Propaganda: Israeli and Palestinian textbooks fail balance test, study finds

Israeli and Palestinian textbooks get failing grades when it comes to adequately and positively representing each other’s people, culture and history, according to a three-year, U.S-funded study released Monday.

Propaganda: Israeli and Palestinian textbooks fail balance test, study finds 69574889

On the bright side, researchers concluded that most schoolbooks on both sides were factually accurate, even though they usually described each other in negative, unflattering terms and typically cast one another as the “enemy.”

Extremely negative material, such as demonization, incitement to violence or depicting the other side as subhuman, were rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books, the report found.

Israeli officials, who frequently claim Palestinian textbooks espouse hatred, rejected the study's conclusions as biased. Palestinian Authority officials said the study vindicated their assertion that their textbooks are as fair and balanced as Israel’s.

The report found both sides lacking in objectivity and balance.

Neither side scored particularly well in geography with 94% of Palestinian textbook maps failing to identify the existence of Israel and 87% of Israeli maps lacking any mention of Palestine or the Palestinian territories.

Neither side’s textbooks devoted adequate attention to the idea of living together in harmony, researchers said.

“Peaceful co-existence ... is completely ignored,’’ said Sami Adwan, a professor at Bethlehem University, who participated in the research with Daniel Bar-Tal, a professor at Tel Aviv University, and Bruce E. Wexler, a senior research scientist at Yale School of Medicine.

Funded with a $500,000 U.S. State Department grant, the project analyzed 94 Palestinian textbooks and 74 from Israel, including some from public state-run schools and some from ultra-Orthodox institutions. Ultra-Orthodox schools have a large degree of autonomy in setting their own curriculum and now instruct nearly one-third of Israeli’s students, the study found.

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-israeli-palestinian-textbooks-unbalanced-20130204,0,3549890.story

Propaganda: Israeli and Palestinian textbooks fail balance test, study finds

Propaganda: Israeli and Palestinian textbooks fail balance test, study finds

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