RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sept. 7 Inside a modern, secular private school here, the first-grade boys and girls stuffed their Pokemon and Barbie backpacks into their cubbies and gathered on the blue rug for story time.

Their 24-year-old teacher, Nesrin Alayan, kneeled, clasped her hands and began, in a singsong voice, to tell “the tale of a joyful home called Palestine.”

The tale begins, she told the children, with a large, happy family eating and laughing inside their house. One day, she said, “some people” come to the door with rifles and pistols, open fire on the house and seize it.

“We the Palestinian family are forced out into the cold,” she said. “And then we spend many, many years trying to get back into our house. In order to do so, we start throwing stones. And then people are killed. Do you boys and girls know the word intifada? That’s when the world starts paying attention to our tale.”

With her story, which concludes on the “path of peace,” Mrs. Alayan was improvising a setup for the opening lesson in a new first-grade reader, the very first official reader written by and for Palestinians.

The lesson deals with the symbols of the new Palestinian identity – the flag, the passport and it is part of a fledgling home-grown curriculum that was introduced this week in first- and sixth-grade classrooms throughout the Palestinian-ruled territories.

For decades Palestinians in the West Bank have used Jordanian textbooks and those in Gaza have relied on Egyptian ones, making for a disjointed and ultimately borrowed educational program. As part of the process of building institutions for an emerging Palestinian state, the Palestinian Authority, with money from European countries, is trying to create from scratch a genuine Palestinian curriculum, starting with two grades as a pilot effort.

But since the Palestinian nation has not yet emerged, the curriculum is a delicate work in progress, fodder for criticism from within and without.

With peace negotiations unresolved, it is hard to know how Mrs. Alayan’s tale will end. Her principal, Maha Shihadi, said it was almost impossible to teach geography. The regional map, as far as every Palestinian is concerned, cannot be drawn before borders are determined as part of the peace talks.

How, Mrs. Shihadi asked, can the children illustrate Palestine? She wondered if they should make cutouts, like snowflakes, to portray the unconnected parcels of land that now constitute the Palestinian-ruled territories. The textbook writers opted for what they call “the historic map of Palestine,” the map of 1948.

In other words, Israel is not pictured. Tel Aviv does not exist.

This greatly upsets those Israelis, mostly rightists, who monitor Palestinian media and literature, documenting hostility toward Israel and Jews. They say it betrays the whole spirit of the peace effort for the Palestinians to generate a new educational curriculum that, for starters, ignores Israel on maps.

Salah Yassin, the director general of curriculum development for the Palestinian Authority, defends this omission as calculated and unavoidable.

“Complain to the Education Minister!” he joked. Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, holds that portfolio.

Mr. Yassin said Israel, like Palestine, remained undefined. “That is what these peace talks are about, no?,” he said. “When the crisis is solved, we will clearly mark: `This is Palestine. This is Israel.’ But for now we educators are not going to get involved in politics. The texts are, by necessity, works in progress, and they will be modified.”

The Palestinian educators think it is significant that Palestinian students will crack open textbooks saturated with local images and references for the first time.

Math books ask students to calculate the distance between Bethlehem and Nablus in the West Bank, not Amman and Petra in Jordan. Arabic texts feature poems and essays by Palestinians and reading comprehension passages about the Palestinian olive oil and stone industries. Mr. Yassin also cited “Mary and Jesus” as examples of Palestinian personalities in the new books.

In the sixth-grade books, Palestinian history is presented not in linear narrative form but sketchily.

The creation of Israel is explained tersely as “the Israeli occupation of 1948,” which with the assistance of Britain “destroyed most of the Palestinian villages and cities and kicked the Palestinian inhabitants from their lands.”

In a section on the Palestine Liberation Organization, its “liberation army” is mentioned, as well as the return to the West Bank and Gaza of its “fighters” after the Oslo interim peace agreement was signed in 1993. Terrorism is not mentioned, and Oslo is not explained.

A chapter on “Palestinian problems” includes a grab bag of issues, including high unemployment, a brain drain, the Israeli settlement expansion policy and the “Judaization” of Jerusalem.

Text blocks tend to be short, followed by suggested activities – like inviting a Palestine Liberation Organization official to class or fill- in-the-blank exercises:

Palestine in the 20th century was under (blank) occupation and blank) occupation.

The correct answers are British and Israeli, omitting what some Palestinians consider to have been periods of Ottoman and Jordanian occupation.

For much of Israel’s history its textbooks were far from neutral themselves, sticking closely to a heroic Zionist narrative and avoiding any Palestinian perspective. Starting last year, shortly after Israel’s 51st birthday, a revised curriculum began using the term Palestinian freely and referring to a Palestinian people and a nationalist movement.

In a bid to introduce greater historical detail to the story of Israel’s founding, new textbooks said that in 1948 some Palestinians were expelled from their villages and that some fled because they feared Israeli soldiers. But the new books are used only in the mainstream secular school system, which serves about 60 percent of schoolchildren. And since some secular Israeli educators consider them offensive, they are not used throughout the system.

Mr. Yassin emphasizes that the first- and sixth-grade books must be seen as part of what will eventually be a complete first- through 12th- grade curriculum.

They cannot be judged in isolation, he said. Over the next four years, the Palestinian government intends to phase in the remaining grades and introduce broader educational reforms: more creative teaching, less rote learning, compulsory English starting from the first grade, third- language electives including Hebrew, technology classes.

But with so many inside and outside the Palestinian world anxiously wondering what shape the new state will take, the books have been pounced on this week, and not just by Israeli rightists. Palestinians, too, have been scouring them for signs of how the government is managing the delicate question of forging a national identity from so many strands: the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims and Christians, religious and secular. And academics are scrutinizing them to evaluate the educational standards they set.

In an article in the Palestinian newspaper Al Quds, a local professor condemned the new first-grade reader for underestimating Palestinian children. Every Palestinian child knows and understands the camel, a part of the landscape here, “the cargo ship of the desert,” he said. Why, he asked, did the textbook writers feel compelled to concoct a story about a camel and a lion that describes the camel as “the king of the jungle?”

At the private school here, which is called Al Mustaqbal, or the Future School, a seasoned science teacher expressed disappointment with the new sixth-grade science book. After conducting a lively anatomy class on joints, the teacher, Dalal Kasabri, said she had greatly departed from the text because it was overly simplistic, unimaginative and in some cases inaccurate.

“Obviously there are different levels in the West Bank and Gaza, in public schools and private ones like this one,” she said. “But we should be setting high standards for our children and our people.”

The illustration for a civics book lesson on tolerance shows a sheik and a priest shaking hands.

To the disappointment of Israeli critics, who were hoping that the new Palestinian textbooks would preach tolerance for Jews, too, the books look inward only, where Palestinian educators say a lot of work must be done. As part of an interfaith effort, they also produced textbooks on Christianity, which will be used by Christian children during the period when their Muslim classmates study Islam.

Back in Mrs. Alayan’s class, the children were examining one little girl’s shiny new Palestinian passport. The young teacher, her face shining, asked the children how they could use their new documents, their new badges of Palestinian identity.

“Teacher, teacher!” one boy called out, leaping with his outstretched arm into the air. “To go to America!”

The writer is the bureau chief of the New York Times in Israel

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