• Examines a wide range of Middle Eastern countries and the impact that textbookscan have on national identities
• Emphasises the role of textbooks in legitimising an established political and socialorder
• Explores the type of knowledge acquired by textbooks across a number of subjects

This book highlights and examines the role of the textbook in legitimising established
political and social orders. It analyses the way in which the ‘other’ is presented in school
textbooks, focusing on a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa
(MENA) region, and argues that the role of textbooks in developing and maintaining a
national identity should be afforded greater critical attention. Textbooks can help form
national identities by developing a society’s collective memory; this might involve a
historical narrative which may be self-contradictory or even fabricated to a certain
extent, including myths, symbols and collective memories that divide “us” from “them”,
and ultimately resulting a dichotomy between the Self and the Other. As well as
addressing a range of theoretical questions relating to the study of textbooks generally,
the volume also covers a broad spectrum of Middle Eastern states and societies, with
contributions from Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus, Lebanon, Iraq, Kurdistan, Jordan,
Morocco, Tunisia, Israel and Palestine. It will be essential reading for researchers and
students working in the fields of Education, Sociology and History, particularly those
with an interest in national identities in the MENA region.

The Promise of Integrated and Multicultural Bilingual Education presents the results of a long-term ethnographic study of the integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel that offer a new educational option to two groups of Israelis--Palestinians and Jews--who have been in conflict for the last one hundred years. Their goal is to create egalitarian bilingual multicultural environments to facilitate the growth of youth who can acknowledge and respect "others" while maintaining loyalty to their respective cultural traditions. In this book, Bekerman reveals the complex school practices implemented while negotiating identity and culture in contexts of enduring conflict. Data gathered from interviews with teachers, students, parents, and state officials are presented and analyzed to explore the potential and limitations of peace education given the cultural resources, ethnic-religious affiliations, political beliefs, and historical narratives of the various interactants. The book concludes with critique of Western positivist paradigmatic perspectives that currently guide peace education, maintaining that one of the primary weaknesses of current bilingual and multicultural approaches to peace education is their failure to account for the primacy of the political framework of the nation state and the psychologized educational perspectives that guide their educational work. Change, it is argued, will only occur after these perspectives are abandoned, which entails critically reviewing present understandings of the individual, of identity and culture, and of the learning process.