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While the literature on the history of history education in Israel is vast, little has been written about it from teachers' perspectives. This article focuses on teachers' motivation for teaching history and explores what formed the ways in which they understood their profession in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of great social and political change in Israel. By focusing on history teachers' reaction to the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, to the introduction of a new history curriculum (1975) and to the diversification of the Israeli society, the article shows that, in a rapidly changing world, these teachers saw themselves first and foremost as the ones in charge of maintaining unbroken links between their students and their national past. This often put history teachers in conflict with their professional surroundings, giving rise to heated arguments over the question: what should be the purpose of history education? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]