| abstract | - Al-Nakba or "the Catastrophe" is the Arabic term to describe the displacement or ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Palestine war; Nakba denial refers to the denial of the reality of this event by Jewish sources. According to the Anti-Defamation League, what happened to Palestinian civilians during the war was "largely self inflicted." Ghada Karmi writes that the Israeli version of history is that the "Palestinians left voluntarily or under orders from their leaders and that Israelis had no responsibility, material or moral, for their plight." She also finds a form of denial among Israelis that Palestinians bear the blame for the Nakba by not accepting the UN's proposed partition of Palestine into separate ethnic states. Acknowledgment of the Nakba by Israel would force it to deal with the issue of 4 million Palestinian refugees who are banned from returning to their ancestral land under Israeli law and have not received any form of restitution from the state. Ilan Pappe has claimed that the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon have attempted to remove references to the Nakba from Israeli textbooks: "The first reaction has been from the Israeli political establishment, with the Sharon government, through its minister of education, beginning the systematic removal of any textbook or school syllabus that refers to the Nakba, even marginally. Similar instructions have been given to the public broadcasting authorities. The second reaction has been even more disturbing and has encompassed wider sections of the public. Although a very considerable number of Israeli politicians, journalists and academics have ceased to deny what happened in 1948, they have nonetheless also been willing to justify it publicly, not only in retrospect but also as a prescription for the future. The idea of "transfer" has entered Israeli political discourse openly for the first time, gaining legitimacy as the best means of dealing with the Palestinian 'problem.'"[1] In 2009, Israel banned the use of the word "Nakba" in Israeli Arab schools and textbooks; the word is not part of the curriculum in Jewish Israeli schools. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the ban by saying that the term was "propaganda against Israel". Arab MP Hanna Sweid has described the change in curriculum as "Nakba denial."
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