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After Years of Breeding Anti-Israel Hatred, Egypt's Education System Is Overhauled under Sisi

(Sputnik-Russia) After Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, its education system continued to put forth a narrative that denied the legitimacy of the Jewish state. "Cairo wanted to show that despite the peace treaty, the attitude towards Israel hasn't changed and that the hearts of the Egyptians were still with the Palestinians. That's why Israel has been mentioned in school textbooks as the bitter enemy of Egypt," said Amr Zakariya, a Cairo-based expert on Israel-Egypt relations. "Sadat's peace initiative was sidelined and marginalized." "When President Sisi came to power, he decided to change that equation, realizing that Egypt and Israel shared a common enemy - the threat of terror, and acknowledging that breeding hatred would not solve the Palestinian problem." Another factor that contributed to the change was the shifting attitude towards Israel in the Arab world. "It was for these reasons that Egypt under Sisi took a mild approach towards Israel and that was also reflected in the school textbooks." In 2015, Egypt released a new geography textbook for 9th grade that provided more explicit support for a peace deal with Israel, stressing that the agreement was crucial for the stability and development of Egypt. It portrayed Israel as a legitimate peace partner and featured for the first time a photo of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who signed the agreement with President Sadat. The book also reduced the discussion of the Palestinian conflict and the struggle against Israel from 32 pages to 12.
2020-04-03 00:00:00
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