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This is an original preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Pedagogy,
Culture & Society on May 30, 2020 available online:
https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2021.1934892
Within the National Confines: Israeli History Education and the
Multicultural Challenge
Roy Weintraub and Nimrod Tal
Abstract
In twenty-first-century history education, amid conceptual changes in the
discipline and growing social diversity in classrooms, multiculturalism has
become a key issue. This article examines the key category defining
multiculturalism in Israeli history education: the representation of North
African and Middle Eastern Jewry, aka Mizrahim. Applying Nordgren’s and
Johansson’s conceptualization, the article explores the changes in this subject
from the establishment of Israel to the present day.
The diachronic textual analysis shows that social and educational
transformations along with developments in the historical discipline have led to
a significant change in the representation of Mizrahim. These changes, the
conceptual framework reveals, were manifested not solely in adding content
but reflected a profound acknowledgment of the multicultural approach.
Nevertheless it became clear that the changes are limited, as constructing the
Eurocentric Zionist historical consciousness remains the primary goal of the
education process.
Similar to controversies around the world, the limited nature of the changes–
despite the sincere efforts involved–is the result of the rigid national framework
that continues to shape Israel's history education. Furthermore, the extensive
initiatives regarding the Mizrahim actually have enabled to deflect the
discussion from more controversial cultural issues, mainly the representation of
Arab citizens of Israel.
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Introduction
Representation of “the other” has been a critical issue in the debate over history
education since its early days. Already at the end of World War I, a far-reaching
international debate attempted, with scanty success, to counter the militant patriotic
teaching that many education systems invoked at the time (Wilschut 2010; Elmersjö
2014). Although the image of “the other” has been a focal point of attention for years,
meaningful changes in reference to it became particularly apparent only in recent
decades. Geopolitical developments and the globalization process as well as changes
in the historical discipline and in the concepts of meaningful education, challenged
the traditional and narrow way of history education. Intellectuals, educators, and
policymakers on multiple continents and from multiple cultures came out against
traditional one-dimensional history teaching that excluded communities and
population groups that did not fit the national hegemonic narrative (Carretero,
Asensio, and Rodríguez Moneo 2013; Grever and Stuurman 2007; Stearns, Seixas,
and Wineburg 2000).
Amid these changes and as social diversity in classrooms grew, the question of
multiculturalism became a key issue in twenty-first-century history education.
Particularly in developed and cosmopolitan Western countries, an attempt was made
to transform history education into a process that would reflect the diverse cultural
aspects and historical narratives of social minorities. Often, the changes in history
teaching were not limited to the addition of contents; rather, they were accompanied
by aspiration to break through ethno-national frames of thinking (Popp, Gorbahn, and
Grindel 2019; Carretero, Berger, and Grever 2017; Savenije, Van Boxtel, and Grever
2014). The profound changes that took place in this field, however, also triggered
difficult public controversies that centered on mordant criticism of the new
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approaches as subversive to national identity and social cohesion (Nakou and Barca
2010; Guyver and Taylor 2012; Elmersjö, Clark, and Vinterek 2017).
Israel has not been an exception. As Naveh (2017) has argued, history
education in Israel has fallen into a state of “turmoil,” when, here as elsewhere,
multiculturalism has become a focal issue of public controversies. This article delves
into this controversy and focuses on a key category in the public and scholarly debate
on multiculturalism in history education: the representation of Jews of Middle Eastern
and North African (MENA) origin, otherwise known as Mizrahim. Given the
centrality of this category for ethnic inequality in Israeli Jewish society, extensive
research has documented the discriminatory attitude that the Mizrahim have faced,
institutionally and structurally, in the fields of society, economics, and education
(Haskin and Avissar 2019; Goldberg, Porat, and Schwarz 2006; Medding 2007).
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Despite the importance of the issue and the transformations that have taken place in
the Israeli society and in the discipline of history education, a methodological and
comprehensive study on the changes in the representation of Mizrahim over the years
is still missing.
As discuss below, the studies of Ben-Amos (1994), Raz-Krakotzkin (2001),
and Fischer (2002) analyze the subject from various perspectives. However, they lack
a long-term historical perspective and obviously did not relate to the meaningful
developments in the recent two decades. This article, therefore, wishes to expose and
characterize the changes in the representation of Mizrahim in Israel's history
education, from the establishment of the state in 1948 to the present day. This
diachronic analysis will allow us to explore the developments of the matter and to
unearth the profound obstacles that still hinder multicultural historical education in
Israel.
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In particular, we will argue that the Israeli case-study shows that as long as the
canonical historical narrative is confined by a rigid and uncontestable national
narrative, the above international reforms and efforts—such as in Germany, Spain,
Greece, England, and more (Engel and Ortloff 2009; Popp 2010; Faas 2011;
Carretero, Asensio, and Rodríguez Moneo 2013)—will have only limited affect, and
the tools, methods, and conceptual frameworks that have been developed in recent
years cannot be applied efficiently. The importance of exposing these limitations
intensifies in light of contemporary social, health, and economic developments. The
viciously rapid and expansive spread of COVID-19 pandemic and the recent
manipulations, hatred, and riots that characterized the United States presidential
election demonstrate that we live in a time when solidarity, cooperation, and
multicultural understandings are increasingly necessary to heal social tensions and to
ensure the future existence of our democratic societies.
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel society has been a collection of many
“others,” including, for example, Jews of Ethiopian descent, Ultra-Orthodox Jews,
and, of course, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel (Kimmerling 2004). While the
canonoical Zionist-Ashkenazi (Jewish of European origin) narrative excluded all
these “others,” a focus on the Mizrahim is particularly telling for two reasons. First,
Mizrahim have comprised about half of Jewish society in Israel. Second, unlike the
Palestinan Arabs—the representation of whom has also generated much debate,
controversy, and research—the Mizrahim have been seen as part of the national
collective. Unlike Palestinian Arabs, they have been considered “others,” but not
“outsiders”. From the point of view of the canonical narrative, they can thus be seen
as a special “close other” –one that while excluded from the classic national canon
constitutes an integral part of the nation.
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The focus on a “close other” enables new light to be cast on questions that
reach far beyond the local context and explores the inherent challenges to represent
various marginalized groups in history education (Harrison et al. 2020; Dozono 2020;
Bacon and Lalvani 2019; Rodríguez 2019). In many countries, populations that are
considered part of the “national self” (rather than national outsiders) are often
nonetheless marginalized within it. African Americans and non-Anglo-Saxon
ethnicities in the United States are cases in point (Chandler 2009; Foster 1999;
Schocker and Woyshner 2013; Rodríguez 2019); so are women practically
everywhere (Osler 1994; Blumberg 2008; Schoeman 2009; Chiponda and
Wassermann 2011; Alpargu and Çelik 2016). The present Israeli case-study allows us
to examine the challenges of history education in multicultural societies specifically
by focusing on groups that are part of the canon but also have their own cultural
character that strives for a unique place within the canon. In doing so, we will not
examine the representation of the distinct “other” of the Jewish public in Israel—the
Arab Palestinians. In light of the Israeli-Arab conflict, such an analysis requires a
completely different conceptual approach and oversteps the limits of this study
(Goldberg 2020; Goldberg, Wagner, and Petrović 2019; Bekerman 2016).
Furthermore, we wish to contribute to the international discussion also
conceptually. Hence, we use a conceptual framework for intercultural history
education recently developed by Nordgren and Johansson (2015), which is based on
the intercultural-competence theory and postcolonial thinking.
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Below we apply this
framework in a non-European environment that is typified by major cultural and
religious diversity and demonstrate its value in revealing historical changes in history
education. By using it, we breach the boundaries of the Israeli scene and present broad
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normative conclusions enable history educators and scholars alike to think anew about
planned reforms in the field.
Materials and methods
As an historical study, this article applies a critical contextualized analysis of primary
sources. The corpus of sources centers on official curricula and textbooks published
between 1948 and 2020. In comprehensive education systems these materials are a
significant reflection of the learning process and of the goals and worldviews of the
education policymakers (Carretero, Berger, and Grever 2017; Apple 2018). The
importance of these materials is particularly heightened in countries such as Israel,
where the Ministry of Education (hereinafter: MOE) closely monitors the curriculum
and textbooks.
Moreover, in order to enhance the evaluation of more recent changes in the
past two decades, our analysis also addresses teachers’ seminars, instructions of MOE
inspectors, and special curricular materials. We give special emphasis to the
compulsory matriculation examinations. Given the cruciality of these exams for
evaluation and certification, they continue to command the highest priority among
stakeholders in the MOE; and they shape the teaching process in the upper secondary
grades.
The textual analysis will focus on Israel’s two Jewish public-education
systems: State (Secular) and State-Religious, which together comprise more than 50
percent of total enrollment countrywide (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2017). Each
system has its own inspectorate, curricula, and textbooks (Weintraub 2020; Weintraub
and Naveh 2020). We do not take up the two other public-education systems: the
ultra-Orthodox, which is not supervised, and the Arab, in which the issue of the
Mizrahim is not relevant.
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To deepen the evaluation of the historical changes in Israeli history education,
we apply Nordgren’s and Johansson’s theoretical model. Following our textual
analysis, we use the model's first three categories—those that address the aspect of
historical content—and ask whether given historical contents in Israeli schools
(1) represent cultural encounters, (2) embody voices of diversity, and (3) contribute to
the ability to decenter and relativize one’s own culture. Thus, we will explore not only
the qualitative representation of Mizrahim and their place in the curricula, but also the
way the learning process at large shapes cognitive constructs in respect to
multiculturalism. This conceptual framework will enable us to explore in what ways
does history education in Israel reflects the multicultural historical dynamic and
enhance students’ competence in this field?
The Zionist historical consciousness
Zionist historiography adopted its frames of reference from ideas of progress and
modern European nationalism. Notwithstanding ideological differences within the
movement, all Zionist streams shared a historical narrative constitute a three-period
template. First came the ancient biblical days of glory, when the Jewish people
coalesced as a sovereign nation in the Land of Israel. Afterwards was an anomaly:
two millennia of harsh exile, the underlying source of Jews’ woes. In the third era, the
Zionist one, the Jewish people returns to its land and resurrects its sovereignty—the
only antidote to its suffering and the only path to the fulfillment of its potential
(Myers 1995; Avineri 2017).
Within this historical narrative, the place of the MENA Jewry—that would be
categorized later, by way of generalization, as “Mizrahim”—was blatantly marginal.
Naturally, Zionist historiography focused on European Jewry, the decisive majority of
the Jewish population (Singer 1905, 532–533). It went beyond this, however, as the
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marginalization of the Mizrahim was also a result of Zionism’s culture and ideology.
The Zionist mindset perceived, Orientally and paternalistically, the Mizrahim as
affiliates of a primitive Arab culture and, as such, outside the narrative of the
ascendancy of the Jewish national movement (Tsur 2007; Shenhav 2006; Shohat
1999).
After the establishment of Israel, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the Eurocentric
Zionist outlook collided with a new social reality. The new situation had two main
precipitants: The Holocaust, which obliterated 60 percent of European Jewry, and the
Jews’ migration patterns in those years. Whereas only about half of the European
Jews who survived the Holocaust immigrated to Israel, the vast majority of those from
MENA did so. Thus, by the early 1960s more than a million Israeli citizens, some 40
percent of the Jewish population, were Mizrahim (Picard 2018).
Mass immigration to Israel, a protracted war of independence that claimed
massive casualties, a dire economic crisis, and political struggles threatened the
country’s complexion if not its existence. Amid a sense of the house burning, the state
leadership, led by the prime minister David Ben-Gurion, introduced a social policy
designed to homogenize the national identity. It was not the aspiration of this melting-
pot policy to integrate the Jewish immigrants’ wealth of cultures. In this, the Israeli
melting-pot policy was much like that in other places, such as in the United States
(Foster 1999. See also Van den Berghe 1983 and Palmer 1973 on Canada and
Australia). Instead, flowing from the paternalistic Zionist outlook, it sought
uncompromisingly to instill the European culture, which it considered supreme and
preferable (Shenhav 2006; Chetrit 2009). As has happened elsewhere in the past and
today, history education in fledgling Israel would be central in attaining this goal.
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History education in Israel’s first decades
The public education system, together with the Israel Defense Force, was the main
mechanism for implementing the cultural melting-pot policy. The architect of the
process and the designer of the first State curriculum was minister of education Ben-
Zion Dinur, a Hebrew University professor and distinct historian of Zionism. Dinur
assigned the highest priority to history education as the premier instrument with
which to create a homogenous Israeli identity among the newly arrived immigrants
(Ram 1995; Naveh and Yogev 2002).
Under Dinur’s baton, the MOE took a rigid, uncompromising approach toward
the nature of history education. All the schools were united behind an official history
curriculum that had the inculcation of national identity and patriotic sentiments as its
supreme goal (Goldberg and Gerwin 2013; Hofman 2007). The curriculum aimed to
glorify Jewish national history, emphasize its uniqueness, and reinforce national
heroic myths. It presented Jewry as an organic and essentially unique entity that
“maintained its religion, leaders, and views during exile” and “did not nullify itself
before large nations and their culture” despite all vicissitudes and challenges (MOE
1954, 17).
Among the measures taken to fulfill these national aspirations, the curriculum
focused significantly on the Jewish history. Only fourteen of the fifty-three chapters
of the 1954 curriculum dealt with general history. In practice, the processes and trends
in world history and human civilization were marginalized, and only events involving
Jews’ lives and doings over the generations were taught (Naveh and Yogev 2002;
Kizel 2008).
Despite the lavish place afforded to Jewish history, contents relating to
Mizrahim are conspicuous in their nearly total absence. In reference to the centuries
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that followed the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in the fifteenth century, the curriculum
focused exclusively on European Jewry. Notwithstanding the painstaking detail of the
historical content concerning that era—spanning nine pages in the curriculum
booklet—it referred to the Mizrahim only once. Their history in recent centuries
boiled down to a mere single phrase: “the Jewish collectivities in Asia and Africa”
(MOE, 1954, 179).
Like the curriculum, the textbooks gave the Mizrahim similar inattention,
allocating scanty space, less than 2 percent, to their history.
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They were described
only in a chapter on world Jewry after World War II, as though as an afterthought to
the history and the upheavals that European Jewry experienced. In contrast to the
modern European Jewry, the textbooks described the Mizrahim as illiterate and
superstitious. “This Jewish collectivity stagnated for many generations,” Avivi and
Perski, the authors of the most popular textbook, explained (1958, 366). Wishing to
emphasize Jewish national unity, they blamed the problematic state of the Mizrahim
on the harsh Muslim society in which they lived. In an Orientalist stance, they
reduced the discussion of vast population groups and cultures—from Morocco to
Iran—to stereotypes that explained them away within the context of the cruelty and
backwardness of Islamic society (Ben-Amos 1994; Firer 1985).
When these findings are examined through the prism of Nordgren’s and
Johansson’s analytical categories, an obvious picture emerges. In Israel’s first
decades, history education skirted the entire topic of multiculturalism because of
deliberate political and social policy. First, the contingency of the various Diaspora
Jewish cultures and their interactions with different cultures, as should be described in
view of Category 1 of the model, was entirely omitted. Presented instead was the
crystallization of Jewry in exile as a wholly internal process that neither affected nor
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was affected by its surroundings. For this reason, Category 2—history as voices of
diversity—was also totally absent in the history curriculum as a matter of course. This
is because non-Jewish voices were marginalized and, if they appeared at all, were
inconsequential in the narrative of Jewish national development. The same is evident
in respect of Category 3: instead of reflective examination of self-identity as the
product of a historical process, the curriculum stresses the unique and unchanging
nature of the Jewish people across its millennia of exile. Thus, even at a time when
half of Jewry was of Mizrahim origin, it is no wonder that the few textbook pages that
dealt with them afforded no opportunity to understand their culture and the way it
took shape and evolved in recent centuries.
Social, ideological, and educational changes
Since the 1950s and 1960s, Israeli society and, more narrowly, the social and political
status of the Mizrahim has changed in profound ways. During the 1960s, Israeli
governments began to pivot from melting-pot aspirations to support cultural pluralism
due to the waning potency of the Zionist ideology and restructuring of the domestic
economy. The collectivistic goals gradually yielded to individualistic, capitalistic, and
competitive social tableaux. These changes gathered momentum in the following
decades with the ascent of privatization tendencies and the integration of Israel into
the emerging globalistic post-industrial world (Ram 2010 2013; Mautner 2011;
Shapira 2004).
As these changes unfolded, Mizrahim struggled determinedly against the
policies of social, economic, and cultural discrimination. These trends were part and
parcel of a dramatic political change in 1977, the ascent of the Right to power for the
first time in Israeli history. Hence, new populations began to establish themselves in
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the country’s governing and bureaucratic apparatuses. As the Mizrahim penetration of
national and local centers of political power advanced steadily, so did Mizrahim
culture enjoy a re-efflorescence (Picard 2017; Chetrit 2009; Yedgar 2010; Cohen and
Leon 2008). The pluralistic nature of Israeli society surfaced and moved to the center
of the political, social, and educational discourse, as it has continued to do to this day.
These social and political changes in Israel influenced the goals of the
education system. The MOE abandoned its aspirations to create a monolithic society
that mobilizes for national missions and turned instead to acknowledge the different
circumstances of different groups. Concurrently, the education system adopted the
emerging global trend against the traditional educational process in favor of applying
Meaningful Learning theories and educating for a tolerant civil society. These factors
led the MOE, at least at the declarative level, to accept and even, gradually, to nurture
Israel’s cultural diversity (Naveh and Yogev 2002; Kizel 2008).
Amid these changes were developments in the historical discipline. Israeli
historiography breached the limits of the elites’ political past and turned to new
directions of research. Simultaneously, initial breakthroughs were made in diverting
resources and attention to the formulation of systematic research into the history of
MENA Jewry. Hence, in 1976, The Center for the Integration of the Mizrahim Legacy
was established with aim to develop academic research and produce educational
media for school (Ben-Amos 1994; Picard 2017).
These conceptual and social changes reflected also in Israel’s history
education. Curricula published in the 1970s lowered the emphasis on national
enlistment and, instead, began to stress cognitive aspects of the discipline of history.
“Stressing the unique way of Jewish people” remained a dominant goal of the
curricula (MOE, 1975, 5; MOE, 1977, 3); yet, broadening the range of cultures and
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perspectives became a goal as well. Thus, one of the curriculum’s value-related aims
stressed the importance of “developing the understanding of and tolerance towards the
emotions, traditions, and ways of life of other people and peoples” (MOE, 1975, 9).
The representation of Mizrahim also underwent an ostensibly meaningful
change when the curriculum sought “to recognize and respect the cultural traditions
and ways of life that took shape among our people over the generations” (MOE, 1975,
13). Immediately afterwards, however, it stressed the need to inculcate “awareness of
the shared fate and the unity of the Jewish people in its communities and Diasporas”
(MOE, 1975, 13-14). Namely, learning about other ways of life is important not in
order to demonstrate cultural diversity but, contrarily, to emphasize the characteristic
unity of the Jewish people.
Analysis of the curricula indicates that the reference to the shared faith of Jews
manifested mainly in their sufferings and hardships in exile and their aspiration to
repatriate. The curriculum developers integrated the Mizrahim by reconciling their
histories with the Zionist historical narrative. The new sections of the curriculum dealt
with the development of Zionist attitudes among Jews in the Muslim ecosystem
(MOE, 1975, 23; MOE, 1979, 12-13). Not only were the Zionist aspects in these
communities overrepresented, but they were sketched in superficial lines that masked
the vast differences in cultural, political, and ideological contexts that existed in
different parts of the Muslim world. While, for the first time, the curriculum referred
to the integration of mass immigration and the “ingathering of exiles” policy, the
treatment of the Mizrahim was not analyzed thoroughly and a conspicuous attempt to
refrain from criticizing government Eurocentric melting-pot policy was made (MOE,
1975, 46).
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Comporting with the curriculum, the textbooks added new chapters on
Mizrahim history, but their place remained marginalized. To expand their
representation, a textbook devoted exclusively to the history of Jewry in the Islamic
world was published in the early 1980s. Although a large step forward, it, too, came
with sizable problems mainly in taking an orientalist approach that represented the
Mizrahim as an undifferentiated and “ahistorical” bloc. Instead of the chronological
account, the textbook presented the topics synchronically, in the manner of
ethnography. Therefore, although the textbook does describe the history of a society
over a lengthy period—from the fifteenth century to the early twentieth—the contents
resemble a still photo and create the impression that Mizrahim communities did not
change across these centuries (Fischer 2002; Ben-Amos 1994).
Therefore, without belittling the changes in those years, it would be correct to
say that history teaching carried on without substantive change regarding
multiculturalism generally and the representation of Mizrahim specifically. Although
it did step away from promoting national mobilization, it continued to rest on the
overarching Zionist narrative that left the Mizrahim on the scholastic fringes. Thus, in
terms of Category 1 in Nordgren’s and Johansson’s model, which relates to learning
about cultural interactions, hardly any change occurred. The Jewish-Muslim
intercultural interaction that influenced both cultures was hardly discussed. Moreover,
the emphasis on the shared fate of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim kept the intra-Jewish
intercultural encounter from being revealed and elucidated. A mild tendency to
multicultural openness—an aspect associated with Category 2 of the model—did
seem to appear. In practice, however, references to Mizrahi history centered on an
attempt to present their integration into the Zionist Movement and its adoption of
modern European culture. Finally, relating to Nordgren’s and Johansson’s Category
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3—studying how the students’ culture came about—no real change is discernible.
Despite the new chapters, the curriculum still devoted marginal attention to the
Mizrahim and portrayed their cultures as static and unchanging. In the late 1990s,
however, history education in Israel entered a new and still continuing phase.
History education since the late 1990s
The 1990s saw heated debates about history education around the world, driven by
social, cultural, and political processes and events. In many places, marginalized
populations pushed for further integration into the curriculum and wider recognition
of their unique culture and history. Contrastingly, nationalist voices issued a call to
fortify the old canon, particularly in view of what they saw as threats of social and
national fragmentation and disintegration. For example, in the United States, with the
rise of neo-liberalism and the ascendancy of identity politics and of what Richard
Rorty calls more broadly the “cultural left,” the history curriculum became a
contested issue (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn, 2000). Calls were raised, on the one hand,
to acknowledge marginalized histories along with oppressive efforts to marginalize
them, and, one the other hand, to strengthen the existing national narrative. In
Australia, Canada (Clark 2009; Bennett 2016), Hong Kong (Vickers, 2003), and other
places (Nakou and Barca 2010; Guyver and Taylor 2012), similar debates were
evident.
Israel underwent analogous processes as well as others unique to it. In the 1980s and
the 1990s, amid processes of fragmentation and dissolidarity in Israeli society, the
Zionist narrative faced a powerful offensive from academics, intellectuals, artists, and
media people. The term that attached itself to this trend, “post-Zionism,” captured
multifaceted and sometimes clashing approaches as it critiqued and revised the history
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and worldview of the Zionist project. Its crux manifested in an attempt to disengage
from the aspirations and the ideals of the Zionist enterprise and to develop a sober
understanding of its history, shattering constitutive myths and revealing manipulations
and deceptions that occurred in constructing the national legacy (Shapira and Penslar
2013).
The Mizrahim issue became central in the post-Zionist criticism. Multiple
studies and cultural products brought harsh accusations against the melting-pot
policies of the Ashkenazi hegemony and its patronizing and discriminatory treatment
of Mizrahim (Shohat 1999; Shenhav 2006). This criticism worked its way into the
multicultural discourse that escalated in Israeli society generally and in the public-
education system particularly. “Multicultural” ceased to be a mere adjective for Israeli
society; rather it became a normative aspiration, an idea that considers cultural
multiplicity a positive value that epitomizes the human spirit in all its complexions
and best expresses the values of education, equality, human dignity, and justice
(Yonah 2005; Gutwein 2004).
The publication of the new junior-high school curriculum for the State system
in 1995 marked the turning of a new leaf in Israeli history education generally and in
its approach to the multiculturalism issue particularly (Raz-Krakotzkin 2001). Until
the 1990s, as our inquiry shows, both the State and State-Religious education systems
took much the same attitude toward the representation of Mizrahim. At this time,
however, the systems were moving farther and farther apart in their ideological view
of history at large (Naveh 2018; Weintraub 2020), and this was evidenced in the way
they confronted the question of multiculturalism.
The ideological gap between the systems was manifested primarily in relation
to Category 1 in Nordgren’s and Johansson’s model—the status of Jewish history and
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its aspects of intercultural interaction. Thus, in its curriculum, the State system
pivoted from emphasizing the uniqueness of the Jewish national story to the way
Jewish history twines with general history and cannot be understood in dissociation
from it. “History is one,” proclaimed the authors of the junior-high curriculum (MOE,
1995, 5-6), in a dictum that was quoted in many places and reaffirmed in the
introduction to the most recent curriculum, that of 2010 (MOE, 2010a, 4).
This approach was also fundamental to the State system senior-high
curriculum, published in 2003 and still in effect (MOE, 2019). In it, the authors
explain, “The linkage of the general historical narrative and Jewish history is a
guiding principle in organizing the topics of instruction” (MOE, 2003, 5; MOE,
2019). Furthermore, one of the main goals of the current curriculum is “developing
understanding and tolerance of the feelings, traditions, cultures, and ways of life of
the other”. In greater detail, students are expected:
to appreciate the interdependency and intereffects of peoples and societies
during human development [and to] understand the importance of this
dependency, which creates cultural symbiosis and abets human
development (MOE, 2019, 4).
Thus, the State curriculum makes it clear that intercultural interactions are not only a
historical phenomenon but a normative situation of integral importance in human
development.
The State-Religious system took a much more reserved attitude toward the
contingency of Jewish culture. The new curriculum did specify “the integration of
general history into Jewish history” as one of the most important changes that it
proposed to implement (MOE, 2010b, 7); however, it still emphasized the substantial
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difference between these histories. This is no trifling distinction in State-Religious
eyes; it flows from the system’s theological tenets, which stress the uniqueness of the
Jewish people and distinguish between Jewry and the rest of the nations (Weintraub
2019; Weintraub and Naveh 2020).
The teaching of mediaeval Jewish communities—one of the most meaningful
novelties in the representation of the Mizrahim—offers an example for the difference
between State and State-Religious curriculum. Both systems refer to two case studies,
one Christian (Prague) and one Muslim (Baghdad) (MOE 2019a, 14-15). Within this
framework, the State system emphasizes the totality of relations between the Jewish
community and its surroundings and the way they influenced Jewish culture. In the
winter 2016 exam, for example, students were asked to survey the factors that
transformed Baghdad into a cultural center in the ninth and tenth centuries and to
specify “two influences of the Muslim culture on the Jewish culture in mediaeval
Baghdad” (MOE 2016a, 5). The State-Religious system, in contrast, understates the
absorption of non-Jewish cultural elements by Jewish culture, describing changes in
Jewish society as internal responses to external challenges (MOE 2010b, 29-32).
Another difference between the systems is the treatment of developments in
Israeli society. As detailed below, the systems added copious meaningful content on
the 1950s–1960s mass immigration and the social policy in effect then. However,
while the State curriculum emphatically sees Israeli society as multicultural (Domke,
Urbach, and Goldberg 2009, 254–258), the State-Religious version offers a much
more tentative portrayal. In fact, the State-Religious curriculum and its textbooks
refrain from describing Israel as a multicultural society. This stance was not prompted
by resistance to the struggle of the Mizrahim, to which the curriculum gave greater
attention (MOE 2010b, 83; Har Bracha 2016, 403-409). Instead, it originated in the
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State-Religious system refusal to acknowledge social multiculturalism as a normative
situation and, more specifically, from reluctance to consider any secular or non-
Jewish culture as equal in worth.
Despite these differences, both systems made meaningful revisions in their
representation of Mizrahim. All the curricula emphasized the need to integrate topics
relating to “the cultural legacy of the various communities and sects in Jewish
history” into history teaching (MOE 2003, 5). Therefore, in accordance with Category
3 of the model, one may say that both education systems desire a learning process that
exposes students to the way their culture took shape and evolved.
In addition, the curricula and their corollaries, the textbooks, began to include
new chapters about the history of the Mizrahim. Alongside the Jewish community of
Baghdad, the curricula added an explicit reference to the way the Jews of Yemen and
northern Africa coped with the conceptual, cultural, and social developments that
accompanied modernization (MOE 2003b, 47; CET 2014, 225, 230, 252–255; Har
Bracha 2014, 238–240). Furthermore, both systems introduced new contents about
changes among the Jews of the Islamic countries and the challenges that they faced in
the period between the world wars (MOE 2010b, 75) and the 1950s and 1960s
decolonization process (MOE 2003, 24; MOE 2019, 21).
Improvement regarding Category 3—the way the students’ culture was shaped
and evolved—may also be seen in the addition of much educational content about the
integration of the 1950s–1960s masses of immigrants. Textbooks in both systems
devote entire chapters to the distress of the newly arrived immigrants and the
Ashkenazi discrimination against Mizrahim. As for the concepts of “ingathering the
exiles” and the “melting pot,” the authors of the Center for Education Television
(CET) textbook wrote: “In practice, these concepts did not reflect an attitude of
20
equality between the communities; instead, those from the east were instructed to
adopt the cultural values and ways of life of those of European origin” (Avieli-
Tavivian 2009, 226). Another textbook paints a complex portrait of the government
policy. On the one hand, the process managed to unite the Israeli nation and create
shared cultural symbols and customs among all Jews; on the other, the immigrants
had to pay a steep price for it:
The immigrants from the Islamic lands had to relinquish their Arabic
language and culture, which were perceived as belonging to the enemy
and as degenerate. This sent a harsh and insulting message to Jews from
rich cultures who had come to Israel in the hope of being accepted as
equal there (Domke, Urbach, and Goldberg 2009, 233–234).
Along with new chapters about the Mizrahim, the curriculum authors
expressed openness to diverse voices—Category 2 in the model—by attempting to
adopt new disciplinary developments (Seixas 2017a). In a comprehensive process
undertaken by MOE since the turn of the twenty-first century, history teaching in both
systems has begun to give much importance to developing principles of historical
thinking. Within this ambit, one of the new principles in each curriculum is
“acknowledging the existence of different points of view and approaches toward
every topic, event, and process” (MOE 2003, 13; MOE 2010a, 8; MOE 2010b, 8, 10).
At a deeper level, these curricular developments could also connect with
Category 3. The development of disciplinary competences and the curricular
emphasis on the creation and subjectivity of historical knowledge, shapes the
students’ historical consciousness, i.e., the way the past shapes their understanding of
the present and influences their actions going forward (Seixas 2017b; Zanazanian and
Nordgren 2019). In this sense, learning about the contingency of history directly
21
impacts students’ understanding of their culture as a dynamic process contingent on
conditions and circumstances.
These changes, parsed by Nordgren’s and Johansson’s three categories, seem
revolutionary in terms of the structuring of multicultural history teaching, especially
in the State system. However, although the curricula emphasize a multi-perspective
approach at the declarative level, their practical manifestations remain severely
limited. Mostly, the approach is applied in historical matters that are peripheral for the
students’ identity, i.e., distant in chronological terms or in reference to politically
sensitive historical issues (Weintraub 2019).
Beyond the limited implementation of the disciplinary approach, the highest
hurdle that multicultural history education faces is the continued embrace, by both
systems, of the same main educational goal: creating national identity in accordance
with the Zionist narrative. Despite the curricular revisions in the “aughts” and the
advent of a new generation of textbooks, history education continues to comport with
Raz-Krakotzkin’s assertion (2001) and remains subordinate to the Eurocentric Zionist
narrative within clear ideological boundaries. Thus, much like other cases around the
world (Anderson 2012), history education in Israel reflects an attempt to add content
about marginalized populations but does not wish to challenge the thought formations
that construct the historical canon.
In both education systems, principles of the modernization that swept Europe
remain fundamental in the learning process. Consequently, despite the new chapters,
the representation of non-European Jewish communities that did not experience
meaningful modernization is still severely limited. Analysis of textbooks in both
systems shows a steep increase in references to the Mizrahim—to a level five times
greater than that in the textbooks of the 1950s. However, the upturn springs from a
22
very low baseline—less than 2 percent in the 1950s—meaning that chapters on
Mizrahim still account for less than 15 percent of total textbooks content.
Integrating the Mizrahim has become even more challenging in view of the
growing centrality of the Holocaust in the Israeli society. In recent decades, against
the background of the erosion of the Zionist ethos, the Holocaust appears to have
become the common denominator of national identity and cementing the historical
legitimacy of Israel. Since the early 1980s, therefore, the curricula have been devoting
a growing place for the Holocaust, which evolved into one of the main topics in the
teaching process (Porat 2004; Naveh 2017). This trend caused a pressure to
marginalize even more the Mizrahim, who experienced the persecution and the
annihilation much less than did European Jewry.
In February 2016, amid public disputes over the underrepresentation of the
legacy of MENA Jewry, the minister of education set up a special committee to
investigate the matter. The panel, chaired by the poet Erez Biton, included
subcommittees that examined the various subjects taught in the two education systems
and in universities. The history subcommittee acidly criticized the attitude toward
Mizrahim and found their representation “shallow, belittling,” and liable to cause the
offspring of these communities “to repudiate [their legacy] or feel alienated from it”
(Biton 2016, 32).
The Biton Committee’s recommendations touched off a tumultuous public
discourse and inspired the MOE to launch a far-reaching public-relations campaign on
the topic. A meaningful change also took place at the level of the inspectorates of both
systems. They took advantage of official web sites and social networks to publish new
lesson plans and educational media specially produced about Mizrahim history (e.g.,
MOE 2017a; GAA 2017a, 2017b). Noticeably, both systems’ inspectorates adjusted
23
their field trips, workshops, and teachers’ seminars. The matriculation exams, the
most important instruments of national evaluation, also reflect this change. It is
plainly evident that the post-Biton exams began to include more questions related to
the Mizrahim history.
The recommendations of the Biton Committee and the MOE’s strenuous
efforts, however, still leave the boundaries of the Zionist consciousness intact and
merely add information to the canonical narrative (Tal 2019). The committee
recommended the writing of “chapters that emphasize the contribution of Mizrahim
Jewry to the State of Israel from the time it was established to the present day” (Biton
Report 2016, 38). Thus, the recent measures have heightened the tension between
aspiring to protect the Zionist narrative, which revolves around the Jews of Europe,
and the attempts to assimilate Mizrahim history into the curriculum.
A major revision in the State system's matriculation exams, for example, was
adding questions about Zionist activity by Mizrahim. In 2016, the exam gave major
attention to members of the Bnei Zion association in Port Said, Egypt. In 2017, a
question about the first clandestine immigration vessel from northern Africa appeared,
and an original excerpt from the records of the central committee of the Zionist
organization in Iran was presented in 2019 (MOE 2016, 6, 2017b, 10, 2019, 8). These
questions, however, were the only ones that related to historical changes among
Mizrahim in the modern era. Thus, they centered unreasonably on Zionist aspects,
totally overlooked important personalities, and rich cultural history unrelated to the
Zionist process.
To complete the Zionist equation, the learning process turned its emphasis to
the Arab populations’ harsh treatment of Jews. Soft-pedaling the process of Jews’
integration into the local non-Jewish society, culture, and even politics, the MOE
24
began to publish educational media about pogroms throughout the Muslim realm and
the expulsions of Jews in the 1950s (MOE 2017a; General Inspector 2019; Kan 2016;
Dahan Center 2017; Yaffe 2016). Thus, the teaching portrayed the fate of Mizrahim
as a mirror image of that of the Jews in Europe: in both regions, Jews suffered from
persecutions and violence, in both they acted to realize the Zionist idea, and in both
communities were ultimately “liquidated”.
These efforts to paint the history of Mizrahim with the brush of the Israeli
Zionist ethos created an even more significant historical distortion when they turned
to the Holocaust. In view of the centrality of the Holocaust in the current Israeli
identity, the MOE has been struggling to depict the Mizrahim as partners in European
Jewry’s tragic fate, even though the Holocaust was marginal in the history of the
Mizrahim. Nevertheless, in early 2017, when the MOE put out a video on “facts that
every Israeli should know about everyone’s story,” the first fact that it chose to
present was “the Holocaust of the Jews of Libya” (MOE 2017a). Namely, from the
entire rich and glorious history of the Mizrahim, the MOE placed a historically
marginal event, the Holocaust era in Libya, at the forefront of the historical account.
In the same vein, the State-Religious system devoted most of the Holocaust
section in its winter-2018 matriculation exam to primary source regarding the
Holocaust in Libya. Although the exam asked to explain why the Final Solution was
not implemented in that country, it emphasizes the fate the Libya Jews shared with
those in Europe. Thus, in two of three questions students were asked to describe the
similarities of what happened in Poland and the events in Libya, e.g., to compare the
actions of community leaders in Cyrenaica with those of Adam Czerniaków, chair of
the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat (MOE 2018, 7-8).
25
The arguments expressed above do not intend to belittle the difficult
challenges that the Jews of Libya faced or understate the tragedy of the murder of
thousands of people. Needless to say, acknowledging the suffering of the Jews of
Libya is an important step in describing the history of this community. Nevertheless,
the steps taken are doubly problematic. First, the attempt to emphasize a similarity of
type between the circumstances in Libya and those in Europe may cause
misunderstanding as to the extent and features of the Holocaust in Europe,
diminishing its significance and uniqueness. No less, the copious space invested in the
phenomenon, mostly as the only reference to modern Libyan Jewry, impairs
understanding of the rich history of the Mizrahim generally and the Libyan
community particularly.
Conclusion
History education in Israel, like global processes that pertain to meaningful education
for a democratic society, has changed in substantive ways over the last seven decades,
particularly in reference to the question of multiculturalism. The representation of
Mizrahim, the principal category in structuring the multicultural debate in Israeli
society, is a manifestation of this. In response to social and educational changes along
with developments in the discipline of history, history education today takes a
fundamentally different approach to the history of Mizrahim than had been the custom
in Israel’s first few decades. Analysis of the MOE’s digital interface, regular
directives, and annual examinations, makes it clear that in recent years various
stakeholders in the education system are making growing efforts to empower the
Mizrahim legacy and status.
26
Above all, the analysis shows that the State and State-Religious education
systems wished to adopt a different approach to the way history education reflects the
students’ culture—Category 3 in Nordgren’s and Johansson’s conceptualization. Both
systems sought to amplify the representation of the Mizrahim, who account for
roughly half of the student population. They added chapters to their curricula and
revised the mix of items in the matriculation exams.
The use of Nordgren’s and Johansson’s conceptual framework reinforces the
realization that the change did not exhaust itself in adding contents; it was also
reflected in the perception of history education as a process consistent with the
multicultural approach. This stands out when applying the framework's Category 1,
which relates to intercultural interactions. For example, whereas the curricula up to
the 1990s emphasized the singularity of Jewish history, the new curricula make a
perceptible attempt to present this history as inseparable from global processes. The
change stands out particularly in the State system, but the State-Religious schools,
too, are giving much stronger emphasis to general history.
Meaningful improvement is also evident in openness to different perspectives,
Category 2 in the model. Both systems have unequivocally affirmed the immense
importance of education that recognizes and accepts a range of views and cultures.
The new contents relating the history of Mizrahim are crucial for deeper acquaintance
with these communities; beyond this, however, they are helpful in illuminating
additional approaches toward existing topics of study. In a deeper sense, the attempt
to harness historical thinking theories has created the potential of profound change at
the level of epistemology, i.e., to instill in students a historical consciousness of the
contingency of historical phenomena, including the issue at hand, for their culture.
27
Nevertheless, as our analysis deepened, it became increasingly clear that the
ostensible improvement that we found, parsed by the categories of the model, has
remained within certain bounds. The principal goal of the learning process—instilling
a historical consciousness based on the Eurocentric Zionist narrative—has not
changed. Accordingly, although much content has been added, the Mizrahim
representation remains marginal. Furthermore, intercultural encounters with Islam are
still limited mainly to the far-removed context of the Middle Ages, with hardly any
reference to intereffects in recent centuries–the most relevant to students’ lives. Thus,
modern Arab states are studied solely in the context of violence against and expulsion
of Jews. The template recurs in the matter of multi-perspectives teaching, which is
applied but relegated to ideological peripheral matters. Hence, despite strenuous
efforts in recent years, the implications of this trend are still incomplete and not of the
kind that would accommodate substantial change.
It is therefore clear that the historical narrative is careful not to present the
Mizrahim as an integral part of the Middle Eastern and North African population. On
the contrary: plainly it attempts to emphasize the uniqueness of the Jewish
population’s history and the way in which it suffered from the Muslim population.
The portrayal of the Mizrahim as part of the culture of Middle East society has broad
implications that transcend its importance for the historical understanding of the
Mizrahim; it is also capable of influencing the attitudes toward Palestinians and
various Middle Eastern countries that are in conflict with Israel. In other words, the
representation of the Mizrahim as an integral part of Arab countries may challenge
fundamental assumptions that shape the Israeli identity, such as the uniqueness of the
Jewish people and its relations with surrounding countries. Although this concept has
been accepted in research for almost two decades (Shenhav 2006), it remains
28
marginal in the public discourse and a fortiori has not been translated into the official
curricula taught in the country’s schools.
The limited effect of the changes that have occurred is a consequence of the
rigid framing of the national concept that continues to structure the goals of the
education process. Tension between the goal of representing the Mizrahim and
adherence to the boundaries of the Zionist narrative is conspicuous in both education
systems. Despite major differences between the systems, the Zionist national mindset
is fundamental in both.
The conflict between the efforts to strengthen the Mizrahim representation and
the constraints of the Zionist narrative has created major distortions. Educational
media dress the MENA Jewry in Zionist colors, overlooking the fact it was relatively
marginal phenomenon. Thus, for example, the MOE has positioned the Holocaust in
Libya—a relatively minor episode in that community’s history—as an event of central
if not supreme importance in the history of Mizrahim.
In a broader conceptual context, this conflict should be understood as a
reflection of international growing infrastructural tension characterizing history
education in recent decades. That is, historiographic and social developments that
create pressure for major curricular revisions are countered by the abiding wish in
many education systems worldwide to preserve national goals and particularistic
identities. Thus, alongside the tension that accompanies the attempt to adopt
multicultural approaches, one also sees meaningful challenges in the effort to attain
gender balance and integrate additional social history historiography (Carretero,
Asensio, and Rodríguez Moneo 2013; Cho and Park 2016; Crocco 2018; Alexander
and Weekes-Bernard 2017; Rupp and Freeman 2014).
29
Concurrently, the calling of public attention to the Mizrahim issue often
allows the MOE to divert it efforts from urgent conflictual cultural questions that
simmer today in Israeli society. Foremost among these potential topics of study is the
representation of Arab Israelis—Palestinians who remain within the borders of Israel
and live within its framework. Although this population constitutes 20 percent of
Israeli society, it hardly receives any reference in the curriculum, and even that only
in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Thus, in conceptual terms, the meaningful
changes in the representation of the Mizrahim reflect that even perceptible changes in
the learning process may not necessarily constitute evidence of holistic change;
sometimes they may even serve as signals of progress that allow deeper changes to be
neutralized.
1
The catch-all term Mizrahim (lit. ‘easterners’) itself has evoked fierce controversy.
However, because it remains a key category in Israeli society and academic research,
we use it here without losing sight of its limitations and the power relations that it
embodies.
2
In the article, we choose to use the descriptive term “multicultural” because the
normative term, “intercultural,” remains controversial in Israeli society, as we discuss
below.
3
This calculation is based on an analysis of the three main series of textbooks: Ziv
and Touri (1959(, Avivi and Perski (1959), and Katz and Hershko (1962).
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