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JERUSALEM - A school text book for Arab children in Israel has sparked an outcry among rightist Jews by including a reference for the first time to the Palestinian view of the Jewish state's founding as a "catastrophe".
The book, designed for use in schools this year, is aimed at eight to nine-year-old Arab children in Israel's largely separate public school system. Arab citizens make up about a fifth of Israel's population of seven million.
The edition uses the previously taboo word "nakba" - Arabic for catastrophe and the Palestinian term for the 1948 founding of Israel in a war when some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.
The text was ordered several years ago when Israel was seeking to build bridges with its Arab population. Education Minister Yuli Tamir, of the left-of-centre Labour Party, praised the book yesterday as a development whose time was overdue.
But many Israeli rightists demanded his dismissal for approving use of the phrase, arguing that the book seemed to legitimise debate over the Jewish state's right to exist.
However, Tamir pledged to seek to amend other Israeli schoolbooks to reflect the Palestinian narrative as well.
- REUTERS
