The Geography of Hostility and Exclusion: A Multimodal Analysis of Israeli Schoolbooks

Abstract

This paper examines the multimodal ways in which ideologies are recreated in geography schoolbooks in Israel. Five schoolbooks currently used in Jewish mainstream schools in Israel were analyzed for the use they make of visuals such as photographs, maps, graphs, icons, and colour, in order to recontextualize both disciplinary and political discourses to education. The semiotic analysis of these schoolbooks is supported by observations of social and political geographers. Geography textbooks are what Van Leeuwen defines as multimodal genres (2005a, p.80). Their generic structure is multimodally realized through images, graphs, maps and diagrams, layout, colour, and verbal chunks. The paper argues that in Israeli geography schoolbooks, scientific conventions and principles of visual and verbal representation are compromised by political messages and the commitment of these schoolbooks to promote Jewish territorial and national identity, which is largely based on the denial of Palestinian identity. The distortion of geopolitical facts and the concealment of any meaningful life besides the Jewish one promote hostility and reproduce Elite Racism1.