Israel's education ministry is to drop from an Arabic language textbook a term describing the creation of the state of Israel as "the catastrophe".
The Arabic word "nakba" has been used with Israeli-Arab pupils since 2007. It does not appear in Hebrew textbooks.
Education Minister Gideon Saar said no state could be expected to portray its own foundation as a catastrophe.
Israeli Arab MP Hana Sweid called the move an attack on Palestinian identity and collective memory.
The passage in question, which occurs in one textbook aimed at Arab children aged eight or nine, describes the 1948 war, which resulted in Israel's creation, in the following terms: "The Arabs call the war the Nakba - a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation - and the Jews call it the Independence War."
Israel concern at UN use of Nakba
Ms Tamir's successor in Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing administration, Mr Saar, said: "There is no reason that the official curriculum of the state of Israel should present the establishment of the state as a 'holocaust' or 'catastrophe'."
Mr Saar added that state education for children was not supposed entail the de-legitimising of that state.
"Including the term in the official curriculum of the Arab sector was a mistake, a mistake that will not repeat itself in the new curriculum, which is currently being revised," he concluded.
Correspondents say most Hebrew-language history books, especially when written for schoolchildren, focus on the heroism of Israeli forces in 1948 and gloss over the mass exile of Palestinians.
If it is mentioned at all it is attributed to a voluntary flight, rather than the deliberate expulsion which later revisionist historians claim to have uncovered from archive sources.
The term Nakba is usually applied to the loss suffered by millions of Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 war and subsequent conflicts; their fate remains a key factor in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Jafar Farrah, director of Israeli-Arab advocacy group Moussawa, told the BBC that removing the word Nakba from textbooks would not stop Arabs from using it, but it would complicate relations.
Far-right members of the Israeli government are pursuing legislation to make it illegal in Israel to commemorate the Nakba, as Palestinians and their supporters do every 15 May.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has ordered its diplomats to use an old photograph of a former Palestinian religious leader meeting Adolf Hitler to counter world criticism of a Jewish building plan for East Jerusalem.
Israeli officials said on Wednesday Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israeli ambassadors to circulate the 1941 shot in Berlin of the Nazi leader seated next to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the late mufti or top Muslim religious leader in Jerusalem.
One official said Lieberman, an ultranationalist, hoped the photo would "embarrass" Western countries into ceasing to demand that Israel halt the project on land owned by the mufti's family in a predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, annexing it as part of its internationally unrecognized claim to Jerusalem as its capital.
Some diplomats opposed Lieberman's move, arguing it could earn Israel stiffer world criticism for seeming to sidestep the wider conflict it faces with the Palestinians who want East Jerusalem as capital of a future state, another official said.
Asked why Lieberman issued the order, a spokesman said: "because it's important for the world to know the facts" and would not elaborate.
The United States and Europe this week protested the plan by private Israeli developers to build 20 apartments on the land which Israel says was bought by an American-Jewish millionaire as well as Israel's threats to demolish Palestinian homes that could leave thousands homeless.
The controversy has complicated an Israeli rift with the U.S. over its refusal to meet President Barack Obama's demands to halt Jewish settlement building throughout the West Bank so that stalled peace talks may resume.
About half a million Israelis live in the settlements built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas that are home to some three million Palestinians.
An official in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's government accused Lieberman of "political bankruptcy" in ordering the distribution of the Husseini-Hitler photograph.
"It's an old story that has its own circumstances and doesn't apply to the present," Adnan al-Husseini, the Palestinian Authority-appointed governor of Jerusalem, and a relative of the late mufti, told Reuters.
Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust said Husseini supported Nazi Germany to try to win backing for Arab nationalistic goals and that he lobbied for the extermination of Jews in North Africa and Palestine.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072202500.html
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