German textbooks excel on Holocaust, uneven on Israeli-Palestinian conflict, report finds

A comprehensive review of German secondary school textbooks released on Tuesday found that while educational materials in North Rhine-Westphalia provide exceptional coverage of Jewish history and the Holocaust, they exhibit significant imbalances when addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The report forms the final part of a series conducted by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), examining how curricula across seven European countries present Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“With antisemitism at alarmingly high levels in Germany, what children learn about Jews and Israel matters more than ever,” IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff said on Tuesday. “German textbooks do an excellent job of confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and the country’s antisemitic past. But this commitment to historical accuracy must also extend to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Equating Israeli soldiers with Hamas fighters risks dangerously distorting young people’s understanding of the conflict. Germany has a responsibility to ensure that its classrooms equip the next generation to confront antisemitism, not just as a lesson from history, but as a threat that persists today.”

The study examined 12 textbooks utilized within Gymnasien, representing the highest academic track in Germany’s secondary school system designed to prepare students for university entrance. Researchers focused specifically on history, religion, and social science curricula across North Rhine-Westphalia, looking at the final three years of schooling leading up to Abitur examinations. Evaluation was conducted against international standards derived from UNESCO declarations to measure how curricula treat cultural groups, address controversial topics, and maintain factual integrity.

According to the report, educational materials succeed notably in portraying Judaism as a rich, multifaceted tradition and providing thorough Holocaust instruction, yet the study asserts they falter in presenting an accurate and fair historical picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While history and social studies classes dedicate substantial attention to the Middle East, the report states that religious studies largely bypass the topic, and systemic efforts to maintain multiple perspectives frequently generate skewed equivalencies.

Study finds problematic comparative analyses between religions

The report states that German classrooms introduce Judaism as an active, contemporary element of national society rather than a mere historical precursor, highlighting cultural heritage and community life both before and after the Holocaust. Illustrating this approach, the study notes that a high school textbook cites former President Christian Wulff asserting that Judaism undoubtedly belongs to Germany as part of the nation’s shared Judeo-Christian foundation. Curricula also integrate internal Jewish debates regarding interfaith relations, featuring objections raised by rabbinic figures against missionary or conversion-oriented Christian terminology.

While students explore sacred texts, rituals, and ethical ideas, such as Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel defining Shabbat as a way to escape the constant pressure of daily life, the report points out that some of the comparative analyses prove problematic. In one case, the study highlights that a textbook juxtaposes traditional Jewish circumcision and Christian infant baptism alongside an asserted Islamic prerogative for husbands to discipline spouses, generating an inappropriate equivalence between foundational rites and domestic abuse.

Historical overviews tackle the roots of Christian antisemitism by looking at how church teachings have evolved to support peace and reject hate. Crucially, upper-level textbooks dismiss the idea of collective guilt for the crucifixion, clearly stating that the execution was ordered by Roman authorities rather than the Jewish people, and reminding students that Jesus and his early followers were Jewish. When examining medieval history, the study shows that, while Muslim rule allowed for some coexistence, the textbooks indicate that Jewish and Christian populations were treated as protected second-class subjects known as dhimmis, meaning they faced legal limits and special taxes. They also cover Christian persecution during the First Crusade, including the murders and looting in cities like Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, though the report notes critics point out these sections remain rather brief.

Chapters on the Holocaust trace how old Christian prejudices turned into Nazi racial theories, showing how propaganda and discriminatory laws led up to the murder of six million people. Advanced textbooks emphasize that the genocide wiped out European Jewish culture entirely, noting that nearly a third of all German Nobel Prize winners before 1933 were of Jewish origin. Using a wide range of primary sources, from Victor Klemperer’s diaries and Heinrich Himmler’s Posen speech to postwar interrogations of figures like Otto Moll, students study how bureaucratic planning and widespread public cooperation made the atrocities possible.

Resistance is shown in many forms, ranging from hiding out and rescue operations like saving Danish Jews, to armed revolts in the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, and Sobibor, which the report highlights demonstrates that Jews were not passive victims. Postwar trials like Nuremberg and Frankfurt, alongside religious studies exploring theodicy through thinkers like Elie Wiesel and Hans Jonas, round out the curriculum.

Curriculum for Israeli-Palestinian conflict blurs lines between opposing sides view of history

When evaluating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the report asserts that while textbooks cover Jewish historical ties, Zionism, and subsequent wars, their framework for multi-perspectivity frequently collapses into severe structural imbalances and false equivalencies. The study notes that the curriculum frequently uses matching headings for opposing sides, such as placing the War of Independence right next to the Nakba (the Arabic term for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war), or the Six-Day War beside the Naksa (referring to the displacement following the 1967 war), which blurs the line between acknowledging different memories and treating them as equally valid causes of historical events.

Furthermore, the report criticizes how complex religious attachments are narrowed down to ideologically extreme groups, associating Palestinian religious claims almost exclusively with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas’s concept of an Islamic waqf (an inalienable religious endowment or trust), while tying Jewish religious claims primarily to national-religious settlers.

The study highlights that one textbook places photographs of Israeli military operations in the West Bank directly next to an armed Hamas fighter under the heading of “Mutual threats and violence” without ever identifying Hamas as a terrorist organization.

When covering the 1947 UN Partition Plan, the report notes that Arab objections are detailed thoroughly through concerns over land, demographics, and political rights, whereas the Jewish perspective focuses narrowly on international legitimacy without giving comparable weight to security vulnerabilities or territorial fragmentation.

Similarly, discussions of 1948 and the Intifadas elaborate extensively on Palestinian displacement and portray the First Intifada primarily as a civilian uprising while downplaying violence, omitting the concurrent expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, and framing the Second Intifada around Palestinian frustration rather than terrorist attacks.

The study also faults textbooks for presenting Israeli settlements almost exclusively as an illegal obstacle to peace created by Israel, while ignoring Israel’s legal perspectives, the security concerns that shaped settlement policies, and the context of local violence.