Educating Palestinian Children
in the Post-Oslo Era
Raphael Israeli
Apologia
As long
as the Palestinian entity existed only in slogans and in “armed struggle”
during the long uphill battle which pitted the uprooted and destitute
Palestinians against their Zionist enemy, the education of Palestinian
children was tackled mainly by the authorities under which the Palestinian
citizenry and refugees lived, in various Arab countries or under Israeli
rule. In this regard, Jordan, between 1949 and 1967, bore the brunt of
that burden inasmuch as more than two thirds of the Palestinian people
found themselves under its aegis both east and west of the Jordan. The
rest were either under Egyptian military government in the Gaza Strip, or
dispersed in the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria, or as a minority
within Israel, or else engaged in careers in the oil-rich Gulf states, or
in search of their future in other diasporas in the Arab world or in the
West.
This meant that during the
formative period of 1949-67, most Palestinian children who pursued regular
schooling, even those in the UNRWA school system, depended more or less on
the curricula of the Jordanian Ministry of Education. Not surprisingly,
the civic education imparted to Palestinian children under that system was
of a general Arab-Islamic character, with special emphasis on loyalty to
the Hashemite crown, and a clear skirting of the issue of Palestinian
nationalism. As in other Arab educational systems, it included a strong
element of totalitarian political indoctrination founded on sloganeering,
memorizing, citations, repetitions and conformity, and little in the way
of free thinking, creativity, imagination (in the sense of the
imaginative, not the imaginary which was rife), and innovative spirit.
Political education, either explicitly stated or implied, was geared to
reinforce Arab and Islamic identity, to bring up children committed to
Arab and Islamic causes, to Arab and Islamic unity and solidarity, and to
resist the perceived enemies, be they abstract imperialism or colonialism,
or concrete Israel and Zionism.
When Israel took over the West
Bank and Gaza following the war in 1967, it found itself constrained to
maintain the legal and educational systems which had existed in those
territories prior to the war on the one hand, but on the other hand it
took the liberty to alter many passages in dozens of textbooks which it
considered hateful, bigoted and inciting against Jews, Zionism and Israel.
The extirpation of those passages from the books predictably produced
barrages of condemnation from the interested Arab countries, from Arab
educators and from Western countries and UNESCO, to the effect that
Israel, as an occupying power, had no business in altering, censoring,
rectifying, or otherwise correcting existing textbooks that had prevailed
prior to occupation. It is noteworthy that Israel had abstained, during
the campaign of revision of those textbooks, from tampering with citations
from holy Islamic sources, such as the Qur`an or the Hadith,
even when they were considered highly offensive, but the Arab and Islamic
ire did not subside.
When the Palestinians
gained self-rule in those territories following the Oslo Agreement (1993),
one of their main and immediate concerns was, understandably, to take
renewed control of the future of their population and guide it into the
new moulds of Palestinian identity, nationalism, statehood, independence
and relations with the outside world. Shaping the minds of Palestinian
children, via textbooks and the state-controlled media, was considered a
supreme priority. Many reasons were implied for this urgency, which also
occasioned the prompt restoration of the passages which had been
obliterated by Israel during the years of occupation:
-
Palestinian children who missed
school during the
intifada, which many credit for the Oslo Accords, now deserved to
have their future chartered and guaranteed by the new Palestinian
Authority;
-
The nascent Palestinian entity was
soul-searching for its identity, challenged as it was domestically by
the Islamic Movement, notably the Hamas, and it became crucial to
educate the new generation according to the Authority’s prevailing
vision of a Palestinian society in the making;
-
The new Palestinian entity would
need increasing numbers of technicians, teachers, cadres, intellectuals
and bureaucrats to man its fledgling state institutions, its school
system, its professional associations, its growing security apparatus
and its economic management. Planning school curricula was considered
vital for the provision of all those needs, and for instilling in them
the new state ideology;
-
The Palestinian entity, which grew
out of the Oslo Accords, was still locked into a bitter and prolonged
struggle to achieve its full independence from an enemy that was not
forthcoming in according it all its aspirations. Since the foreseeable
Palestinian future seemed tightly tied in with that struggle, it was
necessary to define the enemy, to render society resilient in
confronting it, and to shape the relations with it. For example, if
during the intifada Palestinian children viewed the Israelis as
oppressive occupiers who usurped Palestinian lands, they might have to
be made to change their perceptions when dealing with a partner for
peace, a neighbor, an employer, or perhaps even a legitimate political
entity in its own right.
For all these reasons, although the
new textbooks sponsored by the Authority, and its policy statements over
its media, do not necessarily express public opinion there, they certainly
reflect the intentions and state of mind of the Authority as to the
policies it wishes to pursue and the way it aspires to shape the thinking
of its future citizens. All the more so since the Palestinian Authority
has been under pressure to comply with its international obligations under
Oslo I and II (1993 and 1995, respectively) and the Wye Plantation
Agreements (1998) with regard to eradicating the statements of hatred and
incitement against Israel from its school books and state-controlled
media. The Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness or inability to expunge
such statements from the textbooks it has sponsored since its inception,
can also be a measure by which to gauge its intentions and plans for the
future.
The textbooks under examination here
cover some 140 examples which were published by the Palestinian Authority
during the years 1995-8. In the previous years of the existence of the
Authority (1993-5), the Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks which had been in
use under Israeli rule, continued to prevail, except that the corrections
introduced by Israel, which had extirpated the anti-Jewish stereotypes,
were abrogated and the original defamatory text was restored for that
transitional period. The Palestinian new textbooks are all of the
Authority’s making, and in this regard they reflect its educational policy
better than the previous two substitutes. The textbooks under discussion
cover the whole span of first to twelfth grades, not in the fields of
science which are supposedly value-unrelated, but in humanities and social
sciences which are loaded with values and therefore reflective of policy
intentions, such as civic studies, grammar, literature, history, geography
and Islamic studies.
Building a National Myth
School education in the Palestinian
Authority understandably provides answers to the questions of identity,
roots and history of the Palestinians. Enough evidence exists
independently of the textbooks to sum up the elements of Palestinian
identity since the 1920s when the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, raised the vanguard of Palestinian nationalism both against
the British occupiers and the Zionist contenders. Prior to that, when
Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, it was divided into several
sanjaks (counties) under the Vilayet (province) of Damascus,
and not recognized as one political unit.1
The local inhabitants consisted of several landed clans, some prominent
families in the cities, a few nomadic tribes, and a mishmash of minorities
and new migrants from Syria and Egypt, and they certainly did not consider
themselves as one nation, their focus of identity being either local,
tribal, Muslim or Ottoman, or a combination thereof.
Nascent Palestinian nationalism,
however, feels the need to lend depth to its history, either because “old
is beautiful”, or because there is a necessity to contend with the Jews
who provide a millennial recorded history of their link to that land. If
there is no Palestinian historical record to satisfy that need, myths are
concocted, and school textbooks are one of the most efficient ways to
promote and diffuse them. Let us cite several examples from these
textbooks and then try to make sense out of them:
-
Dear pupil, do you know who the
Palestinians are? The Palestinians are descended from the Cana`anites.2
-
Jerusalem is an ancient Arab city,
built by the Jebusite Arabs before Islam.3
-
Jerusalem [introduces herself]: I
am an ancient city, thousands of years old. I occupy a mountain plateau
in the center of Palestine. My most ancient name, Jebus, is derived from
the ancient Arabs, the Jebusites.4
-
At the conference...the Jewish
claims and historical allegations in favor of their right in Palestine
were noted, and the historical right of the Arabs over Palestine ever
since the dawn of history was stressed...5
The claim to Palestine as Arab naturally
delegitimizes those who today counterclaim it, and this theme will be
discussed in more detail below. Here suffice it to note, that the repeated
stress of the Palestinian educational system on the ancient Arab identity
of the land is obviously geared to posit Palestinian antiquity, never mind
if imagined, created, invented, without even feeling the need to produce
any evidence to sustain the claim, much like other mythologies which need
only to be repeated, not proven. Moreover, by making Jerusalem introduce
itself (citation 3 above), in an innocent and straightforward fashion, as
if addressing the third-graders directly, weight is added to the statement
of its Arab identity by itself, making any outside evidence redundant.
Evidence by omission is another
device used by the writers of these textbooks. For example, both PA
Television and the schoolbooks use a map of the Middle East in which
Israel does not exist and is replaced in its entirety by a country called
Palestine and so it goes as well for the privately produced new atlas that
was adopted by the PA educational system. Illustrations:
-
Under the words “our country
Palestine”,
a map replaces all Israel.6
-
A map entitled “Map of Palestine before and after
the war of 1967” defines the area of the State of Israel as the Arab
lands conquered before 1967, while the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are
defined as the Arab lands conquered in 1967.7
-
Maps of the Middle East in which Israel does not
exist and its area is marked as “Palestine”, appear in many pages of
these textbooks.8
-
A map which accompanies the lesson, “Palestine our
Homeland”, encompasses the entire State of Israel and specifies numerous
Israeli cities as Arab even though some of them date from biblical
times: Safed, Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Nazareth, Beit Shean, Jaffa,
Jerusalem and Beersheba.9
-
A drawing shows a woman waving the Palestinian flag
while in the background is the map of Palestine in the place of all
Israel.10
-
Nineteen times in a geography book, maps mark
Israel as Palestine.11
The Palestinian Television shows the
same map, many times daily, at the beginning and the end of every news
report. And so it goes for all geographical features of Palestine which
bear present-day Israeli names, some of which relate to Biblical, clearly
pre-Arab, locations such as the Valley of Jezreel (called Bani `Amr Valley
in the Palestinian textbooks and media).12
Similarly, there are vows to return to Jaffa13
which has been part of Tel Aviv for the past 50 years; or continued
references to Israel as “occupied Palestine”; or to the Galilee as part of
Northern Palestine.14
This substitution of Palestine for
anything Israeli, including Israeli industries which are not an intrinsic
part of the claimed land (e.g. in Palestine there are two oil
refineries...in Haifa and Ashdod),15
which is part of myth-building by omission, stands out, incidentally, not
only in textbooks and the official Palestinian Television, but also in
other media. For weeks, in July-August 1996, the Jerusalem daily,
Al-Quds, carried a daily page of chronicles of the history of the
“Palestinian-Cana`anite people”, where academics of the West Bank
Universities explained how Israeli archaeological finds bolster the claim
of the Palestinian-Cana`anites to age-old rootedness in the land. All
these write-ups led to the celebration of the Summer Festival of Sebastya
that was staged by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in August 1996,
where Arab youth dressed in robes bearing ancient Cana`anite figures
brandished torches as they danced about the town square that was packed
with officials of the PLO and PA administration. Others arrived atop
horse-drawn chariots modeled on drawings found at the Israeli
archaeological excavations at Meggido.16
On the same stage in the middle of
the square, a dramatic passion was acted out with the Ba`al, God of the
Heavens and Fertility, in the Pantheon of the ancient Cana`anites
struggling against Mut, God of the Underworld. Ultimately, the Ba`al
emerged victorious and the narrator took the opportunity to heap praise on
the loyal Palestinian-Cana`anite nations: the Amorites, Girgashites,
Jebusites, and Perizites which had fought at its side in the battle
against the Hebrew invaders across the Jordan.17
This part is rather puzzling if one takes into account the numerous
references in the Qur`an of God’s Covenant with Jews and His
promise that they would inherit the Land [of Cana`an]; all the more
puzzling is the modern use of Ba`al, a pagan god, in a society where the
Islamic trend is a serious contender for Palestinian nationalism.
This whole historical structure that
has been created, invented, imagined, adopted and elaborated by the
Palestinians, raises several questions. First, the problem of the
totalitarian fashion in which this questionable concoction of events is
being instilled into the minds of children, not as an idea, an option or a
theory, but as an absolute and irrefutable truth, as History, as their
history, without criticism, evidence or sources. This is not without
precedent in the Arab world
– there is Saddam Hussein’s
revival of Hamorabi’s heritage as his own during the first years of his
rule (1975-90). In consequence of the Gulf War when he needed the help of
other Arab and Islamic countries, he had to abandon his claim to
antiquity, and Sadat’s repeated references to Egypt’s “7,000 years of
Pharaonic history” which he inherited. In both cases, those cultures were
superseded by the Arabo-Islamic civilization that bears no resemblance to,
nor claims descent from, those ancient cultures. Similarly, Jordan has
been claiming as its own, the ancient heritage of the pagan Emorites,
Edomites, Amonites and even Romans. In all these cases, as in the case of
the Palestinians, the attempt is clearly to construct a direct bridge to
antiquity in order to gain legitimacy. However, in the case of the
Palestinians, and to a certain extent the Jordanians, this myth-building
is also designed to deprive their rival, Israel, from it, while in the
other cases there are no contenders around to claim legitimacy over those
ancient lands.
Indeed, the striking characteristic
of the Palestinian version of myth-building is not only the constant need
to construct its past from imaginary building bricks, but in so doing, to
disregard and omit others, even refute them and deny their heritage and
existence. For example, the entire 1,000 years of two Jewish commonwealths
in ancient Palestine are simply skipped over, and history is so rewritten
as to erase from its pages any mention of the Jews. Or worse, pages of
history are torn off, and the remaining pages are re-numbered so as not to
disturb the smooth flow of events by the embarrassment of inquisitive
questions. However, due to the existence of Israel as a living claimant to
that heritage, Palestinians cannot relate to ancient history without
displacing their rival first. As we have seen, displacement is achieved
either by omission or by active assumption of that heritage as exclusively
theirs, by leapfrogging Jewish ties to the ancient kingdoms of Israel and
Judea, and rooting themselves in the far past that preceded the Jewish
commonwealth.
When acting in this fashion, the
Palestinians could have generously and realistically admitted the
existence of an ancient Jewish heritage which is past, and reclaimed the
Cana`anite heritage as preceding it, but they do not. They resort to
constructing their bridge to the Cana`anite past on an historical void,
for fear that a recognized intermediary period where the Jews
predominated, might threaten their way to the far end of the bridge. The
omission of the Jews on the one hand, and the claim to Cana`anite descent
on the other, seem inconsistent with each other: if the Palestinians
descend from the Cana`anites, then the Jews in the intermediary period do
not matter anyway because they do not interfere with the neat lineage. But
when the Jews are omitted, this in itself raises the suspicion that either
the Palestinian myth-builders themselves do not trust in their Cana`anite
roots, or they acknowledge that their grounds are so shaky that they had
better eliminate the contenders who stand on a more solid historical
ground, than face them in open debate. If fever cannot be controlled, one
may break the thermometer and eliminate any evidence of a threatening
temperature.
Self Aggrandizement and Enemy Denigration
Jahiliyya poetry in
pre-Islamic Arabia, which attained high peaks of imagination, creativity
and idiom, stood out in its purple verbiage of self-praise of the poet’s
own chief, family, clan and tribe and their feats of heroism and valor on
the one hand; and his scathing, humiliating and abusive language in
denigrating the enemy tribes and clans. This device, which seems to have
been borrowed by many a contemporary Arab poet and leader, is also applied
by the writers of the Palestinian school textbooks. Apparently, those
educators somehow felt that rather than only erecting a peak for their
people by singing its praise and making up its history, they also had to
dig a pit for their rivals/enemies in order to augment the perceived chasm
between the two. Maybe they sensed that rather than being overshadowed by
the successful West and its perceived appendix –
the Jewish state –
both of which are not to their liking, they would rather minimize
them to the extent possible, by castigating them, denigrating and
diminishing them, in contrast with the lofty innate qualities of the Arabs
in general and the Palestinians in particular.
Look, for example, at what a
Palestinian textbook for 11th graders18
instills into their minds:
In the present period...of
unprecedented material and scientific advances..., scientists in the West
are perplexed by the worrying increase in the number of people suffering
from nervous disorders..., and the statistics from America in this matter
are a clear indication of this (p. 3).
Western civilization flourished, as
is well known, as a consequence of the links of the West to Islamic
culture, through Arab institutions in Spain, and in other Islamic
countries where Islamic thinkers and philosophers took an interest in
Greek philosophy...
Western civilization, in both its
branches –
the Capitalist and the
Communist, deprived man of his peace of mind, stability...when it turned
material well-being into the exemplary goal..., his money leading him
nowhere, except to suicide (p. 5).
There is no escape from a new
civilization which will arise in the wake of this material progress and
which will continue it and lift man to the highest spiritual life
alongside his material advancement... Is there a nation capable of
fulfilling such a role? The Western world is incapable of fulfilling it...
There is only one nation capable of discharging this task, and that is our
nation... No one but we can carry aloft the flag of tomorrow’s
civilization (p. 12).
We do not claim that the collapse of
Western civilization and the transfer of the center of civilization to us
will happen in the next decade or two, even in fifty years, for the rise
and fall of civilizations follow natural processes, and even when the
foundations of a fortress become cracked it still appears for a long time
to be at the peak of its strength. Nevertheless [Western civilization] has
begun to collapse and to become a pile of debris. We awoke to a painful
reality and to oppressive Imperialism, and we drove it out of some of our
lands, and we are about to drive it from the rest (p. 16).
It is noteworthy in the above, however, that
although the argument for Islamic superiority and ultimate victory is
clear, an allowance is made for “natural processes” to unfold. Other
fervent believers in Allah would rather impute to Him alone the decision
and the timing of the Western collapse. One also wonders how the
Palestinian Authority in fact expends tremendous efforts in the real world
to find solace and seek favor in the West while teaching its school
children that the very source of its sustenance is about to collapse. With
regard to Jews, Israel and Zionism, statements of vilification are even
more straightforward. For Israel, the immediate and most implacable enemy,
does not deserve any sparing; it is the source of Arab misery and
universal evil. The Jews, who constitute the majority of its population,
are corrupt by nature and cannot be expected to improve, and the Zionist
ideology which nurtures the Jewish state is the paradigm of racism and
doomed to failure. Consider the following sample:
-
One must beware of the Jews,
for they are treacherous and disloyal.19
-
Racism: mankind has suffered
from this evil both in ancient as well as in modern times. For indeed,
Satan has, in the eyes of many people, made their evil actions appear
beautiful... Such a people are the Jews. 20
-
The clearest examples of
racist belief and racial discrimination in the world are Nazism and
Zionism.21
-
...Israel’s mean, brutal,
inhuman, fascist, racist, genocidal, cleansing wars. The Jewish gangs
waged racial cleansing against innocent Palestinians..., large scale and
appalling massacres, saving no women and children.22
-
It is mentioned in the Talmud:
We [the Jews] are God’s people on earth... He forced upon the human animal
and upon all the nations and races of the world that they serve us, and He
spread us through the world to ride on them and to hold their reins. We
must marry our beautiful daughters with Kings, Ministers and Lords and
enter our sons into the various religions, thus we will have the final
word in managing those countries. We should cheat them and arouse quarrels
among them, then they fight each other... Non-Jews are pigs whom God
created in the shape of men in order that they be fit for service for the
Jews, and God has created the world for them.23
These passages derive from either
ancient Islamic sources, considered irrefutable in themselves, or from
speculation which mixes wishful thinking with emotional distress caused by
frustration in the face of formidable and successful rivals who refuse to
disappear from sight. However, while Palestinian defamation of the Jews
and Zionists can be understood in terms of the subjective sense of
humiliation caused by a century of conflict and loss, it is much harder to
comprehend the fabrication of “evidence” from the Talmud. Unless the
writers of the text have themselves fallen into the trap of their own
propaganda, it remains incomprehensible how educated people of obvious
scholarly merit, could posit a fake text which is verifiable as an
authentic textual source. Worse, how could they hope to train a new
generation of scholars by feeding them with apocryphal materials as the
paradigm of truth. Understandably, the writers of the text refrained from
quoting a precise reference and hid behind a general attribution to the
Talmud. Thus, instead of erecting a logical case based on evidence, the
writers of the text seem to be content with mud-slinging, vilification and
deprecation, assuming that by force of repetition, some of it will stick
and serve the purpose of political indoctrination.
Jihad and Martyrdom
This is how Yasser Arafat, the Head
of the Palestinian Authority, was introduced on PA Television during a
ceremony at Gaza’s al-Azhar University on the occasion of Mi’raj Day.24
This is the Commander, this is the man, his face is like a
bright sunny day... May Allah grant him noble qualities of manhood... The
leader of this nation whom Allah watches over...
Allah, Allah, Allah!!!
Let Abu ‘Ammar25
lead us to Jihad.
And then, came Arafat’s turn to speak
to the crowds:
...Bless you! Bless your struggle and your Jihad on
this land...
We renew our oath to the martyrs... I say that all of us
are made for martyrdom. Hence I say to all martyrs who have died, on
behalf of the martyrs who still live... that we stand by our oath to
pursue [the battle].26
The message of martyrdom and Jihad
carried and repeated by the Head of the Palestinian Authority on its
official media could not but influence the textbook writers who cannot
help internalize these symbolic and powerful concepts. When Palestinian
politicians are castigated for this sloganeering of Holy War in an era of
peace negotiations, they always insist that Jihad is meant in its
metaphorical and spiritual sense. Certainly, this word may have been made
to designate an intellectual striving too, but in Islamic Shari`a
it clearly means a military action designed to expand the outer borders of
the realm of Islam or to protect the boundaries of the Pax Islamica
from encroaching Unbelievers. Since Jihad does not necessarily have
to be offensive and can also apply to defensive wars against aggressors,
the Palestinians, like other Muslims, can claim that due to the Jews’
aggression against them in Palestine, they are entitled to thwart the
attackers by Jihad.
When at the turn of the century, new
winds of liberalism and reform began blowing in the Islamic world as a
result of the impact of the West, some apologetic currents in Islam
attempted to limit Jihad to its strictly defensive scope, or to
extending assistance to persecuted or otherwise needy Muslims. But again,
the identification of the aggressor against those Muslims remained
problematic when it was done by interested Islamic parties against other
Muslims (Iran-Iraq, Egypt-Yemen, Morocco-Polisario, etc.). Liberal
thinking has also been detected by some scholars in the early years of
Islam when the Prophet is said to have usually elected peaceful means over
violence and war.27 But the violent and
warlike interpretation of Jihad prevailed again when the Prophet
launched his attacks against Mecca and Khaybar, and especially when Islam
sprung out of Arabia after his death, and all through the Islamic
conquests. The violent interpretation usually continues to prevail in the
modern world, especially in the jargon of the Muslim fundamentalists28
and certainly in regards to Israel.29 All
the more so when statements of Jihad are coupled with qital
(battle), nasr (victory) and shahid (martyr). For it is
difficult to envisage a spiritual Jihad where people are enjoined
to partake of battles and where martyrs fall in combat, especially in an
era of peace where those powerful symbols were supposed to have been
abandoned.
The textbooks in Palestinian schools
do not lag far behind the statements of the leadership, as reflected in
the reports of the Palestinian Television and other state media, which are
directly relevant to the prevailing ambiance of a continuing struggle,
where the enemy is vilified and made legitimate prey:
-
Know, my son, that
Palestine is your country...that its pure soil is drenched with blood of
martyrs... Why must we fight the Jews and drive them out of our land? [The
text follows a map of Palestine that replaces all of Israel.] There will
be a Jihad and our country shall be freed. This is our story with
the thieving conquerors. You must know, my boy, that Palestine is your
serious responsibility.30
-
My brothers! The oppressors
have overstepped the boundary. Therefore, Jihad and sacrifice are a
duty... Are we to let them steal its Arab nature? Draw your sword,
let us gather for war with red blood and blazing fire... Death shall call
and the sword shall be crazed for such slaughter... Oh Palestine! The
youth will redeem your land... [the book then asks questions to emphasize
the message that Israel, the enemy, is to be fought and defeated]:
-
What is the road to victory
over the enemy that the Poet mentions?
-
The Poet urges the Arabs to
undertake Jihad. Indicate the verse in which he does so...31
-
In your left hand you
carried the Qur`an and in your right hand an Arab sword. Without
blood, not even one centimeter will be liberated... Therefore, go forward
crying: Allah Akbar! [Allah is the Greatest!]32
-
Muslims must protect all
mosques...and must wage a Jihad both of life and property, to
liberate al-Aqsa Mosque from the Zionist conquest.33
-
Make use of the following
expressions to make logical sentences: The Zionist Danger...; calling for
Jihad...
-
A Poem of Palestine:
To Palestine: Greetings from Arab hearts
Who have stubbornly and successfully resisted the chains of the
enemies
For me, the promise of martyrdom
And Jerusalem is my song.34
-
If the enemy has conquered part of
the land [of Palestine] and those fighting for it are unable to repel the
enemy, then
Jihad becomes the individual religious duty of every Muslim, man
and woman, until the attack is successfully repelled and the land
liberated from conquest.35
These sample passages from a wide
array of PA textbooks, point to the tenacity in which the Authority wishes
to instill into the minds of its children, from the early ages of
childhood until adolescence, with regard to the necessity and
inevitability of a prolonged
Jihad to liberate all Palestine from the Jewish-Israeli grip. The
insistent demand that the children should be prepared to fight and die in
the service of this dream is unequivocal inasmuch as the textbooks do not
offer any glimmer of hope for a peaceful settlement and way out. Rejection
of Israel, Zionists and Jews, which is based on moral, political,
nationalistic as well as religious considerations, is total, irreversible
and immutable. Thus, a protracted and open-ended struggle is foreseeable,
where Islamic and nationalistic rhetoric promises success at the end of
the process, if every Arab and Muslim regards it as his/her personal
endeavor (fard `ayn) and not only as a vague commitment of the
community (fard kifaya).
This approach is surprisingly
identical to that of the Hamas,36
which means that although the Palestinian Authority has been at odds with
its formidable domestic rival for the soul of the Palestinian people, it
has conceded to them in matters of school education, inasmuch as the
Hamas messages are unequivocally and uncritically echoed in the
Authority’s textbooks. While this partnership and collaboration might
mitigate differences between the two contenders in the short run and make
for a Palestinian united facade, it may prove in the long run to be
dangerous when the fifth and seventh graders of today come of age and
begin to make their political choices.
Significance and Consequences
As is often the case in authoritarian
regimes in general, the point is not declaring lofty principles and
promulgating liberal-minded constitutions, agreements and treaties, but
fulfilling them in the real world. Thus, the Oslo Accords notwithstanding,
there is a question to what extent do the school textbooks, that are a
priori commissioned or a posteriori approved and adopted, by the
Palestinian Authority, reflect its thinking and policy. And if they do,
are they in accord with the Authority’s engagements, obligations and
commitments, both domestic and international.
On the domestic front, it is evident
that a state in the making must also lay claim to its past, its identity,
its myths and its particular culture which make it different from all
others, in order to build social cohesion, construct a political
consciousness, and rally the masses behind it. It is less clear why such
legitimate claims to the past, or to continuity on a national soil, must
delegitimize others and deny their future, and nurture a conflicting and
confrontational state of mind among the children, who must grow to accept
or reject the counterparts of Palestinian nationalism as enemies or
partners, as may be the case. We have seen that in both myth-making and
self-aggrandizing, there are strong elements for displacing or ignoring
the rival to such an extent as to exclude it from any permanent settlement
of the problem. For as the children grow up and imprint in their minds the
illegitimacy of the other, and its systematic satanization as the paradigm
of evil, there is little hope that those stereotypes could be reversed
when the children later become able to see and judge for themselves as
policymakers and decision takers, or as common citizens.
Thus, while strenuous efforts are
being made in Israel, with admittedly mixed results, to initiate peace
education projects and educate Israel’s children in the school system to
comprehend the concepts of peace, acceptance, tolerance, sharing,
listening and coexistence, both as a necessity and as an ideal and a value
in its own right; and as several Israeli-Palestinian institutions have
been striving to inculcate those values into Israelis and Palestinian
Arabs with various degrees of success, the official Palestinian textbooks
seem not only oblivious of these valiant efforts, but they appear rather
intent on perpetuating the negative stereotypes and scuttling any attempts
at reconciliation and goodwill.
On the international front, it
appears that the Palestinian Authority, rather than breaking new paths and
making its impact on world public opinion, is bent on sustaining the
current state of affairs. To be sure, when the Palestinian textbooks adopt
or condone anti-Israeli stereotypes, they do not operate in a void. They
conform, in fact, to much of the anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli stereotyping
that has prevailed in the Arab world since before and after the beginning
of the peace process in the late 1970s. For example, when Egyptians accuse
Israeli expert farmers who help develop Egyptian agriculture, of poisoning
Arab land and destroying the local farming industry, no one should be
surprised that the Palestinian representative in the Human Rights
Commission in Geneva accuses, with impunity, Israelis of injecting the
AIDS virus into hundreds of Palestinian children. Or when Robert Garaudy,
the notorious French anti-Semite and Muslim convert who denies the
Holocaust in his “scholarly research”, is given a hero’s welcome in the
Arab world, it is no coincidence that denial of the Shoah among
Arabs/Muslims becomes a universal consensus. Similarly, in order not to
contradict themselves on the Holocaust issue, even the Arabs who have made
peace with Israel have banned "Schindler’s List" from their screens
although there is little Israeli or Zionist aspects in it, but it does
illustrate an event of the Holocaust. They overlook and deny the antiquity
of Jewish presence in Israel even when they allocate rooms in their
museums to other ancient peoples in the Middle East who have long
disappeared from the scene. They even attribute Israel’s peace measures to
dark schemes reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
calculated to take over the Arab world culturally and economically in the
“New Middle East”.37
These organized and institutionalized
attitudes towards Jews and Israel, which may be hidden or uttered in the
privacy of one’s intimate circle, once given the official stamp of
authority and approval by the Palestinian textbooks, cannot but encourage
Palestinian children to express those feelings and attitudes in public,
and to sense that it is legitimate to do so. This was the reason why
Israel insisted in both the Oslo and Wye Agreements on the eradication
from textbooks of the statements of hatred, but it remains to be seen
whether a turn-about in the official Palestinian attitude will be
implemented. So far, the only changes that the Palestinian Authority made
in this regard was, as mentioned in the introduction, to restore the
negative stereotypes that had been eradicated by Israel from the Jordanian
and Egyptian textbooks when it ruled the West Bank and Gaza.
Constructivists in the domain of
educational psychology, such as Jean Piaget, have tackled the question of
how the individual learner goes about the construction of knowledge in
his/her cognitive apparatus; for other constructivists, the individual
learner is of little interest, and what is the focus of concern is the
construction of human knowledge in general. But there are also
constructivists who are interested in both poles and who believe that
their theories throw light on both the question of how individuals build
up bodies of knowledge and how human communities have constructed the
public bodies of knowledge. And they raise the question of whether
acquired new knowledge is made by the thinking individual or is out there
and merely discovered.38 Writers in the
field of constructivism conclude that construction of knowledge is an
active process, whether we define it in terms of individual cognition or
in terms of a social and political process.39
However, even according to Piaget, who is usually labeled as the High
Priest of individual cognition, heteronomous morality follows moral rules
given by others, out of obedience to an authority which has coercive
power. Heteronomous morality means that an individual does not regulate
his/her behavior by means of personal convictions. Rather, his/her
activity is regulated by impulse or unthinking obedience, in contrast to
autonomous morality which follows self-regulating principles.40
It is argued, however, that without the belief that rises from personal
conviction, children will not be likely to follow moral rules given
ready-made by adults.41
The ramifications of these theories are
clear in our context of the Palestinian textbooks: While Palestinian
children absorb at home and from their environment basically anti-Israeli
and anti-Jewish stereotypes, and bring them as their luggage of knowledge
and conviction when they come to school, that body of knowledge and
convictions is enhanced when reinforced by the teachers who, regardless of
their personal experiences and convictions which they had also picked up
within the same environment, must impart to their students the contents of
the textbooks, give and take their personal additions, interpretations and
elaborations. In the literature dealing with political violence, it has
been repeatedly demonstrated that verbal abuse and delegitimation of the
enemy are necessary steps towards the use of violence against him.
Conviction, authority and action then converge in a deadly cocktail to
perpetuate hostile attitudes and hostile actions on the part of the
children, which are backed by the approval of the Palestinian Authority.
This is the most worrying question that arises from the reviewed
textbooks: will they only remain part of a political indoctrination
program which reflects public opinion and/or shapes it; or will they push
the growing children of today and the adults of tomorrow, to transcend
rhetoric into the dangerous and ominous grounds of hostile action.
Endnotes
1 |
See the important treatise by Haim Gerber, “Palestine and Other Territorial Concepts in the
17th Century”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 30,
1998, pp. 563-572, where the author discusses the term Palestine as a
socio-cultural concept. |
2 |
National
Palestinian Education for 5th Grade, #550, p. 19. |
3 |
Islamic Culture
for Eighth Grade, #576, p. 50. |
4 |
Palestinian
National Education for Third Grade, #529, p. 12. |
5 |
A report on PA Television of May 19, 1998, of a
conference where these themes were discussed. |
6 |
Palestinian National
Education for Second Grade, #519, p. 21. |
7 |
Modern Arab History and
Contemporary Problems, Part II, for Tenth Grade, #613, p. 66. |
8 |
E.g. Social and National
Education for Fifth Grade, #549, pp. 81, 84, 88, 89, 103, 107, 109,
110, 120, 124. |
9 |
Our Arabic
Language for Fifth Grade, # 542, p. 64. |
10 |
National Palestinian
Education for First Grade, # 509, p. 11. |
11 |
Geography of the Arab
Homeland for Sixth Grade, #557, pp. 12, 20, 23, 36, 48, 50, 53, 55,
61, 66, 72, 73, 75, 80, 81, 88, 90, 115, 124. |
12 |
Geography of Arab Lands for
Twelfth Grade, #650, pp. 49, 55. |
13 |
Composition and Summarizing
for Eighth Grade, #581, pp. 13, 20. |
14 |
Modern Arab History and
Contemporary Problems Part II, for Tenth Grade, # 613, pp. 70, 91, 95. |
15 |
Geography of the Arab Lands
for Twelfth Grade, #650, p. 186. |
16 |
Editorial by Yoram Hazoni, Azure, No. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 3-5. |
17 |
Ibid. |
18 |
Outstanding Examples of our
Civilization for 11th Grade. |
19 |
Islamic Education for Ninth Grade, p. 79. |
20 |
Islamic Education for Eighth Grade, p. 95. |
21 |
The New History of the
Arabs and the World, p. 123. |
22 |
PA Television, May 14, 1998. |
23 |
The New History of the
Arabs and the World, p. 120. |
24 |
Mi’raj is the
ascension of the Prophet to Heaven from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. |
25 |
The nom de guerre
of Arafat, borrowed from an illustrious general in early Islam. |
26 |
PA Television, January 1, 1995. |
27 |
See Jihad,
The
New Encyclopaedia of Islam. |
28 |
See Sayyid Qut’b, Ma’rakatuna ma’a al-Yahud (Our Campaign against the Jews), Beirut,
1986; and R. Israeli, “The Charter of Allah: the Platform of
the Hamas”, in Y. Alexander (ed.) The 1988-9 Annual of Terrorism,
M. Nijhoff, Netherlands, 1990, pp. 99-134. |
29 |
Esther Webman, “Anti-Semitic
Motives in the Ideology of Hizbullah and the Hamas”, in Projects for
the Study of Anti-Semitism, Tel Aviv University, 1994. |
30 |
Our Arabic Language for Fifth
Grade, #542, pp. 64-70, (the map is on p. 64). |
31 |
Reader and Literary Texts for
Eighth Grade, # 578, pp. 120-122. |
32 |
Ibid., pp. 131-133. |
33 |
Islamic Education for Seventh
Grade, p. 184. |
34 |
Our Arabic Language for
Second Grade, Part II, # 513, p. 51. |
35 |
Islamic Education for Seventh
Grade, # 564, p. 108. |
36 |
See the Charter of the Hamas
quoted above. |
37 |
In fact, Shimon Peres’ book on the New
Middle East was criticized in Egypt as “conclusively demonstrating” that
the old international Jewish conspiracy was still valid, even though its
author is hailed throughout the Arab world as the champion of peace. |
38 |
This passage is based on D.C.
Phillips, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Many Faces of
Constructivism”, in Educational Researcher, Vol. 24, No. 7, October
1995, p. 7. |
39 |
Ibid., p. 9. |
40 |
Rheta De Vries, “Piaget’s Social
Theory”, in Educational Researcher, Vol. 26, No. 2, March 1997, p.
5. |
41 |
Ibid. |
|