Because Israel has spent its entire modern history in a state of siege, surrounded by enemies who seek its destruction, what we tend to think of as "culture wars" over identity and point of view have a dire connection to reality in Israel that our own culture wars have traditionally not had. (For an explanation of how the so-called culture wars in this country became "The Real Culture War" after 9/11, see Chapter 8 of The Death of the Grown-Up.)
     This connection between what seems largely theoretical and what is clearly a line of battle helps explain the significance of the outcome of a recent controversy over the textbook version of history in the tiny Jewish state. This week, the Knesset Education Committee voted against the education minister's proposal to include in an elementary school textbook for Israeli Arabs the Arab perspective on Israel's victory over the Arab world at the time of Israel's founding in 1948. The defeated Arabs view Israel's victory--which, of course, made possible its survival as a fledgling state--as the "Nabka," or catastrophe. (Every year, in fact, Israel's Independence Day is a  day of mourning in parts of the Arab world.) In July, as the Jerusalem Post reports, "the mention of the Arab term nabka in an official third-grade Education Ministry textbook for [Israeli] Arab schoolchildren caused an uproar among Israeli politicians."
    As well it should have. After all, teaching schoolchildren the Arab perspective on the 1948 war Israel is like teaching schoolchildren why Israel should not exist--and thus validating this amoral, rejectionist and even genocidal point of view. For Israel even to consider according validity to this point of view--one that sees its very existence as a "catastrophe"--shows the degree to which the cultural rot of self-doubt has advanced.
     Cultural disintegration, however, was averted--at least for the moment. The committee voted six to one against the proposal, with one abstenstion.