See the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel spin in action.
Israel cuts Palestinian tragedy from textbooks
The Israeli government will remove references to what the Palestinians call the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the country’s education minister said Wednesday.The reference to “al-naqba” or catastrophe, what the Palestinian’s call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation, was controversially inserted by a dovish education minister for the first time in 2007.
The phrase remains contentious six decades after Israel was founded.
“No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe,” Education Minister Gideon Saar told Israel’s parliament on Wednesday.
“What will you do to a teacher who addresses the class and begins to explain what happened to the family of a child who asks?” Ahmad Tibi, an Arab Israeli lawmaker, asked Saar in parliament.
Second: Notice that a quote pops up in the next edition, about “naqba denial”—yet another example of the Palestinians attempting to expropriate terms meaningful to Jews. To compare the removal of a negatively descriptive word (“catastrophe”) regarding the founding of Israel to the denial of the Holocaust is spurious and insulting—but not, apparently, to the AP, which puts it in the lead.
Israel cuts Palestinian tragedy from textbooks
The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians call the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the education minister said Wednesday.The reference to “al-naqba,” the Arabic word catastrophe as Palestinians call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation, was controversially inserted by a dovish education minister for the first time in 2007.
The phrase remains contentious six decades after Israel was founded.
“No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe,” Education Minister Gideon Saar told Israel’s parliament on Wednesday.
Israeli Arab lawmaker Hana Sweid accused the government of “naqba denial.”
Israel cuts 1948 ‘catastrophe’ from Arabic texts
The lead is the same. The headline is now using the Palestinian narrative that 1948 was the naqba in the headline, though using the words “what Palestinians call” in the lead to justify their objectivity. The “naqba denial” quote is still there, of course. Your latest version of yellow journalism, courtesy of the Associated Press—which is actually among the least anti-Israel of the mainstream media (cf: Reuters, AFP).
Update: The latest AP version adds an extra anti-Netanyahu graf to the lead, and drops the “naqba” quote to paragraph six as a result. The third paragraph has been given extra, added, anti-Israel value, as well. (The bold is the addition to the paragraph.) Witness:
The phrase remains contentious six decades later, a symptom of the continuing divisions in Israel. Many Israeli Arabs identify politically with their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, some Israeli Jews accuse Israeli Arabs of disloyalty to the country.
Israel’s current government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line Likud Party, includes members who favor cracking down on Israeli Arabs by ordering loyalty oaths or even moving them out of Israel.
It just doesn’t get any better than this, eh? Truly, the evolution of the anti-Israel AP narrative is an astonishing thing to behold.