Row over 'new' Israeli history

Israel's left is challenging the myth of the "purity of arms"

Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid has stepped up a controversial campaign to change the way modern history is taught in schools.

Mr Sarid is urging teachers to teach Israeli schoolchildren about the notorious Kafr Qassem massacre of Israeli Arabs in October 1956.

He also wants schools to commemorate the event, in which some 50 Arab villagers, including 15 women and 11 children, were gunned down by Israeli troops.

"We owe it to the Arab citizens of Israel that we not only commemorate the massacre, but that we send a clear and unequivocal message," Mr Sarid wrote in a letter to all Israeli social studies teachers.

The education ministry says it favours a more comprehensive view of Israeli history, "even if that required painful introspection and examination of negative aspects and myth-breaking events".

Cold blood

Israeli soldiers committed the massacre on 29 October 1956 - the day Israel launched its attack on Egypt, triggering the Suez Crisis.

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The victims were returning to Kafr Qassem from their fields after the sudden imposition of a curfew as a prelude to the attack.

A survivor of the killings said Israeli frontier guards stopped three groups returning to the village, lined them up and killed them in cold blood.

During their trial, the soldiers said they were following orders. They were sentenced to long prison terms, although they were subsequently drastically reduced.

Challenging myths

"Pupils must know about this shameful page of our history," Mr Sarid, who leads the leftist Meretz party, said on Wednesday on Israeli television.

"It is also very important that older pupils, who will soon be doing their military service, should know what an illegal order is, and that in such a case they can refuse to obey," he said.

Yossi Sarid wants to get rid of "censorship" in Israeli education

Events like those at Kafr Qassem sit uneasily with Israel's concept of the "purity of arms" of its military and have consequently been ignored in schools and by the Israeli public.

Mr Sarid has also introduced new history textbooks that challenge several popular myths, such as that, in the 1948 Arab-Israel war, Jewish fighters were outnumbered by Arab armies.

The books have sparked an angry debate. Criticsm ranges from accusations of factual error and undercutting Israel's negotiating positions in peace talks.

But the education minister has in the past argued that children do not need "censored" information.

The argument is shared by a number of "revisionist" Israeli historians who have written about the darker aspects of modern Israeli history and acknowledged that the creation of the state was largely achieved at the expense of the indigenous Arab population.