Arab taboo phrase in Israel text book sparks outcry

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A school text book for Arab children in Israel has sparked an outcry among rightist Jews by including a reference for the first time to the Palestinian view of the Jewish state's founding as a "catastrophe".

The book, which is designed for use in schools from this school year, is aimed at 8-9 year old Arab children in Israel's largely separate public school system. Arab citizens make up about a fifth of Israel's population of seven million.

The edition uses the previously taboo word "nakba" -- Arabic for catastrophe and the Palestinian term for the 1948 founding of Israel in a war when some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.

The text was ordered several years ago when Israel was seeking to build bridges with its Arab population. Education Minister Yuli Tamir of the left-of-centre Labour Party praised the book on Sunday as a development whose time was overdue.

But many Israeli rightists demanded Tamir's dismissal for approving use of the phrase, arguing that the book seemed to legitimize debate over the Jewish state's right to exist.

"Shall we inject Arab propaganda into our schools with our own hands?" Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the rightist Likud party and a former prime minister, said.

Tamir pledged to seek to amend other Israeli schoolbooks to reflect the Palestinian narrative as well.

Until now, Israeli schoolchildren learn about the founding of Israel solely from the officially Israeli perspective, even those attending Arab schools whose pupils are largely descended from or related to Palestinian refugees of the conflict.

Most Israeli Jews and Arabs attend separate school systems, largely a reflection of the fact that the two groups live mostly segregated in distinct towns and neighborhoods.

Many in Israel "have shut our eyes for too many years to the issue. We have a complex history of two peoples engaged in a struggle and it's time to give the story of this struggle its proper treatment," Tamir said in television and radio interviews.

"It shouldn't be that an Arab child, a citizen of Israel, won't know about and won't have the ability to discuss the Arab narrative as well" about Israel's existence, Tamir said.

The new text contains just one phrase that alludes to the Palestinian version of events, which says:

"The Arabs call the war the nakba, a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation, and the Jews call it the Independence War."

But Netanyahu said: "The education minister should go home. This is utter bankruptcy."

Zevulun Orlev, a lawmaker of the rightist National Union Party, said Israel risked encouraging its own Arab citizens to revolt rather than accept its rule.

"We lend legitimacy to Arabs seeing our independence as their disaster. How then can we teach the same pupil to be a loyal citizen?"