Palestinian & Israeli Nationalism: Indentity Politics and Education in Jerusalem

107 Pages·2005·10.351 MB·English

by  Evan S. Weiss

CAIRO PAPERS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE is a valuable
resource for Middle East specialists and non-specialists. Published
quarterly since 1977, these monographs present the results of current
research on a wide range of social, economic, and political issues in
the Middle East, and include historical perspectives.
Submissions of studies relevant to these areas are invited.
Manuscripts submitted should be around 150 doublespaced typewrit
ten pages in hard copy and on disk (Macintosh or Microsoft Word).
References should conform to the format of The Chicago Manual of
Style (footnotes at the bottom of the page) or of the American
Anthropological Association (references with author, date and page
parenthetically within the text). Manuscripts are refereed and subject
to approval by the Editorial Board. Notification is usually prompt,
within three months of receipt.
Opinions expressed in CAIRO PAPERS do not necessarily
reflect the views of the editorial staff or of the American University in
Cairo. The editors welcome diversity of subject matter and viewpoint.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Maha Abdelrahman Asef Bayat
Sociology, AVC Leiden Vniversity
Sharif Elmusa Enid Hill
Political Science, AVC Political Science, AVC
Nicholas S. Hopkins Ann M. Lesch
Anthropology, AVC HVSS Dean, AVC
Hoda Rashad Malak S. Rouchdy
Social Research Center, AVC Sociology, AVC
Reem Saad Mostafa K. Al-Sayyid
Social Research Center, AVC Political Science, Cairo V.
Earl L. Sullivan Iman A. Hamdy
Political Science, AVC Editor
Annual subscription (4 issues)
Individuals: US$ 35 (LE 35 in Egypt)
Institutions: US$ 50 (LE 40 in Egypt)
Single issues: US$ 16.95 (LE 20 in Egypt)
Subscriptions and other correspondence should be addressed to:
Cairo Papers Office, Dept. # 218
The American University in Cairo
P.O. Box 2511
Cairo 11511, Egypt
CAIRO PAPERS
IN SOCIAL SCIENCE
Volume 25, Number 4, Winter 2002
Palestinian and Israeli Nationalism:
Identity Politics and Education
in Jerusalem
by
Evan S. Weiss
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO PRESS
CAIRO NEW YORK
Copyright © 2004 by the American University in Cairo Press
113, Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written pennission of the
copyright owner.
Dar el Kutub No. 17947/03
ISBN 977 424 847 3
Printed in Egypt
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v
FOREWORD
Dan Ts ch irg i- ------------------------------------------------------------------- VII
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION -------------------------------------
CHAPTER TWO: EDUCATION UNDER OCCUPATION ----------- 8
Conditions of Education --------------------------------------------------- 10
The Ho listic Project--------------------------------------------------------- 21
Israeli Schools---------------------------------------------------------------- 26
CHAPTER THREE: PALESTINIAN NATIONAL EDUCATION---- 29
Unit One: Palestinian Society --------------------------------------------- 31
Unit Two: National Institutions ------------------------------------------- 42
Unit 3: "Myself and Others" ---------------------------------------------- 54
CHAPTER FOUR: ISRAELI NATIONAL EDUCATION ------------- 59
CHAPTER FIVE: TERRlTORIAL NATIONHOOD -------------------- 71
CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION ------------------------------------------- 81
BIBLIOGRAPHY -------------------------------------------------------------- 85
ABOUT THE A UTHOR- ----------------------------------------------------- 87

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Professors Engin Akarli, Clavin Goldscheider, Housni
Bennis, and David Jacobson of Brown University; the Program in Judaic
Studies at Brown University; Photographer Joel Sanders; the Palestinian
Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG); Benni Villar; Avi Sela'a;
Sharon Goldshtein; Tsipi Erbaz; administrators and teachers of all the
schools that provided information for this report; the Palestinian Ministry of
Education; the Orient House; and B'Tselem (The Information Center for
Human Rights in the Occupied Territories).
v

FOREWORD
DAN TSCHIRGI
The only thing certain about the tangled and tragic politics of
Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking is that nothing in this world is eternal.
Surely, the Oslo Peace Process has long since died, and efforts to produce a
viable alternative through "Roadmaps" and deliberations of the so-called
International Quartet have been stillborn. As of this writing (mid-2004),
there are no discernable grounds for predicting any serious revival of
movement toward a definitive Palestinian-Israeli political settlement in the
foreseeable future. Hope that politics rather than violence will yet provide
the means for ending the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation must therefore
rest on the faith that nothing is immutable. Should this faith be borne out
that is, if or when a new Palestinian-Israeli peace process begins to take
shape at some future point- it would be well if this compact monograph by
Evan Weiss were required reading for all concerned.
Based on a study that was completed shortly after the outbreak of the
second intifada, the eruption that laid the Oslo Process to rest, Weiss' work
compares and contrasts the circumstances and content of public education
offered to children in East and West Jerusalem at the onset of the new
millennium. By that time, in regard to East Jerusalem, this was one area in
which the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority shared
responsibility. Israel funded and administered the East Jerusalem public
school system, and taxed the Arab population to pay for these services,
while the PA took charge of establishing the curriculum.
The following pages deftly and succinctly expose the sad, but hardly
surprising, reality that Israel's administration of Arab public schools in East
Jerusalem fell far short of its handling of Israeli public schools on the other
side of the city. Weiss crisply presents us with graphic imagery contrasting
underfunded, understaffed, unsanitary and generally unappealing East
Jerusalem schools with their modem, clean, efficient, and aesthetically
pleasing West Jerusalem counterparts. As Weiss notes, "conditions in the
[East Jerusalem] schools reflect on the manner in which Israel has
VII
administered the Palestinian resident, non-citizen' population for the last
three decades"( p. 5).
This is only to reaffirm the inevitably obvious: occupation will always
lead to an imbalance in resource allocations to the occupied and the
occupier.
The main thrust of Weiss' analysis relates to the nationalistic content of
Palestinian and Israeli curricula, and his findings carry deep implications for
any renewed peace process. In a nutshell, Israelis as well as Palestinians
bent their educational efforts toward inculcating in their respective new
generations ideologies of exclusive national rights of ownership over all of
Palestine. No better formula, of course, could be found to perpetuate the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
This dispassionate study of these educational systems offers much food
for thought concerning recent events as well as future prospects. The Oslo
Process may have collapsed for multiple reasons but, as this text shows, a
major source of the rot that brought it down lay in the motivations of the
leaderships of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Neither was willing to pay
the price for peace, which must necessarily include the abandonment of
exclusive claims to the land of Palestine. Each, instead, was at pains to pass
the torch of conflictual demands to new generations. So long as such
outlooks continue to guide the protagonists, it seems likely that a peaceful
settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will remain beyond reach. The
pity is that both leaderships, mired in their respective visions of the moment,
will therefore bequeath only more conflict and bloodshed to the youth they
claim to serve.
VIII
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Before I begin my discussion of Palestinian and Israeli nationalism and
the education system in Jerusalem, it will be useful to establish a broader
theoretical framework for nationalism. John Breuilly's Nationalism and the
State shows that nationalism is a fOim of politics that developed within the
specific context of the emergence of the modem state. \ According to
Breuilly, "A nationalist movement seeks to bind together people in a
particular territory in an endeavor to gain and use state power.,,2 In that
respect, nationalism is a purely political phenomenon that seeks to use a
constructed national identity as the basis for claims of sovereignty. It is a
constitutive argument for who has the right to control the resources within a
specific state territory.
From Breuilly's discussion of nationalism, one can discern three
dimensions of a national movement, forming what I will call the national
triangle. The first dimension of a national triangle is the national
community. Nationalism binds together a group of people under one
national identity. Benedict Anderson defines the national community as an
"imagined political community," in which the members of the national
community "will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or
even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their
COlTIlTlL1l1ion.,,3 A national community derives its 'image of communion'
from any number of sources, including territorial, cultural, linguistic, and
religious references. National communities draw upon these references of
identity in order to produce social cohesion and define who is and is not a
member of the community. Furthermore, as Breuilly argues, "nationalism is
a parasitic movement and ideology, shaped by what it opposes.'''' Because a
national community insists upon social cohesion in order to justify its
\ John Breuiliy, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982).
2 Ibid, p. 381.
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983) p. 6.
4 Breuilly, p 396.