Friday, June 07, 2024
Elder of ZiyonBesides looking at how the textbooks portray Israel, which is slowly improving, it looks at other topics like polytheism, Christianity, gays and others, and in all areas the books are more liberal and tolerant compared to previous textbook editions.
While how they portray Palestinians was not a topic of the study, some of the findings indicate that the Saudis are de-emphasizing the Palestinian cause compared to earlier years. Officially, they still support it wholeheartedly, but some changes are significant.
For example:
The 2023 editions of grades 5 and 9 social studies textbooks show the systematic trend of featuring the area of Israel proper and Palestine as unnamed, as opposed to the 2022 editions which marked it as “Palestine”
In several geography textbooks, when previously Israel was replaced with "Palestine," now they removed all labels naming countries that do nto directly border Saudi Arabia. Other maps which replaced Israel with "Palestine" were completely removed.
In a social studies textbook, the entire chapter addressing the Palestinian cause was removed in 2022.
In 2023, a picture of the White Mosque in Ramlah, featured in a chapter about the Umayyad dynasty, no longer mentions that it is located in Palestine. The city, located near Tel Aviv, was established in the 8th century during of the Umayyad era as the capital of Jund Filastin, the military district of Palestine, in the Bilad al-Sham province.
There are still several maps that still replace Israel with "Palestine." But the trend is away from that. (Also, several mentions of "the Israeli enemy" have been replaced with "the Israeli occupation.")
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