Israel exam book will be revised

V AN EXAM board will change a school textbook accused by Jewish groups of being slanted against Israel although it rejects claims of bias overall.

Pearson, which runs the Edexcel board, has temporarily withdrawn books used for the Middle East unit in its GSCE and international GSCE history courses.

The Board of Deputies had called for a “substantial rewrite” of the book on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Conflict, Crisis and Change: the Middle East, 19172012 by Hilary Brash, which was published by Pearson for the iGCSE.

A similar book by the same author is used for the GCSE course, which covers the narrower period of 1945 to 1995.

Concern was first raised by the Zionist Federation, which with UK Lawyers for Israel, commissioned a report into the first chapter of the iGCSE text by investigative blogger David Collier. In a damning analysis, Mr Collier described it as “poisonous… hard-core anti-Zionist revisionist material.”

Writing to Pearson, the Board highlighted insufficient reference to terrorist groups such as Hamas which killed Israelis and the omission of the exodus of Jews from Arab lands.

Pearson said this week an independent review of the two books by an educational charity had found “no overall evidence of anti-Israel bias”.

The review “identified some areas where the balance of sources could be improved and we are updating the texts and offering existing customers the option of replacing them for free”.

Pearson noted it was “the only awarding body that tackles this subject matter at both GCSE and international GCSE level.”

The exam board said the charity involved in the review wished to remain anonymous .

Paul Charney, ZF chairman, commented,“Every child who has been exposed to this book has been exposed to hardcore anti-Zionist revisionist material, manipulatively delivered through the use of images, misleading maps and distorted statistics and facts and should never have been released to schools in the first place. “

Last year, 2,341 students took the unit for GCSE and 1,509 for iGCSE.