Textbooks on Israel-Palestine: The Politics of Education and Knowledge in the West
How is the Israel/Palestine question narrated in Western academia? What ideas dominate the key textbooks on the subject and what is presented as 'truth'? This book answers these critical questions. It is widely known that Western support of Israel played a vital role in the realization of Zionist objectives in Palestine. But academic support of Israel in the West has been a neglected issue, with Western academic knowledge being regarded as impartial and objective. This book reveals that this understanding of Western academic knowledge is wrong when it comes to the Israel/Palestine question. Rather, knowledge has been biased, misleading, and dogmatic and Western college students are subscribing to ‘factual histories’ based on theories at best, if not fiction. The book is the first empirical investigation able to document this partial reporting of history. Seyed Hadi Borhani examines the most popular college-level textbooks used to teach the history of the Israel/Palestine in Western universities, combining ‘textbook analysis’ (to determine how the dominant academic texts report the question) and a ‘context analysis’ (to identify who 'manufactures' the dominant knowledge). The book provides a historical map of how the Israel-Palestine conflict is understood in the West. The book can be used as a critique for students and professors to use alongside textbooks and is a vital and much-needed intervention into the state of affairs in Western academia.
Reviews
"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." Professor Shlomo Sand, Tel Aviv University, Israel
"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." Professor Mark Tessler, University of Michigan, USA
"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." Professor Haim Bresheth, University of London, UK
"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." Professor Ali Abootalebi, University of Wisconsin, USA
"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." Professor Mehran Kamrava, Georgetown University, Qatar
"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." Rosemary Sayigh, author of Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries
"A valuable analysis of college textbooks that are educating - or in most cases, miseducating - American students on Israel-Palestine." Alison Weir, author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel
