Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published "Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education", an account of her study of the contents of Israeli school books. She asserts that the books promote racism against and negative images of Arabs, and that they prepare young Israelis for their compulsory military service. After examining "hundreds and hundreds" of books, Peled-Elhanan claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a "normal person". She has stated that the most important finding in the books she studied concerns the historical narrative of events in 1948, the year in which Israel fought a war to establish itself as an independent state. She claims that the killing of Palestinians is depicted as something that was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state. "It's not that the massacres are denied, they are represented in Israeli school books as something that in the long run was good for the Jewish state." "[T]he Israeli version of events are stated as objective facts, while the Palestinian-Arab versions are stated as possibility, realized in openings such as 'According to the Arab version' ... [or] 'Deir Yassin [sic.] became a myth in the Palestinian narrative ... a horrifying negative image of the Jewish conqueror in the eyes of Israel's Arabs'.