Open a Saudi grade-5 social studies textbook printed this academic year and trace a finger across the map of the Levant, and one word that used to be there is simply gone. It has not been replaced with “Israel.” It has been replaced with nothing — a blank patch of territory, unlabeled, unclaimed, unremarked upon. That quiet omission is one of several changes documented in a new review of Saudi Arabia’s school curriculum, and it lands at a moment when the Kingdom’s posture toward Israel is shifting in ways that classrooms, more than press releases, may be revealing first.

The review covers textbooks used across the 2024–25 and 2025–26 academic years and was conducted by IMPACT-se, an Israel-based institute that has spent nearly three decades tracking how school curricula around the world portray peace, tolerance, and religious and political rivals. Its researchers describe a continuation of a trend rather than a single dramatic reversal: language that once affirmed hostility toward Israel and asserted an uncompromising claim to Jerusalem has been steadily, methodically dialed back.

None of these are the kind of changes that generate a press conference. They are the kind that show up only when someone sits down, year after year, and compares one edition of a textbook against the last.

These are not the first cuts. Earlier IMPACT-se reviews had already tracked the discontinuation of a high-school social studies textbook that once defined Zionism as a “racist” European movement, the removal of claims blaming Zionists for the 1969 arson at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the elimination of passages likening Jews and Christians to “maimed animals” or assigning Jewish people collective blame for historical events. According to the latest review, the antisemitic material flagged in those earlier passes has now been fully removed from current editions.

In its place, the curriculum has been adding more content on religious coexistence and critical thinking, and reducing overtly hostile framing of religious minorities — part of a broader modernization drive under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 program, which has reshaped Saudi social and economic life since its 2016 launch.

The softening has real limits, and IMPACT-se’s review is careful to note them. Three things remain constant across the revised editions:

Saudi Arabia’s official commitment to the Palestinian cause has not been abandoned in these pages — it has been restated in a lower register. That distinction matters to anyone trying to read the Kingdom’s intentions: this is not neutrality, and it is not recognition. It is restraint.

The timing is not incidental. The revisions arrive as quiet diplomatic contacts aimed at reviving Saudi-Israeli normalization have picked back up, driven in part by shared concern over Iran and a broader regional realignment. Full diplomatic relations remain unestablished, and the Kingdom has made no public announcement tied to these textbook changes. But analysts who study the region routinely describe curriculum reform of this kind as a confidence-building measure — a way of preparing domestic public opinion for a relationship that Riyadh has not yet been willing to formalize out loud.

Textbooks, in other words, may be doing diplomatic work that official statements are not yet ready to do. A generation of Saudi students is being taught a version of the conflict with sharper edges filed down — not resolved, not erased, but softened enough to leave room for what may come next.