Histories of Palestinians Navigating Education: Struggles across Time and Space
Panel II-03, sponsored byPalestinian American Research Center (PARC), 2024 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 11 at 2:30 pm
Panel Description
This panel looks at the history of Palestinian education from the Mandate era into the 21st century. It follows the history of Palestinian education over national borders, looking at the Mandate for Palestine, Israel, East Jerusalem and Lebanon. In all of these situations throughout Palestinian history, Palestinians did not have full control over their own education sectors or their policies, leading to discrepancies between the goals of governments and those setting education policies and structures on the one hand, and the goals of Palestinian teachers, parents and students on the other. These papers analyze the outcomes of these discrepancies, as Palestinian teachers and students navigated complex education structures, changing education policies, political upheaval, and differing educational authorities.
The first paper looks at the gendered nature of education in reformatory institutions in the Mandate for Palestine. It argues that “practical” schooling, linked to both the Mandate government and humanitarian organizations, defined ideal types of each gender, which colonial educators hoped would allow the Mandates’ juvenile delinquent population to enter, and even to stabilize, Mandate society. The second paper explores East Jerusalem Palestinians' distinct experience with the First Intifada (1987-1994) due to the city's unique occupied/annexed status and the prevalence of private schools within the city. The paper further examines the long-term impact that the uprising had on students, teachers, and the private school system itself. The third paper traces the implementation of Israel’s Psychometri examination in the 1980s and its significance for Palestinian residents and citizens of Israel. Modeled after the SAT, this examination points to not only the increasing American influence on education globally, but also opened Israel’s government up to the same criticisms American policymakers faced: that the test was discriminatory, excluding populations in the name of selectivity. The final paper draws on archives and oral histories of the post-war era of the 1990s in Lebanon to examine how Palestinian UNRWA teachers in Lebanon navigated the UNRWA's technicalization and their changing role in society due to a shift from a nation-building project to a state-building project from which they were excluded.
Due to the fragmented nature of Palestinian education across these many different education authorities, these papers rely on disparate archives, including oral histories, archival and published documents, and foreign reports. These diverse histories of education point to a long legacy of Palestinians struggling for education under policies that they did not fully control.
In 1935, the Government of Palestine opened a new reformatory institution for delinquent boys on the Government Farm in Acre, where they were trained in “all branches of practical farming.” The aims of this curriculum were three-fold: to give the boys tangible skills that would translate into stable employment upon their release, to provide labor for the government, and, in the words of the Government Welfare Inspector, for the boys to act as vectors to “spread better methods of agriculture throughout the country.”
In the same year that the new reformatory school opened in Acre, the Government Welfare Inspector extolled the virtues of practical training for the inmates at the Girls Reformatory Home in Jerusalem. In learning cooking, breadmaking, washing, ironing, and handicrafts, she claimed, no girl left the reformatory without “work being found for her or – best of all – a suitable marriage being arranged for her.”
This paper examines the uses, experiences, and consequences of practical education in the reformatory institutions of Mandate Palestine from 1919 to 1948. It argues that the differing structures of education for male and female juvenile delinquents - agricultural and trades-based training for boys and the domestic and handicrafts education for girls - sought to create a stabilized colonial society along gendered lines. Using records of the Government of Palestine, as well as those of humanitarian and welfare non-governmental organizations and actors, this paper shows how rehabilitative education of so-called "young offenders" was part of a larger project of social ordering in Palestine following the First World War. Colonial educators, both within the government and in the larger constellation of social welfare actors, understood practical education not only as a way of transforming wayward youth into productive colonial subjects, but also as a means for redeeming Palestinian society as a whole. At the same time, by reading against the colonial archive, this paper reveals the daily violence entrenched in these reformatory institutions as well as the mundane and spectacular ways that the young people within them resisted the agendas of rehabilitative education.
Many scholars have written about the impact of the First Intifada (1987–1994) on Palestinian education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The era was marked by prolonged school closures, violence against children, and widespread protests across the OPT. Students, teachers, and families in the education sector of East Jerusalem, however, experienced the Intifada in distinctive ways compared to the rest of the OPT due to the city’s particular status as both occupied and annexed by Israel since 1967.
To build on the existing literature on the First Intifada's impact on education in the West Bank, this paper explores how East Jerusalem's Palestinian community leaders, educators, and students shaped their own educational paths during the tumultuous era of the First Intifada. The paper draws on historic newspaper articles as well as oral history interviews conducted with Palestinians in East Jerusalem between 2021 and 2023. The oral history narrators included former students and teachers who had navigated the era from within East Jerusalem's fragmented school system, filled with Israeli-run public schools, UNRWA schools, Christian private schools, independent private schools, and private schools run by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf. The expansive private school sector, created by Palestinians after the 1967 Israeli occupation as a way to escape the Israeli-controlled public education system, housed a majority of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian students. This paper argues that the private school system managed to partially spare some Palestinian students from the Intifada's education disruptions and allowed Palestinians in the city to retain some indigenous governance over their own education through the First Intifada era. However, the cumulative impact of school disruptions and Israel's intensification of the legal and physical separation between East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the First Intifada and subsequent Gulf War challenged East Jerusalemites' ability to maintain the parallel education system that they had fought so hard to create due to the financial strain it placed on the schools during an already difficult economic time. Meanwhile, as the Palestinian school system in East Jerusalem struggled, the teachers and students within it also walked a tightrope—each balancing their educational aspirations and careers with their desire to resist the Israeli occupation.
In the early 1980s, Jewish policymakers in Israel, and its heads of universities believed too many students were gaining access to higher education. Israel’s National Institute for Testing and Evaluation(NITE) was established. This institute created, administers and grades Israel’s Psychometric Entrance Test (the Psychometri) the first of which took place in 1983.
NITE has touted this examination as comparable to the American SAT: a multiple-choice examination geared towards measuring students’ potential to succeed in college. The criticisms of the exam are strikingly similar (albeit more explicit) to those of the SAT, particularly concerning minority and disadvantaged populations. The one year the Psychometric exam was suspended (2003) with the goal of increasing admissions on the part of lower-income Jewish students, the number of Palestinian candidates qualified to attend Israeli universities skyrocketed. Universities subsequently sought to clamp down on those numbers, raising the minimum age to favor Jewish Israelis who serve in the army and reinstating the test. As universities moved to bring back the Psychometri, Arab members of parliament demanded that the Educational Committee of the Knesset try for at least three years to see the effects, shouting that the Jewish members of the committee were racists and were trying to hide that racism. The Psychometri remained. More recently, the growing numbers of Palestinian citizens of Israel qualified to enter medicine has led right-wing Israeli news sources and politicians to argue that the Psychometri in Arabic must be too easy, or that too much affirmative action must be taking place and that again, Jewish Israelis who serve in the army must not be discriminated against.
Scholars have compared education between the U.S. and Israel, particularly the issue of separate educational systems. However, this paper analyzes not only the pedagogical motivations of policymakers but their politics as well. I consider the effects of the Psychometri on Palestinian access to higher education within Israel and the criticisms levied by (and against) Palestinians. Using policy documents, newspapers, statistical reports, and interviews this paper argues that the adoption of American-style methods in schooling opened Israel’s educational policymakers up to similar criticisms faced by their American counterparts: namely that the examination was either too discriminatory or (in effect) not discriminatory enough against minority populations.
“Education without national consciousness is not education”:
How Palestinian teachers resist the ongoing Nakba
This article explores the position that education holds in the quest for Palestinian liberation by focusing on the role Palestinian teachers working for UNRWA in Lebanon have played as quiet revolutionaries. We draw on an oral history project with now retired Palestinian teachers who were born before or immediately after the 1948 Nakba, became teachers during the thawra (the revolutionary period in the 60s and 70s), taught through the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon (1982-2000). We analyze how teachers made sense of the dynamic and contradictory landscape of education, and how they forged educational practices to resist Palestinian dispossession. Drawing on a recent article in which Eghbariah defines Nakba as an ongoing process, we expand on the argument to 1) understand how that process extends beyond the fragmented territories of historic Palestine, 2) consider education as a key site where Nakba continues to unfold; and 3) analyze teachers as political actors who craft diverse resistance practices grounded in the right to self-determination. Our analysis offers a historical lens on the current Israeli assault on the entire educational system in Gaza, and explores the critical and contradictory role that education plays in the Palestinian resistance movement.
