Education has always been of crucial importance to the Palestinians. It was a key tool for promoting and supporting their case through their intellectuals. However, several recent statistics revealed that the educational performance of Palestinian refugees have dropped significantly during the past ten years. This paper focuses on school effectiveness in UNRWA secondary schools in Lebanon. Lebanon is the only country where UNRWA offers secondary education to Palestinian refugees. This is due to the limited quota (10%) which Lebanon imposes on Palestinian refugees wishing to entre public schools and universities. The Lebanese regulations also ban Palestinians from working in 72 types of jobs in Lebanon. This paper reports the findings of a survey of over 400 students in their final year of their secondary school (Grade12). It covered five of the seven UNRWA secondary schools distributed over five of the largest refugee camps in Lebanon. The survey investigated students’ views on their learning experience, school environment, teaching methods, democracy at school, and the extent to which their school is addressing their individual academic, social, personal and emotional needs. The study also explored young people’s future academic and vocational aspirations, self-confidence, willingness to participate in their community, and their main concerns.

What it means to be Palestinian has been central to Palestinian national consciousness since the emergence of this consciousness in the 20th century. This centrality is not only manifested in Palestinian oral history, collective memory and mythologies, but is also reflected in popular and official discourses, thus appearing to be immutable and almost a “natural” marker of difference. Drawing on interviews with Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestine about their lives between the late 1930s and 1993, this paper shows how in telling, these Palestinians articulate diverse experiences and modes of struggle between the subjective and objective, between the personal and the political and between the real and the imagined. They also articulate different modes of existence and imagination, reflecting that memory and identity are malleable, dynamic and constructed, and that it is in remembering and telling that people become agents in the making of public history. Indeed, the narratives of lived and imagined experiences reflect how Palestinians, like many other peoples involved in national liberation struggles, deal with the politics of the present, with the politics of time and space and with living at the edges of extreme experiences, personal and collective.

Background: Combatants for Peace is a grass roots organization that was formed in 2005 by Palestinians who were involved in violence on behalf of Palestinian freedom but have now renounced violent means and Israelis who served as combat soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces but now refuse to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories. Members of the organization have committed themselves to work together through nonviolent methods for a peaceful two-state solution. They seek to raise public consciousness through dialogue and education in order to stop violence and end the occupation Research Method and Theoretical Framework: This research involved interviews with Palestinian members of Combatants for Peace, using a flexible interview guide to learn about their decision to commit to nonviolent action for peace and justice. The method used in the study is an adaptation of Lonergan’s (1972/2003) transcendental method, a qualitative approach that is rooted in phenomenology. The method involves asking questions that guide the participants into self-reflection with regard to personal experiences, the questions they ask to understand those experiences, the judgments reached, and decisions around personal action. The theoretical framework being used is transcendent pluralism, a theory that is grounded in human dignity and focuses on human decision-making regarding issues of social transformation. Demographics: Interviews were conducted in May 2007 and April 2008 in the West Bank. There were a total of 10 participants. All were male, Palestinian, and Muslim. The mean age was 31.7 with a range of 25-51. Findings: 8 major themes emerged from the interviews: Awareness and understanding of the conflict; Palestinian struggle against the occupation; Decision to adopt nonviolence; Challenges and conviction; Community response and outreach; Relationship with the Other; Outcomes of nonviolent action; Personal growth. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the decision to commit to nonviolent action involved a personal transformation that influenced understanding of both self and Other. Participants found their work in Combatants for Peace deeply meaningful. Through nonviolent resistance, participants gained self esteem and felt that they were doing something good and worthwhile for the community. Additionally they believed that this approach was consistent with the moral values taught in Islam and more likely to be effective in achieving Palestinian freedom. Recommendations for using a transformative paradigm for peace building are included.

This paper seeks to advance the development of a subaltern-focused account of mandate Palestine by tracing the history of Palestinian ‘youth’ and their growing role and influence in local Arab politics between 1929 and 1936, including their place in precipitating the ‘Great Revolt’ of 1936-39. While many histories of Palestine during the period of the British mandate offer significant detail and analysis of Palestinian Arab politics, most focus almost exclusively on its elite dimension, and particularly the factional contestation between the rival Jerusalemite families of al-Husayni and al-Nashashibi. While the rivalries wracking the elite intimately affected the course of the nationalist struggle, this facet of Arab politics under the mandate has long obscured the importance of other forces within the national movement. This paper questions the established elite-centered narratives of the Palestinian national movement, especially certain historiographical tropes and proclivities, such as narrating the Great Revolt as a ‘spontaneous’ uprising, by exploring a broad set of questions concerning the interrelations between youth, various forms of political discipline, the national movement, Palestinian society, and political radicalization. I argue that in the paradoxically bleak and ebullient period between 1929 and 1936, youth underwent a major transition from a subordinate social force serving elites as the disciplinary arm of the national movement to a burgeoning, restive sociopolitical constituency that came to play critical roles in both opposing the notable strategy of gentlemanly politicking with the British and advancing a politics of anti-colonial militancy and confrontation. In short, youth went from serving as a disciplinary force largely adjunctive to elites to a constituency exercising a disciplining function within the nationalist movement, bolstering and even enforcing a national line that challenged and overturned elite prerogatives, tactics, and strategy. This was evident in youth unrest after the MacDonald letter of 1931, in their strong role in bringing about the popular demonstrations in 1933 against immigration policy (which targeted the British and resulted in weeks of open clashes with the colonial state), and in their role during the national strike in 1936 as enforcers of both everyday discipline (in markets and among the public) and movement discipline (vis-à-vis elite leaders seeking an exit from the strike). This inquiry further situates the ascendance of youth within the rise of mass politics in Arab Palestine, using youth as a window into the new horizontally-centered political formations and organizing that came to shape the national movement in the 1930s.