A Distorted Other: Jews, Israel and the Arab–Israeli Conflict in Egyptian School Textbooks

Abstract

Forging a nation’s collective memory is an integral part of the process of nation building. With its responsibility for imparting knowledge to and instilling values in the younger generations, the education system plays a significant role in this process. By helping to transform young people into loyal citizens who conform to the desired ethos of the state, school textbooks—particularly in the fields of history, geography, civics and religion—inculcate a shared national identity. Since the state controls the education system in many democracies, and certainly in non-democratic societies, it can shape a nation’s collective memory by determining what is to be included and excluded from the curricula and from textbooks. Such decisions open the way for manipulations of the past in order to shape the present and the future (Kammen 1991: 3; Anderson 1991: 201; Funkenstein 1989: 8; Podeh 2003: 371). In this respect, the school system and textbooks become yet another arm of the state, agents of memory whose aim is to transmit certain “approved knowledge” to the younger generation. In constructing a nation’s 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 re-write—the past to suit contemporary needs (Ben-Yehuda 1995: 273–274). Textbooks thus function as a sort of “ultimate 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” (Kimmerling 1995: 57).

I would like to thank my PhD student, Elad Giladi, for helping me with the collection and translation of materials from Egyptian textbooks.