German textbooks strong on Holocaust, uneven on Israel, report finds

The study found that coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sometimes creates misleading equivalencies between Israeli and Palestinian actors.

By JNS

Textbooks used in Germany’s most populous state provide detailed coverage of Judaism and the Holocaust but sometimes give uneven attention to Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, according to a report released on Tuesday by IMPACT-se.

The study examined history, political education, and religious education textbooks used in secondary schools in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The research institute praised the books for presenting Judaism as integral to contemporary German society, explicitly rejecting collective Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion and examining the historical roots of Christian antisemitism.

Their Holocaust coverage addresses the murder of approximately six million Jews, Jewish resistance, societal complicity, and Germany’s postwar reckoning, according to the report.

However, the study found that coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sometimes creates misleading equivalencies between Israeli and Palestinian actors while giving insufficient attention to Israeli security concerns.

One textbook pairs images of Israeli military control in Judea and Samaria and a Hamas terrorist under the heading “Mutual threats and violence,” without explicitly identifying Hamas as a terrorist organization, according to IMPACT-se.

In their treatment of 1948, textbooks present both Israeli and Palestinian narratives and acknowledge the invasion of Israel by five Arab states.

However, the report found that Palestinian displacement receives greater attention than Arab rejection of partition and the subsequent invasion, while the parallel displacement of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries is omitted.

A separate UNESCO study previously found gaps in European textbooks’ coverage of contemporary antisemitism, including in Germany.

“German textbooks do an excellent job of confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and the country’s antisemitic past,” said IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff.

“But this commitment to historical accuracy must also extend to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

The study concludes an IMPACT-se series examining how curricula in seven European countries present Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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