McGraw-Hill Destroys Accurate Textbooks After Israel Partisans Complain

If Americans Knew
March 11, 2016

McGraw-Hill has recalled and is going to destroy textbooks after Israel partisans complained. The textbooks contain maps depicting Palestinian loss of land from 1946 to 2000.

The banned book is a political science textbook, "Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World.” This is similar to an incident in which MSNBC was forced by Israel partisans to apologize for broadcasting the map image.

While some groups and individuals try to minimize the power of the Israel lobby, this is yet another example of its extraordinary reach.

One way to counter such censorship is to distribute map cards in your community.

The Maps Are Accurate

While Israel partisans claim that the maps are "inaccurate,” this claim is unfounded. As Alison Weir wrote last year:

The maps are clearly labeled “Palestinian loss of land.” Claiming that the maps were “factually inaccurate” because they didn’t cover a different topic –demographics – is a little like complaining that a map of climate zones is inaccurate because it doesn’t depict geologic zones.

In actuality, the maps correctly depict, as the title makes clear, expropriation of Palestinian land.

In the late 1800s, Arab Muslims and Christians lived on about 99 percent of the land of Palestine. The Jewish population, mostly Arab too, was a largely urban population and owned about 1 percent of the land.

Over the coming decades, Jews mostly from Europe and the U.S. immigrated to Palestine in a political movement whose goal was to take over the land for an ethnically-exclusive state. (This movement, called political Zionism, was originally opposed by most Jewish people, including those living in Palestine.)

There were intense efforts to acquire land by any means, and by 1946 Jewish ownership in Palestine was, at most, 8 percent of the land; most historians put it at about 5-6 percent. This 1946 land ownership is accurately depicted in the first map in the series.

These colonists then worked to foist a newly invented, exclusivist Jewish state on the indigenous population and ethnically cleansed large swathes of land. The UN General Assembly was pressured to recommend giving 55 percent of Palestine to the Jewish population that owned well under 10 percent of the land, instead of allowing self-determination and self-government in this traditionally diverse and pluralist society. (Map #2)

This never went to the Security Council and has no force of law, so in the end Israel was created through a war in which Zionist forces pushed out native Palestinians and acquired 78 percent of the land. (Map #3) (Although Arab armies eventually came in on the side of the native Palestinians, their overall troop strength was smaller than the Zionist/Israeli forces.)

In 1967 Israel attacked its neighbors in the Six Day War, and began a military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Syrian Golan Heights that continues to this day. Since that time it has confiscated more and more Palestinian land for Jewish-only colonies. (Map #4)

The maps accurately reflect this land dispossession. They do not claim to discuss a different aspect of this history, population percentage.

Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim Source of Complaints

An article on Electronic Intifada describes where and how the objections originated:

"...The first criticisms of the textbook came from the virulently anti-Palestinian and pro-settlement blogger Elder of Ziyon.

"Elder of Ziyon’s blog post on the textbook, published on 1 March, urged supporters of Israel to flood McGraw-Hill with emails against the maps....

"Within hours, the post was republished by The Tower, a self-styled Israel and Middle East-focused magazine and website run by The Israel Project.

"TIP is a right-wing pro-Israel lobbying outfit that specializes in crafting and supplying anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim propaganda to journalists and policy makers.

"TIP receives funding from major bankrollers of the Islamophobia industry and is headed by Josh Block, former spokesperson for the powerful Israel lobby group AIPAC.

"Block gained notoriety for secretly coordinating a smear campaign against bloggers who were writing critically about Israeli government policy.

"Independent review?

"The Blaze, another right-wing media outlet, soon picked up the story and brought it to the attention of McGraw-Hill, which responded by immediately suspending sales of the textbook pending a review... Less than a week later, McGraw-Hill announced it would destroy all copies of the book.

Read the whole article at the Electronic Intifada website.

Contact info for McGraw-Hill

The president/CEO of McGraw Hill is David Levin. (Levin’s brother Jeremy is CEO of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, the largest company in Israel by market cap.) The number two official is Peter Cohen.

For people who wish to object to their decision, polite messages can be sent to hep_customer-service@mheducation.com.