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History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System: The Portrayal of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in History Textbooks (1948-2000)
HISTORY, MEMORY AND TEXTBOOKS
Forging the nation's collective memory is an integral part of the process of nation building. The powerful link between history and memory is especially salient in the educational system, which is responsible for implanting knowledge and values in the younger generation. The successful completion of this task, it is assumed, will turn young people into loyal citizens and will help instill a shared identity.
Interestingly enough, historians and sociologists generally fail to note the political and social links between school textbooks and collective memory. Scholars dealing with the tools used by the state to create its own collective memory -- such as historiography, literature, cinema or national commemorations -- tend to overlook the role played by textbooks. At the same time, scholars in the field of textbook research barely analyze them in the context of the attempts to build a collective memory, usually ignoring the social environment that helps shape textbook content as well.(1)
Since in many Western democracies, and certainly in nondemocratic societies, the state controls the educational apparatus, it can shape the nation's collective memory by determining what is to be included and what excluded from the curricula and from textbooks. Such a course of action opens the way for the manipulation of the past in order to mold the present and the future.(2) In this respect, the school system, and textbooks, become yet another arm of the state, agents of memory whose aim is to ensure the transmission of certain "approved knowledge" to the younger generation. Textbooks thus function as a sort of "supreme historical court" whose task is to decipher "from all the accumulated `pieces of the past' the `true' collective memories which are appropriate for inclusion in the canonical national historical narrative."(3) In constructing the collective memory, textbooks play a dual role: on the one hand, they provide a sense of continuity between the past and the present, transmitting accepted historical narratives; on the other, they alter -- or rewrite -- the past in order to suit contemporary needs.(4)
The manipulation of the past often entails the use of stereotypes and prejudice in describing the "other."(5) Carried to...