In a series of debates across North America, on the Web and in newspapers, the two clashed. Major aspects of Zionist history simply went missing from the Education Ministry's new text. The underground struggle against the British and illegal immigration in the Mandatory period are lumped together in a single sentence. Enmity toward Jews, both in Europe and after the creation of the state, is consistently downplayed. Where the old text devoted three pages to Allied indifference to Hitler's Final Solution, the new one contents itself with quoting a 1942 Allied proclamation relating to the prosecution of war criminals after the war.
Nothing conveys the horror of the Holocaust like photographs.
Significantly, A World of Changes contains not one photo of Jews being executed by Nazis or of the skeletal survivors of the camps. Not a single PLO terrorist attack on Israel in the Seventies or Eighties is mentioned. Even Israel's wars are treated from a neutral, and occasionally even hostile, perspective. Coverage of the War of Independence has been reduced from 17 pages in the former textbook to two paragraphs in the new one. All 20 photographs of Jewish suffering and military action during the 1948 War are gone, replaced by a solitary picture of a Palestinian refugee child in Jordan circa 1949.