Few ideas are as deeply ingrained in Israeli culture as the one summed up by the Hebrew phrase ''meatim mul rabim,'' or ''the few against the many.'' Schoolchildren have long been taught that the Jews have always been surrounded by enemies and that their victory over five Arab states in the 1948 War of Independence was a near miracle of David-and-Goliath proportions.
But the start of this school year marks a quiet revolution in the teaching of Israeli history to most Israeli pupils. New, officially approved textbooks make plain that many of the most common Israeli beliefs are as much myth as fact.
The new books say, for example, that it was the Israelis who had the military edge in the War of Independence. They say that many Palestinians left their land not -- as has traditionally been taught -- because they smugly expected the Arab states to sweep back victoriously, but because they were afraid, and in some cases expelled by Israeli soldiers.
The books freely use the word ''Palestinian'' to refer to a people and a nationalist movement, unheard of in the previous texts. They refer to the Arabic name for the 1948 war -- the Naqba, or catastrophe -- and they ask the pupils to put themselves in the Arabs' shoes and consider how they would have felt about Zionism. Finally, the books no longer separate Jewish and Israeli history from events around the world but weave them into a single tapestry.
''Only 10 years ago much of this was taboo,'' reflected Eyal Naveh, a history professor at Tel Aviv University and the author of one of the new ninth-grade textbooks on the 20th century. ''We were not mature enough to look at these controversial problems. Now we can deal with this the way Americans deal with the Indians and black enslavement. We are getting rid of certain myths.''
The ''new history'' approach that Professor Naveh and other new textbook authors are using in their descriptions of the Israeli-Arab conflict is 10 or 15 years old. It has gained a growing following among academic scholars, and with a somewhat larger public after the 1993 Oslo peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians.
But while the publication of such revisionism by scholars is one thing, the inclusion of their perspective in school books is clearly something else. In all countries, and especially in new ones, school is typically viewed as a place not just to learn but also to be imbued with civic and patriotic spirit.
The fact that these new books are currently being assigned and bought without advance publicity about the changes says something about Israel's sense of its own maturity. But it seems likely that when the books' contents become known in the coming months, controversy will ensue.
''Why not just translate the Palestinian books for our children and be done with it?'' fumed Aharon Megged, a novelist and outspoken critic of the new history, when he was read a passage from a new textbook. ''This is an act of moral suicide that deprives our children of everything that makes people proud of Israel.''
The passage to which Mr. Megged was reacting was from Mr. Naveh's book on the War of Independence:
''On nearly every front and in nearly every battle, the Jewish side had the advantage over the Arabs in terms of planning, organization, operation of equipment and also in the number of trained fighters who participated in the battle.''
The approach of earlier textbooks is typified by the following from a 1984 Education Ministry book on the years 1939 to 1949: ''The numerical standoff between the two sides in the conflict was horrifyingly unbalanced. The Jewish community numbered 650,000. The Arab states together came to 40 million. The chances of success were doubtful and the Jewish community had to draft every possible fighter for the defense of the community.''
This shift in perspective is common to the work of the new historians, who are relying on newly opened state archives and the emotional distance of a young generation.
Instead of portraying the early Zionists as pure, peace-loving pioneers who fell victim to Arab hatred, the new historians focus on the early leaders' machinations to build an iron-walled Jewish state regardless of the consequences for non-Jews living here.
The controversy that this narrative has generated mirrors the wider dispute in Israel between those who favor more concessions to the Arabs and those who fear that such concessions place Israel's legitimacy and its very existence at risk.
But the arrival of the new textbooks also mirrors the growing acceptance of some new history by Israelis. Last year, when the country marked its 50th birthday, a television series known as Tkuma, or rebirth, offered a more complex and less varnished version of Israeli history than had typically been shown. And a new military history book of Israel by a group of mainstream military historians has just been published that explodes several key myths about Israeli military feats.
Michael Yaron, who is in charge of the history curriculum at the Ministry of Education, says the issue is one of historical accuracy; he calls the changes salutary. He took up his post five years ago, during the liberal administration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and quietly continued his work after Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative, was elected in 1996, finishing approval of the new books just as Ehud Barak, who is in Mr. Rabin's mold, was elected in the spring.