Israel for the first time has approved a school textbook acknowledging to the country’s minority Palestinian citizens what they have been learning at home for generations: The Jewish state’s creation was a tragedy for them. The updated third-grade primer stirred controversy as soon as the Education Ministry announced its approval for Arab classrooms this fall. Israeli rightists rose in defence of the school system’s traditional one-sided teaching of history and declared the book itself a tragedy.

Living Together in Israel describes events of 1948 and 1949, when Israel’s creation by the United Nations in what had been British-ruled Palestine prompted an invasion by Arab armies and the displacement of about 7,00,000 Palestinian Arabs. Previous editions gave only the Jewish narrative of the war, pointing out the Jews’ connection to the Holy Land and their need for a state because of persecution in Europe. That version focused on heroism of the Israeli forces and referred to the Palestinian flight as a voluntary escape.

The new edition adds the Arab perspective, noting for the first time that many Palestinians were forced from their homes and became refugees after the winners of the war confiscated their land and barred their return.

“The Arabs call the war the Nakba, meaning the war of catastrophe and destruction. The Jews call it the War of Independence”, a key passage reads.

Palestinians who remained in Israel, and now make up 20 per cent of the population, lived until 1966 under military rule that limited their freedom of movement and other rights, the new text acknowledges.

“The book offers Arab pupils a balanced picture, so that they may put what they are exposed to in their home environment into the proper context,” Education Minister Yuli Tamir said.

Although the facts presented are not in dispute, teaching them in Israel is controversial. Some Israeli Jews said the book would encourage a growing militancy among Israeli Arabs, whose leaders recently have demanded that Israel be declared a binational state.

“Once the Arab pupils are taught that the establishment of Israel was a disaster, they might infer that they should be fighting against us,” said Limor Livnat, a former education minister from the Right-wing Likud Party.

Other critics demanded that Tamir be fired. The education minister is a member of the Left-leaning Labour Party and a founder of the advocacy group Peace Now. Last year she ordered that maps in school textbooks show the boundary that existed between Israel and the West Bank before the 1967 West Asia war, provoking challenges from lawmakers, religious leaders and settler groups who claim the West Bank as part of Israel.

Defenders of the change said there was no point in hiding from children what happened in the 1948 war or suppressing open debate about it.

Dalia Fenig, an Education Ministry inspector, said the textbook’s revision was approved by a professional review board representing a spectrum of political views. Its 30 members weighed every word to present the Arab and Jewish narratives as gently as possible, she said.

Jewish high school students are taught a more balanced history of the 1948 war, drawing from complex accounts by Israeli historians.

But Fenig said the Education Ministry had no plans to introduce the Arab narrative into Hebrew-language editions of Living Together In Israel for Jewish third-graders.

Ghassam Hamaissee, an Israeli Arab professor at Haifa University who served on the ministry’s review board, advocated revising the Hebrew edition but was overruled, he said, on the ground that Jewish third-graders are too young to grasp the concept of competing narratives. Hamaissee and other Israeli Arabs welcomed the change in the Arab-language edition.

Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip run their own school systems and use history texts produced with European Union funds.

Starting in the sixth grade, Palestinians there learn that the 1948 war ended with “the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land and the occupation of such cities as Haifa, Tiberius, Nazareth and Jerusalem” as well as “the expulsion and dispersion of the Palestinian people and the start of the refugee problem”.