Libraries have become the latest battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Israelis are getting bibliographically battered.
by Andrea Rapp
A few months ago, I ordered a collection of recently published children's books on Israel for our temple library. Much to my dismay, after reviewing the works I discovered that many books contained flat-out incorrect information reported as fact, demonstrated a blatant anti-Israel bias, or sometimes both. These are the library books on Israel that students across the country will be consulting for reports and class assignments. It's frightening.
Here are a few examples of the falsehoods and errors I found:
In The Six-Day War by Matthew Broyles (2004), one of The Rosen Publishing Group's new series of books on the Middle East wars, Broyles states that the 1917 Balfour Declaration proposed to divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs and make Jerusalem an international city. Actually, these proposals were not in the Balfour Declaration, but in the UN partition resolution of twenty years later; the Balfour Declaration declared that the British government favors "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Broyles goes on to say that the Jews "boldly" declared their state in May of 1948, then "war began." The author makes no mention of the UN partition resolution; instead, he writes, "the home of the Palestinians was now the home of the Jews," and so the homeless Palestinians fled. Here, as in many other books, the entire Arab-Israeli conflict is portrayed as one long frustrated Palestinian attempt to achieve statehood, rather than as Arab resistance to the State of Israel.
Read the full article at
Reform Judaism Online
