Textbooks on Israel-Palestine

Rezensionen / Stimmen

This is an overdue and brilliant research into the battle of narratives on Palestine in Western Europe. Textbooks and educational curricula have for decades been loyal to the Israeli narrative and ignored the Palestinian suffering and struggle since 1948. This is a highly professional and incisive analysis of how knowledge production in West Europe shapes the power relations on the ground in Palestine. A must read for educationalists, academics at all levels and the wider audience who care about Palestine and the Palestinians. This erudite, insightful and brilliant critical analysis of the politics of education and knowledge in the West fully meet the challenge of its pivotal research question, namely: The perplexing paradox of "how Western countries, the same countries that have established the widest and most influential civilization in history in all its post-Renaissance magnificence - its modern education, knowledge, democracy, rule of law and human rights in particular - could at the same time support such injustice in Israel-Palestine- a fundamental source of so much crime and misery in the Middle East. Critically exposing, demystifying and debunking the ideological, political - nay, normative personal - underpinning of Western knowledge when it comes to Israel, this work is a required entry in all academic Middle East history, politics and social science/education reading lists.' This is an important book, full of important material and measured in its judgments. A fascinating and indispensable contribution to the understanding of the relationship between politics and education. The unprincipled, misguided support offered by western nations to Israel is far from an accident of history, or the result of the whims of this or that leader or politician; it is the result of long-term, racist and colonial attitudes persisting in western education systems, favouring the Zionist settler colonial project and denying the indigenous Palestinian narrative, as argued convincingly in this innovative work by Hadi Borhani A valuable analysis of college textbooks that are educating - or in most cases, miseducating - American students on Israel-Palestine This book is well-researched and lucidly written to unravel the subtle biases in popular books used in teaching the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in major English-speaking Western countries. This book is a must-read for scholars and the general audience unfamiliar with the sensitivities and sensibilities affecting the subject matter History, it is often said, is written by the winners. Textbooks on Israel-Palestine shows how the academic narrative of that conflict - and the production, reproduction, and dissemination of knowledge of it - has become both blatantly and subconsciously political, skewing our understanding and retelling of it. This is a book of tremendous value. It should be read by all university professors teaching courses on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Dr Borhani's study of the six books on the Israel/Palestine question most used by colleges in the UK and other Anglophone countries finds that all but one adopt the Israeli narrative of 'return'. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of education and 'public opinion', and how both are formed and misinformed by scholarly bias. Despite the difference in our perspectives and my respectful disagreement with some of Professor Borhani's assessments, it's clear that his book provides valuable information and many thoughtful insights. I strongly recommend it to readers, particularly instructors, with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "This book illuminates the Israeli success over the decades in manipulating the devastating story of how denials of Palestinian basic rights was partly accomplished by warping student minds forced to learn about the conflict through slanted textbooks validating the Zionist narrative. Such textbook propaganda is not a trivial sideshow as struggles of this kind are usually decided on the symbolic battlefields of the mind. Borhani's book compels the reader to grasp why distorted storytelling functions as an insidious weapon of oppressors." * Richard Falk, Princeton University, USA *