Education Ministry Director-General Dalit Shtauber announced on Tuesday that the Knesset Education Committee has ordered that the controversial civics textbook Embarking on the Path of Civics not be taught in junior and senior high schools throughout Israel. The textbook, published by the Education Ministry, generated a firestorm for its sweeping generalizations of the Israeli political landscape, and was accused of including historical falsehoods and distortions. "The textbook lacks balance in its presentation of the problems relating to the divisions in Israel," said Shtrauber, who also heads the Pedagogical Secretariat. She added that the book's authorization by the Education Ministry for use in classrooms was a serious mishap. "The book is full of factual mistakes, and some groups in Israeli society are presented incorrectly and insensitively," she said. Thousands of copies of Embarking on the Path of Civics have already been printed and incorporated into junior and senior high school curricula. But its detractors say it uses stereotypes when describing the Right-Left divide. Namely, it pigeonholes the Right as traditionally more hawkish and an advocate of military solutions as a significant component of national security while calling the Left more humane and a proponent of negotiations as the best means for settling disputes and conflict. The Right places a high value on the concept of nationality and ethnic heritage, and considers nationhood as the largest common denominator; therefore the Right tends to prefer its own ethnic group and sanctifies values that are related to peoples origin, reads one passage of the book. The Left espouses humanism much more." Despite having been approved by the Education Ministry, the book has elicited a strong reaction from lawmakers and professionals alike. Dr. Efraim Podoksik, who works at the Hebrew Universitys Political Science Department and sits on the Education Ministrys professional committee on civics, told Israel Hayom that he only saw the book after it was approved. It has many grave errors and is misleading to a fault, Podoksik said. Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely also voiced her concern over the book, saying in late March, When you put historical inaccuracies before Israeli pupils, it debases the political system and deepens ignorance. On the controversial law that forbids the commemoration of the Nakba (catastrophe), the term used by Palestinians to describe Israels founding, which passed in the Knesset last year, the book says: Representatives of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel view the law as an infringement on the rights of the Arab minority. It also says, There are other pending bills that if approved would hurt the Arab minority in Israel, such as the so called Loyalty Bill mandating that everyone pledge allegiance to a Jewish and democratic state. It is inappropriate to have Education Ministry textbooks, which serve Israeli schoolchildren, opine on laws that were approved and debated in the Knesset, MK Alex Miller (Yisrael Beitenu) said in late March. Miller is the head of the Knessets Education, Culture and Sports Committee and the sponsor of the Nakba Law. On Tuesday, Miller said that the more than one million Russian Jews who made aliyah in the 1990s after the fall of the former Soviet Union were depicted in the textbook as an economic burden on the country, "without any mention of Zionist motivations and as an un-Jewish aliyah. These things create a new reality for the students," said Miller. Israeli-Arab MK Jamal Zahalka (Balad), criticized the decision to ban the textbook: "Any person who is concerned for democracy, tolerance and enlightenment should fight this trend."
