Druze, Aramic and Cherks societies, from a demographic, national and religious perspectives’ (p. 101).

The chapter then continues,

The Druze, despite their language being Arabic, their identification as Arabs is under dispute – both within the Druze and Arab societies. Most of the Druze do not define themselves as Arabs. Part of the Arabic speaking Christians do not see themselves as Arabs, but rather as Aramic. (p. 102)

While the chapter devotes very little attention to Arab or Palestinian identities (the largest minority group in Israel), throughout the chapter it stresses other identifications, such as language and culture, highlighting differences between various ‘Arabic speaking groups’. It also stresses the distinction between Druze, Aramic (a very small minority of Arab Christians who do not identify as Arab-Palestinians and considered loyal to the state of Israel) and those who identify as Arab/Palestinian. It is also important to point out that both the Druze and the Aramic minorities receive greater attention than the Arab/Palestinian minority. Here, the textbook employs another dichotomization practice (Peled-Elhanan, 2008), not only between Jewish and Palestinian/Arab citizens but also between ‘non-Jewish’ Arab groups who does not challenge the Jewish national narrative, reject their Palestinian/Arab national identity and therefore defined as the ‘good minorities’, as appose to those defining themselves as Palestinians. Moreover, their identity is being presented mostly in terms of their relationships with the ‘Arab-Nations’ and with Palestinians who live ‘outside Israel’. In line with this approach, chapter 7, which reviews the different identifications of Israeli citizens and have several sections dedicated to the Palestinian citizens, reads,

Arab National Identity: emphasis the link to the Arab Nation (Pan-Arabian) in the Middle East. Many of the Arab citizens of Israel define themselves first and foremost as Arabs …

Palestinian National Identity: Emphasise the links to Palestine as a historical and cultural homeland. It expresses itself in cultivating the Arab-Palestinian culture and tradition and in maintaining links with their people who live outside the state. (p. 89)

Beside the very limited reference to both Palestinian and Arab national identities in the textbook, it not only lacks substance but also reduces Arab and Palestinian identities to the links between Arabs and Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and those who are not citizens of the state. It is important also to read this description in the context of the claim often made in Israel, countering the Palestinians’ demand for an independent state, arguing that the Arabs have 22 states while the Jews only have one. But mostly, what is missing from the description above is a discussion of the connection Palestinians have to the land of Israel/Palestine and the centrality of this link to their national identity. The lack of acknowledgement of the Palestinians’ links to the land is also evident in Chapter 37 in which one of the sections is dedicated to the ‘national rift’ in Israel between Jews and Palestinians. The discussion starts with a list of factors that have instigated the conflict between these groups: ‘the dispute over the right of the Jews to establish a national home in the land of Israel (who the land belongs to? … the conflict between the state of Israel and the Arab nations, the struggle between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Organizations’ (p. 464). It is interesting to see, that here too, the claim of the Palestinians to the land is not recognised and moreover, the conflict is described as a conflict with Arab nations and Palestinian organisations – what is missing of course is a recognition of the Palestinian people. This omission, which Davies (2003) defines as negative-passive type of curricular practice and Peled-Elhan defines as dissimulation, is especially salient, when it is contrasted with the emphasis the textbook puts on the historical and religious relationships between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, which is also used to justify the preference of the Jewishness of the state over and above its democratic character. It is also a telling omission when put in the context of the discussion that appears on chapter 9 that focuses on non-Jewish minorities:

There is a historical dispute concerning the number of Arabs living in Palestine prior to the first wave of Jewish immigration in 1882 compared with the number of Arabs that migrated to Palestine at the same time as the Jewish immigration. Furthermore, there is a debate on the factual question of the natural population increase and migration factors in Arab demographic growth in the twentieth century. There is no doubt that together with Jewish migration there was also significant Arab migration in the first half of the twentieth century, but its scope is a matter of historical dispute. (p. 102)

The claim that there is a historical dispute over the number of Arabs living in Palestine prior to the first wave of Jewish immigration, and that it can be contended that the Arab majority in the pre-state Palestine was not a product of natural increase of this population, but one of Arab migration to Palestine, is not an accepted thesis, and at the very least a controversial claim.³ This, of course, has a bearing on the civic status of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and particularly on the legitimacy of their claim for recognition of their collective rights in the public domain. Whereas it is expected of a migrant minority to internalise the values of the hegemonic group, indigenous minorities have the legitimacy to demand recognition.

Discrimination without a discriminator: normalising the discrimination against the Arab minority

Another mechanism adopted by the textbook is the de-contextualization and naturalisation (Peled-Elhanan, 2008), and in some cases the justification, of the marginal position of the Palestinian minority in Israel. These are practices constructed throughout the textbook. For instance, in the opening chapter of the textbook, when the Israeli Declaration of Independence and its commitment to civil equality is discussed, the textbook distinguishes between the declarative commitment to civil equality and its practicalities:

sometimes, there is a difference between the declarative and legislative levels, according to which there is full equality of rights and no difference between citizens; and the practical level about which sometimes one can hear claims about unequal treatment and difference between the Jewish and the non-Jewish citizens of the state. (p. 17)

By making this distinction, the textbook in fact legitimises the ‘practical’ reality of inequality, defining civic equality as a utopian idea, and more so, by referring to the inequality the Palestinian minority suffers from as ‘claims’, belittling it. In later point in the textbook, in a section dedicated to the ‘national rift’, the textbook lists the following as an instigating factor of the ‘rift’ – ‘the sense of deprivation amongst Arab Israeli citizens’ (p. 464). The textbook in general refrains from using the term discrimination and when it refers to inequalities between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, it tends to refer to it as ‘claims’ or as ‘a sense of’. Furthermore, in the seldom examples, the textbook discusses ethnic-national inequalities it decontextualises and generally does not provide an explanation to them; these are consequences without a causality, as something that just happened:

The gap between Jews and Arabs om education, employment and income are deep Official statistics reveal that there is a correlation between the Arab society in Israel and lower socio-economic statuses. Meaning that the national rift to a great extent coincide with the socio-economic one. (p. 474)

Finally, when the textbook addresses the ‘claims’ of discrimination, it points fingers towards the Palestinian minority itself and in a sense justifies the state’s actions, or lack of it:

One difficulty the Arab citizens have [with the state], derive from their claim for a discriminatory government policy towards those who are not Jewish, in many areas as a result of the Jewish character of the state. Amongst the Jews there are those who question the loyalty of the Arbs and afraid they will, under certain conditions, join those who calls for its [the Jewish state] annihilations. However, most of the Jewish public support the integration of Arab Israeli citizens in the social sphere and in closing the socio-economic gaps, in accordance with Israel’s democrat values … At the same time, there are those who argue that the economic gaps between Arabs and Jews, similar to those between ultra-orthodox and seculars, are not the result of a discriminatory policy, but in the social characteristics of these populations. For example, a low level of participation in the labour market. (My emphasis, p. 469)

Two things are worth noting here. First, as in the previous examples, there is no policy of discrimination, but claims (founded or not) of discrimination. Second, while inequalities are only acknowledged as claims, the textbook provides two possible explanations/justifications – the Arab citizens not being loyal to the state, and the Arab minority’s own cultural and social characteristics. In any case, it is not a result, according to the textbook, of a discriminatory policy.

However, in other chapters, especially those which focus on the Jewishness of the state and the ethno-national model as a desirable civic model for the state of Israel, the textbook in a sense justifies the hierarchies of rights distribution in Israel, especially when it comes to cultural rights:

It is the right of every person to live in the culture of his [sic] choosing and to cultivate his culture, its values and goals […] In an ethnic-cultural nation-state, the language, holidays […] and the nature of the public sphere – are all an expression of the culture of the national [dominant] group in the best way. The values and cultural perceptions of the nation guides the authorities and reflects them. At the same time […] side by side [the majority’s] cultural rights, there is the duty to carefully maintain the rights of minorities that are not part of the majority culture, including their right to maintain and cultivate their cultures locally within their communities. (Original emphasis, p. 51)

This is emphasised again in the summary of chapter 9:

As in other ethno-cultural democratic nation-states the national Jewish majority shapes the public life and the state’s symbols, whereas national and ethnic minorities enjoy human and civil rights. The state of Israel recognises also their collective rights especially in relation to education and religion. (p. 114)

At first glance, this explanation appears promising as the textbooks seem to relate to ideas that stand at the heart of liberal discussions on the meaning of culture rights. But whereas Kymlicka (1995), for instance, refers to cultural rights in terms of the ability of minority groups to realise their culture both in the private and public spheres (based on tolerance, not only towards their differences, but also to the ways in which they define their belonging to the state), we can see that the textbook defines cultural rights as, first and foremost, the right of the majority group to shape the public sphere, where the protection of minorities rights is reserved to their possibility they are given to express such rights locally. This distinction, between the majority and the minority collective rights, is actually a complete distortion of the notion of cultural rights, utilised here, in fact, to justify the exclusion of minorities from the public sphere. This quote should also be read in the context of Israel, whereas by and large (with the exception of several mixed cities) the Arab-Palestinians and Jewish citizens live in separated communities and attend separate schools. In other words, what the textbooks actually suggests is that the cultural expression of minorities would be kept within the boundaries of their own communities, and more specifically to Israel, that Palestinians may express their culture in Arab towns and villages but not in the public civic sphere.

Summary

The 2016 textbook is set to strengthen an ethno-national (or sometimes refer to as ethno-republican) notion of citizenship that gives precedence to the commitment of the state to its Jewish character over and above its commitment to equal democratic rights. As a result, in the few occasions (a chapter and two sub-sections in other chapters, out of 38 chapters) that the textbook addresses directly the Palestinian minority, it constantly undermines their national identity as well as their claims for civic equality. As I have shown, the textbook uses several techniques to that affect, from omitting the national narrative of the Palestinians all together, constructing them as the ‘other’, belittling their experience of discrimination and even justifying it in the name of the ethno-national state.

It is safe to argue that recent discursive shifts in the notion of Israeli citizenship and the ways in which they are reflected in the current official civics textbook, will have some influence on the civics identities of both Jewish and Palestinian Israel students. As discussed earlier, national identities as well as religiosity shape different notions citizenship among Israeli youth (Pinson, 2004, 2008; Sabbagh and Resh, 2014). However, whereas the students participated in previous studies have been exposed to a civics curriculum, which reinforced the notion of Israel as Jewish and democratic, drawing simultaneously on ethno-republican and democratic liberal notions of citizenship (Pinson, 2007b; Cohen, 2017), the 2016 official civics textbook draws heavily on an exclusive ethno-republican discourse of citizenship (Cohen, 2017). Moreover, if the 2000 version of the civics textbook provided to some degree a space for the Palestinian identity and narrative, even if limited, and most importantly opened up pedagogical spaces for discussing multiplicity of approaches and identities (Pinson, 2007a, 2007b), the 2016 version, as we have seen, have employed practices of omission and marginalisation. These changes beg the question of what are their implications for students’ identity. One can speculate, that if we would to repeat Sabbagh and Resh (2014) study today, that demonstrated the influence of liberal discourses of citizenship on both secular Jewish and Palestinian youth, we might find that secular Jewish students adopt a perspective closer to that of religious Jewish students and more in line with ethno-republican notion of citizenship. On the other hand, the sense of exclusion experiences by Palestinian Israeli students (Pinson, 2008), in light of the even greater omission of their identities and the denial of their marginalisation by the textbook, might be exacerbated.

An indication of what might be the effect of the changes in the textbook can be found in an assignment for the students in chapter 9. This chapter focuses on the identity of ‘non-Jewish’ groups. It ends with the following assignment for the students: ‘What topics in this chapter have aroused emotional difficulties for you and why? Suggests ways to overcome the emotional difficulties you’ve raised’ (p. 106). In other words, the authors of the textbook first of all assume, despite the textbook being designed for all educational sectors, that their readers are Jewish students. Second, they assume that reading about minorities’ identities should make (Jewish) students feel uncomfortable, emotionally upset, and by offering such assignment give legitimacy to such feelings.

Finally, I would like to situate the findings of this study within some of the dominant trends in the research on citizenship education. Educational and academic discourses in recent years have been preoccupied with the ways in which citizenship education can promote multiculturalism, pluralism and global notions of citizenship. James Banks (2008, 2009) important work is a prominent example of this strand of research. As the world becomes more diverse, Banks argues for a citizenship education that expands the notion of citizenship to include cultural rights. Citizenship education, he further suggests, should recognise different groups of identities and strive to develop global identification. To a great extent, the changes to the official civics textbook in Israel take an opposite direction.

Indeed, initiatives that follows the multicultural, universal agenda set by Banks, and others, often fail to address the particular challenges to citizenship education in deeply divided societies, such as Israel (Davies, 2003; Alexander et al., 2010), since they tend to ignore the power relations underlying such conflicts and social divisions. Bashir (2015), for instance, points to both the normative and operational challenges underlying the global and the multicultural agendas in citizenship education.

Furthermore, according to Osler (2011), as a result of globalisation, there is a binary today, between education for national citizenship and global citizenship, namely, between educational initiatives that seek to introduce cosmopolitan ideas and those who argue that we need to re-emphasis the commitment to the nation-state. Philippou et al. (2009) suggest that the global messages that have been introduced into citizenship education in recent years are often used to reinforce national citizenship. However, they also add that ‘the national dimension to citizenship education is no longer necessarily constructed in terms of unswerving patriotism to the nation-state […] as has previously been the case’ (Philippou et al., 2009: 295–296).

The current changes to citizenship education in Israel should be seen as a result of global as well as local pressures, and, at least to some degree, they fall into the tension between national and global dimensions in citizenship education (Yemini et al., 2014). However, while Philippou et al. (2009) suggest that even the national messages in civic curricula today are being reconstructed to fit more universal and less exclusionary understanding of citizenship, this is not the case in Israel. In other words, the changes that have taken place in recent years in CE in Israel allow us to explore the gap between the academic discourse of multicultural education and global citizenship education, on one hand, and the socio-political tensions it is meant to address, on the other. As discussed above, the current changes to the civics curriculum in Israel, in a sense can be seen as a backlash to the influence of democratic liberal discourse and universal inclusion agenda that was also reflected in the decision in the mid 1990s to unify the civic curriculum across all sectors. I have already argued elsewhere (Pinson, 2007a, 2008) that this project of curriculum unification, often falls into a more liberal assimilative (Banks, 2008) model of citizenship education, and thus in the context of a deeply divided society such as Israel, unification of the curriculum might not be the most inclusive option of them all.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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