From `Le Monde diplomatique`–Thursday, July 7, 2011–The Nakba was erased from a French textbookAccording to a wire story of the Agence France Presse (AFP) dated July 4, `passages from a new contemporary history textbooks aimed for eleventh grade general studies, challenged by Jewish organizations, will be `modified` for the occasion of printing the final version, said the publisher Hachette Education on Monday`.These changes would apply to the description of the `partition of Palestine` by the `textbooks of the eleventh grade in the litterary (L), scientific (S) and economic and social (ES) programs starting from the next school year`. The agency quoted the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), who denounces a `completely scandalous presentation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict`. Richard Prasquier sees particularly in the use of the word Nakba (`catastrophe` in Arabic) an `ideologization` and attacks `factual errors`, without `specifying which` – as the AFP notes. Concluding the dispatch the AFP states that `the National Bureau of Vigilance against Antisemitism (BNVCA) had criticized the authors of the textbook for `interpreting the historical facts, for truncating the truth, for taking sides`.In the absence of clarification from the Ministry of Education, which declined to comment on this information, we are left guessing.Being the ultimate responsible for the content of textbooks destined for French high schools, doesn`t the Ministry fall into the same communalism which is so often vilified by the president and prime minister, when agreeing to let an editor revise the content at the request of associations or lobby groups representing (or claiming to represent) various `communities`?The question arises, especially since the position of the CRIF joined the law recently passed by the Israeli Parliament, prohibiting the commemoration of the Palestinian exodus, under the name of `the Nakba`, during the Jewish-Palestinian, and then the Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1949… this raises a further question: Does the CRIF intend to implement the Israeli law in France and should the French Republic bow to this requirement, including in the field of education?Lastly, regarding the history books, would it not be more reasonable for the Ministry to require of the editor to rely on the work of historians, and first of all the most relevant ones: Palestinian and Israeli researchers. And yet, the vast majority of them affirm (for the former) and recognize (for the latter) that most Palestinians who fled their homes during this period have been forced to do so, often as a result of massacres.Even the Israeli Benny Morris, who in 2004 defended the policy of Sharon`s government, reiterated on this point, the results of his twenty years of immersing in the Israeli archives. The man who went as far as defending the `ethnic cleansing`, declaring in an interview with Haaretz on January 8, 2004 that `a Jewish state would not have been possible without the uprooting of some 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them`, would he be considered an `anti-Semite` in the eyes of the CRIF?Richard Prasquier, who claims to speak for the Jews of France (see Le Monde diplomatique of July 2011), is probably a good cardiologist. This is not sufficient, obviously, to make of him a good historian…Dominique Vidal |
