PRESENT ABSENTEES: THE ARAB SCHOOL CURRICULUM IN ISRAEL AS A TOOL FOR DE-EDUCATING INDIGENOUS...

[HLS 7.1 (2008) 17–43]DOI: 10.3366/E147494750800005X

PRESENT ABSENTEES: THE ARAB SCHOOLCURRICULUM IN ISRAEL AS A TOOL FOR

DE-EDUCATING INDIGENOUS PALESTINIANS

Professor Ismael Abu-Saad

Education DepartmentBen-Gurion University of the Negev

P.O. Box 653Beersheba 84105, Israel

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

The Arab and Jewish school systems in Israel have separate curricula andboth are determined by the Ministry of Education. This article argues thatthe Arab curriculum is designed to ‘de-educate’, or dispossess, indigenousPalestinians pupils of the knowledge of their own people and history.It gives them only carefully screened and censored exposure to theirhistory, culture and identity; and suppresses any aspects that challenge orcontradict the Zionist narrative and mission. Furthermore, the attempts ofPalestinian educators to create a more balanced or inclusive curriculum havebeen largely excluded by the formal, state-approved curriculum. Yet, thePalestinian community must play a crucial role in remembering, discussingand retelling its own history.

Introduction

It has been the common experience of indigenous peoples to have theirhistories erased and retold by the settler colonial powers, and all toocommon for indigenous people to be powerless and passive participantsin a process of ‘de-education’, or dispossessing them of the knowledge oftheir own people and history. As Smith states:

Under colonialism indigenous peoples have struggled against a Western viewof history and yet been complicit with the view. We have often allowed our’histories’ to be told and have then become outsiders as we heard thembeing retold . . . Maps of the world reinforced our place on the periphery

18 Holy Land Studies

of the world, although we were still considered part of the Empire. Thisincluded having to learn new names for our lands. Other symbols of ourloyalty, such as the flag, were also an integral part of the imperial curriculum.Our orientation to the world was already being redefined as we were beingexcluded systematically from the writing of the history of our own lands.(Smith 1999: 33)

Many nations that consider themselves liberal democracies, andhave indigenous and minority populations under their jurisdictions,advertently or inadvertently perpetuate this colonising process throughthe formulation and provision of educational services. The predominantnational ethos in settler societies is based upon narratives of coming tosettle and bringing civilisation and progress to ‘barren territories’. InAustralia, despite the presence of the aborigines, the British colonisersdeclared it to be terrus nullius (an empty land, not owned by anyone)(Anderson 2000). In the United States, there was a drive to settle thegreat Western frontier, as if it were empty. In the case of Israel, the earlyZionists1 proclaimed Palestine to be ‘a land without a people, for a peoplewithout a land’ (Masalha 1997). However, the leaders of the Zionistmovement were well aware that Palestine’s Arab population outnumberedthe European Jewish settlers by more than 10 to 1 in 1917 when theBritish committed themselves to establishing a ‘Jewish homeland’ inPalestine (Prior 1999). Even after continuous Jewish immigration efforts,on the eve of Israel’s establishment, the indigenous population continuedto outnumber the European settlers by 2 to 1 (Hadawi 1991; Lustick1980). However, during the course and in the aftermath of the 1948war, the vast majority of Palestine’s indigenous population fled or wasexpelled from the territory that became the State of Israel. The Palestiniansremaining in Israel were reduced to a minority, yet the denial of theirexistence was perpetuated through the enactment of a law that definedall of those who had left their places of residence even temporarily,between 1947 (after the ratification of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine)and 1950, as ‘present absentees’. Over half of the Palestinians remainingin Israel fell into this category, which rendered their property liable toconfiscation, and this law was used to greatly increase the financial, realestate and land holdings of the nascent Israeli state (Lustick 1980). Whilethe active implementation of this policy lies in the past, the designation ofPalestinian Arabs in Israeli society as ‘present absentees’ seems to continueto describe accurately the government’s approach toward them, as isparticularly evident in educational policy and curriculum.

1 In the late 1880s, the Zionist nationalist movement was developed by a group ofJewish intelligentsia in Europe, its goal to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism wasbased on the premise that Palestine was a territory which belonged to the Jewish peopledue to their presence on the land during biblical times.

Ismael Abu-Saad The Arab School Curriculum in Israel 19

The state educational system in Israel is subdivided into a Jewish system(which is further divided into a number of subsystems, e.g., secularschools, religious schools, etc.), in which the language of instructionis Hebrew; and an Arab system, in which the language of instructionis Arabic. For the most part, the Jewish and Arab school systems haveseparate curricula, but both are determined by the central Ministry ofEducation, in line with the general aims that were set for the educationsystem in the 1953 Law of State Education:

to base education on the values of Jewish culture and the achievements ofscience, on love of the homeland and loyalty to the state and the Jewishpeople, on practice in agricultural work and handicraft, on pioneer trainingand on striving for a society built on freedom, equality, tolerance, mutualassistance, and love of mankind. (Quoted in Mar’i 1978: 50)

These aims demonstrate how Palestinian Arabs are ’present’ as pupils inthe school system, and yet ‘absent’ where the educational vision for thestate is formulated. Over 50 years have passed since the enactment ofthis law, but the aims it specified remain central to current Israeli publiceducational policy. Though the law was amended in 2000, it maintainseducational objectives for public schools that emphasise Jewish values,history and culture, while ignoring Palestinian values, history and culture(Adalah 2003). These narrowly-defined educational aims that speak tothe identity of three-quarters of the state’s students while overlooking oractively de-educating the other quarter, have continually been reaffirmedin the official discourse about education in Israel. For example, in June2001, Minister of Education, Limor Livnat, stated that she would like tosee that ‘there is not a single child in Israel who doesn’t learn the basics ofJewish and Zionist knowledge and values’ (Fisher-Ilan 2001: 4B).

In this paper, we will illustrate the ways in which these goals have beenpreeminent in the development of curricula in the Arab school system inIsrael. We will also demonstrate how the attempts of Palestinian educatorsto create a more balanced or inclusive curriculum, from their perspective,have been largely excluded from the formal, state-approved curriculum.

The Impact of Textbooks and Curriculum: The ArabSchool System

School textbooks are widely recognised as important agents ofsocialisation that transmit and disseminate societal knowledge, includingrepresentations of one’s own and other groups (Bar-Tal and Teichman2005). According to Luke (1988), school textbooks ‘act as the interfacebetween the officially state-adopted and sanctioned knowledge of theculture, and the learner. Like all texts, school textbooks remain potentially


agents of mass enlightenment and/or social control’ (p. 69). Apple andChristian-Smith (1991) assert that:

Texts are really messages about the future. As part of a curriculum theyparticipate in no less than the organized knowledge system of society.They participate in creating what a society has recognized as legitimate andtruthful. They help set the cannons of truthfulness and, as such, also helpre-create a major reference point for what knowledge, culture, belief, andmorality really are. (p. 4)

Textbooks tend to dominate what students learn at school, and set thecurriculum, as well as the facts learned, in most subjects. In addition, thepublic tends to regard textbooks as essential, authoritative, and accurateknowledge, and in most school systems, teachers rely on them to organiselessons and structure subject matters (Down 1988). This is particularly truein Israel, since teachers are required to base their instruction upon Ministryof Education-approved textbooks. According to Bar-Tal and Teichman(2005):

Due to the centralized structure of the educational system in Israel, theMinistry of Education sets the guidelines for curricula development and hasthe authority to approve the school textbooks. Thus, the ministry outlinesthe didactic, scholastic and social objectives to be achieved (Eden 1971), andthe textbooks’ contents reflect the knowledge that the dominant group ofsociety is trying to impart to its members. (p. 159)

This process has often had negative ramifications for indigenous andminority groups within a society because the educational system hasbeen used as a tool for pacifying, controlling, and/or assimilating them.The Maori writer, Patricia Grace, highlighted several of the factors thattend to make the official textbooks ‘dangerous’ to indigenous students, inparticular:

(1) they do not reinforce our values, actions, customs, culture and identity;(2) when they tell us only about others they are saying that we do notexist; (3) they may be writing about us but are writing things which areuntrue; and (4) they are writing about us but saying negative and insensitivethings which tell us that we are not good. (Quoted from Smith, 1999: 35)

An examination of the curriculum and textbooks developed by theIsraeli Ministry of Education for the Arab school system yields numeroussalient examples of the factors Grace raises. It also provides insights intothe knowledge that the educational policymakers in Israel have decidedboth to impart, and to keep, from Palestinian Arab students, as well ashow the whole system is used as a control mechanism. In sharp contrast tothe promotion of a Jewish and Zionist identity in the curricular goals andmaterials developed for the Jewish schools, the curricular goals that theMinistry of Education developed for Arab education tend to blur rather


than enhance the formation of their identity as members of an indigenousnational community. Palestinian identity is treated as something at bestirrelevant and at worst, antithetical, to the overriding goals and aimsof the Zionist educational project. The specific curricular goals of theArab educational system require students to learn about Jewish valuesand culture, while receiving superficial exposure to carefully screened andcensored Arabic values and culture (Al-Haj 1995; Mar’i 1978; 1985; Peres,Ehrlich and Yuval-Davis 1970). In 1978, the late Palestinian Arab educatorand academic, Sami Mar’i (of Haifa University) described the status ofArab education within the Israeli public school system in the followingterms:

Arab education is a victim of Israeli pluralism not only in that it is directedand managed by the majority, but it is also a tool by which the wholeminority is manipulated . . . .[It] is not only an example of the Israelipluralism by which Arabs are denied power, it is also a means through whichthe lack of power can be maintained and perpetuated. Arab citizens aremarginal, if not outsiders . . . The Arab Education Department is directedby members of the Jewish majority, and curricula are decided upon by theauthorities with little, if any, participation of Arabs. Arab participation doesnot exceed writing or translating books and materials according to carefullyspecified guidelines, nor does it extend beyond implementing the majority’spolicies. (Mar’i 1978: 180)

Though Mar’i wrote this nearly 30 years ago, a 6th grade geographybook being used in Arab schools in the 2007-8 school year (Fine andGal, The Coastal Plain in the Centre, South and North of the Country,1996) demonstrates how accurately his words still describe the currentreality. This textbook, originally written in Hebrew, was translated intoArabic and forms a part of the Ministry of Education-approved 6th gradecurriculum. The Arabic version indicates that the curriculumdevelopment’s project director and five scientific/professional consultantswere Jewish. Arab involvement was limited to one translator, one editorof the translation and one scientific consultant. The evaluation of thetranslation from Hebrew to Arabic was done by a Jew, and the finalproduction and graphics of the book were done by a Jewish team.

Turning to the contents, this geography textbook contains a sub-uniton the ‘Difficulties of Settlement in the Past on the Central and SouthernCoastal Plain’ that discusses past problems with the shortage of water,swamps and standing water, utilisation of the sandy, red soil, and theshifting sands on the central Coastal Plain (pp. 25–26). This discussionis followed by a section entitled, ‘The Big Change: The Central andSouthern Coastal Plain today – the best developed and most denselypopulated region of the country’ (p. 25). Table 1 contains excerpts fromthis section, showing what is ‘present’ in the textbook, along side what

Tab

le1:

Exc

erpt

from

6th

gra

de

geogra

phy

text

book

use

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2007

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owin

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ater

ialpre

sent

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nt

from

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text

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esen

taA

bsen

tIn

orde

rto

unde

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ndth

em

ajor

chan

gest

hato

ccur

red

inth

eto

pogr

aphy

ofth

eC

oast

alPl

ain,

we

have

togo

back

100

year

s.In

this

peri

od,

ala

rge

rena

issan

cest

arte

dam

ong

Jew

sin

man

yco

untr

ies

ofth

ew

orld

for

retu

rnin

gto

thei

rho

mel

and

inIs

rael

.Thr

ough

out

the

year

ssin

ceth

atpe

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,ove

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mill

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des

tabl

ished

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stat

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Isra

el.

Let’s

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ckto

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begi

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road

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join

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Jew

sw

hoca

me

back

toth

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land

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heir

hear

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full

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onLi

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tabl

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lalo

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ast.

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use

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oder

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ch-

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gym

ade

itpo

ssib

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port

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enin

plac

esth

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acte

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was

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ight

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ew

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fs.T

hey

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eved

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with

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assis

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stpo

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ases

tabl

ished

inTe

lAvi

vin

1936

(the

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port

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tioni

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day,

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in19

65a

mor

em

oder

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rtw

ases

tabl

ished

inA

shdo

dus

ing

the

sam

em

etho

ds).

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cultu

rean

dw

ells

toth

eco

asta

lpla

in,o

nevi

llage

alon

ein

the

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adi

stri

ct,A

l-‘A

bbas

iya,

had

4,09

9du

num

spl

ante

dw

ithci

trus

tree

sw

ater

edby

150

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ls,an

d45

0du

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sof

oliv

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ees

(Sha

rab

1987

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sof

1945

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bsw

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plan

ting

146,

316

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ms

with

citr

ustr

ees,

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le66

,403

dunu

ms

wer

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ing

plan

ted

byJe

ws

inth

eJa

ffa

area

(Jaf

fa,2

006)

.

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tow

nof

Ash

dod,

inth

eG

aza

dist

rict

,exi

sted

since

anci

ent

times

.Pr

ior

toZ

ioni

stse

ttle

men

tan

dIs

rael

’ses

tabl

ishm

ent,

itw

askn

own

asIs

dud

and

was

fam

ous

for

itsci

trus

and

figor

char

dsan

dvi

neya

rds.

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31it

had

apo

pula

tion

of3,

140

Pale

stin

ian

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bs,a

ndco

ntai

ned

746

hous

es.B

y19

45,i

tha

da

popu

latio

nof

4,62

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rabs

and

290

Jew

s(I

sdud

,200

6).T

hete

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okm

akes

nom

entio

nat

allo

fthe

seco

ndla

rges

tPa

lest

inia

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is ‘absent’ or left out of the telling of the story. It illustrates how thePalestinian presence in Palestine is ignored and denied, making PalestinianArab students into ‘present-absentees’ as they learn about ‘the land ofIsrael’.

As this text exemplifies, as much by what it excludes as by whatit includes, the state-sponsored curriculum for Arab elementary schoolsmaintains an emphasis on the Zionist national project that has dispossessedand continues to marginalise the Palestinian people; while at the sametime suppressing the students’ knowledge of and identification with thePalestinian people and their history.

Similar to the discordant geographical narratives in Table 1, Carter(2005) discussed the ongoing tension between the perspectives ofthe indigenous people and the European settlers in New Zealandover geography and geographical development. European settlers andperspectives became so dominant that they subdued the indigenous cultureto the point were they ‘disappeared officially’ from the landscape (p. 11).The settlers’ geographical developments were accompanied by:

an invasive new discourse that denied the contemporaneous spatialexistence of Ngai Tahu [the indigenous Maori inhabitants] during thedevelopment period and since. It relied on a colonial expansionist narrativethat predetermined the landscape . . . as uninhabited wasteland, ripe fordevelopment. (Carter 2005: 11)

According to Park’s (2002) article on the history of swamp drainage inNew Zealand, the ‘swamps themselves . . . were merely empty wildernessto the eyes of the literate’, and swamp drainage was:

a process by which a thriving, powerful expansionist culture learns how towring wealth from a certain kind of country by cleverness, and industry;. . . finds it lying, seemingly vacant and unused in another culture’s land; anddeclaring it wilderness and waste, claims it and transforms it into wealth.(p. 159, quoted in Carter 2005: 11, 13)

As this narrative was applied to the Waitaki River region inNew Zealand, ‘there was no ongoing recognition of the Ngai Tahuspatial connections. The names indicating specific [indigenous] sites andplaces . . . were replaced in official records by . . . names transplanted fromanother history and homeland’ (Carter 2005: 16).

The education system is essential to making the displacement ofindigenous history and presence ‘official’, through texts such as thatquoted from the 6th grade geography curriculum in Israeli schools, whichteaches Palestinian children that the history of the coastal plain beganonly a hundred years ago, with the advent of European Jewish settlementand their transformation of this previously ‘abandoned area’. In the text,modern (Jewish) Tel Aviv overrides any mention of Arab Jaffa; modern


(Jewish) Ashdod of (Arab) Isdud; modern (Jewish) Ashkelon of (Arab)Al-Majdal. Modern Jewish Rishon Litzion and Herzliya and numerousother new towns are superimposed upon an unacknowledged landscapeof Palestinian villages emptied and demolished in 1948. The indigenouslandscape is erased from the curriculum, while it is simultaneously beingerased by the curriculum, because of its absence from the official historicaland geographical materials being taught about the region.

While the processes of de-educating Palestinian children about theirhistory, heritage and identity clearly begin at the elementary school level,most of the analysis of the state-sponsored curriculum for the Arab schoolsystem in Israel to date has focused upon the study of the particularlysensitive subjects of history, language and literature at the high schoollevel. The curriculum for history and languages at this level requiresPalestinian students to spend many class hours studying Jewish cultureand history and the Hebrew language (and in total, more than they spendon Arabic literature and history). Up until the mid-1970s, 20 per centof the compulsory items in the history curriculum in Arab schools weredevoted to Jewish history, while 19 per cent were devoted to Arabhistory. In the mid-1970s, a new curriculum was developed in whichequal proportions (22.2 per cent) of the compulsory items in historywere focused on Arab and Islamic history, modern Jewish history, andhistory of the twentieth century, and 33.4 per cent was focused on themodern Middle East. (In contrast, in Jewish schools, 33.4 per cent of thecompulsory items in history were devoted to the study of modern Jewishhistory, 44.4 per cent to the history of the Zionist national movementand the establishment of Israel, and the remaining 22.2 per cent to theArab-Israeli conflict; with no Arab or Islamic history in the compulsorycurriculum at all) (Al-Haj 1995; 2003). Another committee, comprisedprimarily of Palestinian Arab professionals, was more recently appointedto revise the high school history curriculum for the Arab schools, and itsubmitted a revised programme in 1999. As Al-Haj (2005) pointed out,however, it was:

in practice a revision of the curriculum published in 1982 by a committee,headed by Joshua Prawer, that had an equal number of Jewish and Arabmembers. Most members of the committee that drafted the new versionwere Arabs, but most of the academic advisors were Jews . . . [W]hen itcomes to producing school curricula, the partnership is one-sided, withJewish domination of all aspects of the curricula written for Arab schools.(p. 56)

The new curriculum’s section on the modern Middle East included a15 study-unit chapter on the history of Palestinian Arab society, whichdiscussed the debate over the term ‘Palestine’, the history of the Arab


presence in the land, the ‘1948 War’, and the development and causes ofthe Palestinian refugee problem. However, as Barak (2004) reported:

This revolutionary section, which was supposed to take up a hefty chunkof class time . . . is simply not taught. The supervisor of history and civicsstudies in the Arab sector, Dr Said Barghouthi, claims that there is noavailable textbook with which to teach this material. (par. 9)

Researchers in the Truman Institute of the Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem had begun preparing a new textbook for teaching thiscurriculum, but after receiving initial feedback from the Ministry ofEducation Curriculum Department, the textbook never emerged fromthe editing process (Barak 2004). In practice, the significance of themodifications in the new history curriculum was further reduced bythe fact that modern Palestinian history and the annals of the Arabnational movement were designated as optional, rather than required units.Thus, students who did not take the expanded history curriculum (e.g.,all students focusing on the sciences, math, technology, literature, etc.),do not have the opportunity to study anything related to the Arab-Israeli conflict or Israeli-Palestinian relations (Al-Haj 2002). The on-goingresistance of the Ministry of Education to making substantive changesin the history curriculum for Palestinian students parallels the approachother settler colonial states have taken toward teaching history to theirmajority and indigenous populations. Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith(1999), discussed how the negation of indigenous views of history playeda critical role in asserting colonial ideology, partly because indigenousviews were regarded as incorrect or primitive, but primarily because ‘theychallenged and resisted the mission of colonization’ (p. 29). Because theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict is still unresolved, and the colonising/Zionisingmission (e.g. transforming Palestine into the state of the Jewish people) isstill incomplete, the negation of the indigenous Palestinian view of historyhas been carefully maintained in the curriculum to which the vast majorityof Palestinian (as well as Jewish) students are exposed.

Likewise, the Israeli educational establishment has tended to approachcivics education as a controversial political topic, because it perceives theaim of developing and instilling a civic identity in students as a threatto its primary goal of developing and instilling a national Zionist andJewish identity in students (Barak 2005). For the first several decadesafter Israel’s establishment, the civics education curriculum did not includeuniversal or democratic values, but rather focused upon Zionist educationfor building the Jewish nation (Barak 2005; Ichilov 1993). In the 1980s,after a Jewish peace activist was killed in a demonstration, and membersof an explicitly racist political party (Kach) were elected to the nationalparliament, there was a public call for strengthening the emphasis upon


more universal and democratic values in the civics curriculum. Ironically,however, initiatives for reforming the curriculum were consistently placedwithin the framework of, and made subordinate to, the Ministry ofEducation units dealing with education for Jewish values (Barak 2005).

The new civics curriculum introduced in 2001 was based on a textbookentitled: To Be Citizens in Israel: A Jewish and Democratic State (Adan,Asheknazi and Alperson 2000), which was also translated into Arabicfor use in the Arab schools. The textbook covered the formal aspectsof government institutions and their activities, democratic values, humanand minority rights, the limits of democracy, and the existence of riftsin Israeli society (e.g., Jewish-Arab, Ashkenazi-Mizrahi, religious-secular,and class/socio-economic). The final chapter of the book focuses on thequestion of whether or not the state can indeed be both Jewish anddemocratic by using extensive citations from the articles of a Jewish Israeliprofessor (Gabizon) who answers affirmatively, and a Palestinian Israeliacademic (Mana’ah) who answers negatively (Gordon 2005). The finalexercise at the end of the chapter asks students to respond to the questionof ‘whether the solutions Professor Gabizon proposes . . . vis-à-vis the riftbetween the [Jewish and Arabic] nationalities can be considered as ananswer to the problem that Dr Mana’ah raises – that the State of Israel isnot the state of its Arabic citizens’ (p. 573, quoted in Gordon 2005: 374). Itis worth noting how the question is carefully framed to limit the solutionsthe students are asked to consider to those proposed by Professor Gabizon,while Dr Mana’ah is designated as the raiser of the problem, rather thanas another proposer of possible solutions, or of legitimate alternativeviewpoints. The superiority in academic rank, and also presumably inexpertise, are also subtly introduced into the students’ considerations byincluding the academic rank of the two writers in the question. Gordon(2005), who served as the head of the Pedagogical Secretariat in the IsraeliMinistry of Education, raised this text as an ‘example of good pedagogy’that would enable students to confront the moral problems in their societyand to try to solve them, ‘if handled sensitively by a competent teacher(which entails being able to defuse overemotional, irrational, stereotypicviews and also being able to teach the students that there are no simpleunambiguous answers to such questions)’ (p. 374).

While Barak (2005) considered the new curriculum to be a significantimprovement over the previous curriculum for civics studies, it was notaccompanied by an appropriate increase in the number of classroomhours allotted to civics education, thus limiting its implementation. Shefurther pointed out that until recently, there were no teacher trainingprogrammes or tracks specifically for civics teachers, so the vast majority ofthose currently teaching civics have only general history or social sciencestraining. Pinson (2005) asserted that the new curriculum failed to serve as


a tool for developing a common citizenship for all citizens of the state.Instead, it continued to define the state of Israel as a Jewish-nationalstate, and portrayed other possible definitions (e.g., the state of all ofits citizens) as marginal. Because of its ethnic orientation, it could notpromote the development of a common civic identity for all citizens ofthe state, or genuinely deliberate on the conflict between a Jewish nationalstate and democratic values (Barak 2005). Though the book ostensiblypresented several possible alternative approaches to defining the state ofIsrael, according to Pinson (2005):

the way this discussion is structured shows that the book, under the guise ofadopting a pluralistic outlook and presenting a range of opinions that existin Israeli society, takes a clear stand on the question of whether or not thedefinition of the state is desirable. By presenting an imaginary continuum,the book creates a distinction between the Zionist approaches – the desirableapproaches – located at the center of this imaginary line, and the approachesthat reject the definition of the state of Israel as Jewish or democratic, whichare therefore found on the margins of this imaginary continuum – at theend. (p. 15)

The new curriculum approached Palestinian Arab citizens as a nationalminority, and referred to the tensions deriving from the existence of aPalestinian national minority in a Jewish nation state; however, Pinson(2005) noted that these difficulties were presented as a unique challengefor the Palestinian minority, rather than a common challenge confrontingthe Israeli democracy and all Israeli citizens. Barak (2005) described theserious consequences this approach had for the study of civics in the Arabschool system:

The failure to confront the problems of an ethnic democracy and, inparticular, the failure to seriously confront the attitude toward minoritieswho have a different ethnic identity from the majority’s, places the civicsteachers in the Arab sector in an impossible situation: they are obligedto instill the principles of democracy in students whose situation in lifeis not consistent with these principles. The curriculum does not provideArab teachers with a real opportunity to discuss with their students theconflicts stemming from the clash between the Jewishness of the state andtheir citizenship in it. (p. 4)

As such, she concluded that the civics programmes failed to teach studentsto become critical citizens, and fell short of providing both Arab andJewish youth with proper training for becoming the citizens of tomorrow.

Turning to the study of language and literature in Arab highschools, the curriculum is still primarily shaped by the major revisionthat occurred in the mid-1970s, under which 732 hours were


allotted to the study of Arabic, divided equally between language(366 hours) and literature (366 hours). In contrast, 768 total hours wereallotted to the study of Hebrew, of which 29 per cent (224 hours)were devoted to language, and 71 per cent (544 hours) were devoted toliterature (Al-Haj 1995; 2002; 2003). The content of the Arabic literaturecurriculum was updated in 1981 by a committee made up primarilyof Palestinian Arab professionals, rather than the Jewish specialists inArab affairs that had dominated previous committees. However, the 1981committee’s one Jewish member, who was the head of the Ministry ofEducation’s Arab Education Department at that time, actually supervisedthe publication of the anthology, and directed the publisher to excludesome of the texts that the committee had chosen because he consideredthem to be ‘works that create an ill spirit’ (Barak 2004, par. 2). Thus,as Barak (2004) put it, some of the innovative reforms recommendedby the committee ‘ . . . disappeared somewhere on the way from thecurriculum to the literary anthologies used in the Arab schools’ (par.2), including poetry by prominent Palestinian writers such as MahmudDarwish, Rashid Hussein and Samih al-Kassem. As such, the Arabiccurriculum for Palestinian students in Israel’s Arab school system does notinclude the Palestinian Arab literary classics studied throughout the Arabworld (Adalah 2003). A Palestinian Arab student expressed his reaction tothis as follows:

Everything we study is about the Jews. Everything is Jewish culture. Westudy Bialik and Rachel. Why do I have to study them? Why don’t theyteach me Mahmud Darwish [Palestinian nationalist poet]? Why don’tthey teach me Nizar Qabbani? Why don’t they teach me Edward Said?Why don’t they teach me about Arab philosophers and Palestinian poets?I know that my Arabic language is not very strong, because I know if Idon’t speak fluent Hebrew I can’t function in this country . . . I know thatthe Arabic language in Palestine is endangered. Schools, not individually, butthe educational system as a whole has a very negative impact on our identity.The whole world now recognises the existence of Palestine and that there issomething called the Palestinian people. So why are they still teaching meabout Bialik and Rachel? What is the problem in teaching us Palestinianhistory? The problem is that they are afraid. They don’t want us, PalestinianArabs, to develop an awareness of our national identity. (Quoted in Makkawi2002: 50)

The differences between the approach to teaching Arabic and theapproach to teaching Hebrew to Palestinian students are very telling. Theformal goals established for teaching Arabic are primarily technical andmention nothing about developing a broader understanding of Arabicculture, values or identity issues. The formal goals for teaching Hebrew,however, include becoming ‘acquainted with Jewish culture and its values,


past and present’, and facilitating the Arab pupils’ ‘understanding of thecultural and social life of the Jewish population in Israel’ (quoted in Mar’i1978: 77–8). In the late 1970s, another basic goal for teaching Hebrew inArab schools was added, which called for relating to the Hebrew languageas a bridge for Arab-Jewish co-existence, and promoting the integrationof Arabs in Israeli society (Al-Haj 1998). This made the responsibility fordeveloping tools for co-existence and integration very one-sided, sinceJewish students are not required to learn Arabic, and de-legitimised theirpresence as a national minority actually making up a part of Israeli society,rather than something alien, in need of integration. Again, as conveyedby the civics curriculum, their ’non-Jewish’ presence in the Jewish state isa handicap that it is up to them to overcome unilaterally, and languageand cultural differences are gaps that need to be bridged from theirside only.

The Hebrew literature curriculum taught in the Arab school systemwas compiled in 1977 and has remained largely the same since then (Barak2004). Jewish religious texts (e.g., Bible, Mishna and Agada) held a centralplace in the curriculum, along with literature and poetry of the Zionistmovement, celebrating the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine(Al-Haj 1995; Barak 2004).

A number of academics have criticised the approach to Jewish studiesin Arab education because it is aimed at making Arabs understand andsympathise with Jewish/Zionist causes, while blurring their own nationalidentity in Israel (Al-Haj 1995; 1998; 2002; 2005; Mar’i 1978; 1985;Swirski 1999). In the 1970s, a group of Jewish Israeli researchers, Peres,Ehrlich and Yuval-Davis, who studied the curriculum, criticised it forattempting to instill patriotic sentiments in Arab students through thestudy of Jewish history, and pointed out the absurdity of the expectationthat the ‘Arab pupil . . . serve the state not because the latter is importantto him and fulfills his needs, but because it is important to the Jewishpeople’ (Peres, Ehrlich and Yuval-Davis 1970: 151). In response to thisone-sided curriculum, shaped to meet the goals of a movement thatexplicitly excludes Palestinian Arabs, Rashid Hussein, a Palestinian Arabintellectual and poet, issued the following warning in 1957:

It is a known fact that he who has no self-respect will not respect others.He who has no national feeling cannot respect other nationalities. If theArab student is hindered from learning about his people, his nationalityand his homeland in school, he will compensate for the lack in his homeand on the street. He will eagerly accept anything he hears from otherpeople or reads in the newspaper, and this may lead him into a wrongand distorted view of nationalism. The school, which has deprived himof something in which everyone takes pride, will be regarded by him as anenemy. Instead of learning in school the meaning of nationalism imbued


with humanism, he will absorb only a distorted version. What will theschool have achieved? What kind of generation of Arab youth will it haveeducated? Instead of educating its students to believe in fraternity and peaceand to believe in the sincerity of its teachers, the school will bring forth abewildered and confused generation, which looks at the facts in a distortedmanner, and considers other nations to be their enemies; a generation filledwith inferiority complexes, feelings of abasement, unable to take pride in itsyouth, in its homeland and its nationality. (1957: 46)

However, the concerns of the Israeli authorities about the educationof their Palestinian citizens were of a completely different nature than theconcerns of Hussein. They were perhaps best summed up by Uri Lubrani,the Advisor on Arab Affairs to the Prime Minister of Israel from 1960 to1963, who openly stated:

if there were there no Arab students perhaps it would be better. If theywould remain hewers of wood perhaps it would be easier to control them.But there are things which do not depend upon our wish. There is thenno escape from this issue, so we must be careful to understand the nature ofthe problems involved and to devise appropriate strategies. (Haaretz, 4 April1961, quoted in Lustick 1980: 68)

The longing for the state’s present-absentees to be fully absent haspermeated the school system, as it has other state institutions. Since,however, they remain a persistent presence, the curriculum in the Arabschool system has been used as a tool for devising appropriate strategiesto control Palestinian students, and attaining the improbable goal ofdisplacing their indigenous identity and replacing it with – in lieu of anidentity of their own – a loyalty to the state’s Zionist mission.

De-education Continued: One Hundred Basic Concepts

The Ministry of Education has continued to pursue its emphasis onproviding a Zionist/Zionising education to both Jewish and Palestinianstudents through recent curricular initiatives, such as the ‘100 BasicConcepts’ curriculum unit that was introduced to the middle schools inthe 2004–5 school year, see Table 2 (Ministry of Education and Culture2004). While separate lists of the 100 key concepts were developed for theJewish and Arab educational systems, they largely reaffirmed the status ofPalestinian Arabs in Israel as ‘present absentees’. One third of the conceptswere devoted to heritage, and the list for the Jewish school system wasentitled, ‘Concepts in Jewish Heritage’, while the list for the Arab schoolsystem was entitled, ‘Concepts in Arab Heritage for the Arabic Sector,’ aqualification suggesting that they were of no importance or relevance forany other sector of Israeli society.

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The 34-item Jewish list comprised broad concepts about ancientJewish history and religion, and National Holidays (including Purim,Independence Day, Hanukah, Jerusalem Day, etc., which despite beingcalled ‘national’ are not holidays for all citizens of the country). It alsoincluded broader social concepts, such as respect for parents and teachers,as a part of Jewish heritage (see Table 2). The 34-item Arab list containedconcepts from both the Muslim and Christian religions, thus providinga more superficial treatment of each; and other general concepts chosenas characterising the Arabic culture from a perspective of romanticisingthe Orient (e.g., Arab markets, hospitality, generosity, the tent). At thesame time, it excluded the broader social concepts included in the Jewishheritage list (e.g., respect for parents and teachers), as though such valueswere unique to Jewish culture and not present in Arab culture.

Table 2 also contains the second list in the 100 Basic Concepts pro-gramme for the Jewish schools, which was entitled, ‘Zionist Concepts.’It included 33 items dealing with the Zionist movement, 15 prominent,modern Zionist/Israeli leaders (including 3 women), the ‘wars of Israel’,pre- and post-state waves of immigration, and institutions that have be-come inseparable/indistinguishable from Zionism, such as the HolocaustMuseum and the Israeli military. The parallel 33-item list for the Arabschools was entitled, ‘Zionist Concepts for the Arab Sector’ and includedthe same concepts as the Jewish list, with a few exceptions (see Table 2).The Arab list included the names of 3 Arab citizens of Israel (one politicalfigure from the mainstream Zionist Labour Party, one novelist and theonly Arab ever to receive the Israel Prize, and one Christian religiousfigure, all of whom were men). It also included Beit haGefen (‘the Houseof the Vine’), the Haifa-based Arab-Jewish Centre for Arab-Culture andYouth and Sports Society, that organises non-political social meetingsbetween Arabs and Jews aimed at creating recognition and understanding,and educating for co-existence, good neighbouring and tolerance.Neither the three Arab names, nor Beit haGefen centre nurturing Arab-Jewish coexistence, appeared on the Jewish list of Zionist concepts, whichinstead included additional items about the pre-state Zionist settlers andtheir victories over the indigenous population, the unauthorised pre-stateimmigration of Jews to Palestine, and the absorption of the first massivepost-state wave of Jewish immigration. Again, the need for recognising,understanding and co-existing with the other were included as aspects ofZionism that applied only to Palestinian students. Not surprisingly, therewas not a single mention for either Jewish or Arab students of the historyof the Palestinian people, the consequences they suffered (dispersion anddispossession) as a result of the fulfillment of Zionist aspirations throughthe establishment of Israel, or of the Palestinian national movement. In


stark contrast, Palestinian Arab students were required, along with Jewishstudents, to memorise a substantial list of Jewish Zionist historical facts andfigures.

The final section of the 100 Basic Concepts for both school systemswas entitled, ‘Concepts in Israeli Democracy’. It contained the same broadhumanitarian items (e.g., human rights, the Geneva Convention, Rightsof the Child, pluralism, humanism, etc.) for both groups, in addition to lessinclusive items such as that defining Israel as the ‘Jewish and DemocraticState,’ the Law of Return (which applies to Jewish immigration and returnrights only), the flag and the national anthem (which are both symbols ofJewish religious origin) (see Table 2).

Programmes such as the ‘100 Basic Concepts’ demonstrate how theeducational aims and goals that were established in the 1953 Law ofState Education have continued to shape and determine the curriculum,keeping Palestinian Arabs from being fully present in their own education,and basically absent from Jewish education. Ironically, the pedagogicaloffice of the Ministry of Education sought out the author’s input, asa Palestinian educator, on the ‘100 Concepts’ curricular unit for Arabschools. After receiving it, they proceeded to completely disregard it,but still listed the author’s name as a consultant on this curricularunit. Thus, while the process formally included Palestinian Arab input,ostensibly a sign of progress, it instead actually demonstrated how suchformalities represent another contemporary metaphor of the ‘presence’and simultaneous ‘absence’ of Palestinian Arabs in Israeli educational andpolicy-making circles.

After the Ministry of Education released its ‘100 Basic Concepts’programme, it received a great deal of criticism from the PalestinianArab sector. A group of Palestinian educators developed an alternative listfor Palestinian students in Israel, entitled Identity and Belonging: The BasicConcepts for Arab Student Programme (Amara and Kabaha 2005).

It was divided into five sections, including: historical facts and events(e.g., the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, LandDay, the Oslo Accords, the first and second Palestinian Intifadas, OrrCommission, etc.); key places and sites (e.g., Palestine, Canaan, Jerusalem,Hebron, the major Palestinian cities, unrecognised villages, the IsraeliApartheid Wall, Palestinian refugee camps, important religious sites, etc.);key institutions (Palestinian, Zionist/Israeli, and international), importantpeople (Palestinian, and Zionist/Israeli), and general concepts (e.g.,colonialism, national minority, racism, self-determination, democracy,right of return, etc.) (see Table 3). Education Minister Livnat Limorcharacterised this alternative programme as ‘extreme incitement’ againstthe state of Israel. She forbade its use in the Arab school system and

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announced that she was looking into the possibilities of bringing legalaction against the authors of the programme for incitement.2

Clearly, the Arab educational system in Israel continues to be governedby a set of political criteria which Palestinian Arabs have no say informulating. Though the Arabs were basically ‘absent’ from the Jewish-oriented general aims formulated in the 1953 Law of State Education,no parallel aims were formulated for the Arab educational system. In the1970s, 1980s,3 and as recently as the 2005 Dovrat educational reform, anumber of committees (all of which were directed by Jewish educators andpolicy makers) drafted aims specific to Arab education, but none of thedrafts were ever appended to the Law of State Education (Al-Haj 1995;Dovrat 2005). Nor was the Palestinian minority ever given autonomouscontrol over its education system or allowed to determine its aims, goalsand curricula. The Arab school system’s separate curriculum continues tobe designed and supervised by the Ministry of Education, in a process thatis heavily dominated by Jewish educators, administrators and academics(Al-Haj 2005; Golan-Agnon 2006). As Golan-Agnon (2006), chair ofthe Committee for Equality in Education in the Ministry of Education’sPedagogical Secretariat from 1999 to 2001, stated, ‘The Arab head of theArab education system not only has no authority or budget, but also nevereven says anything at the meetings. Between us we call him “the plant”.His deputy, a Jewish man appointed by the General Security Service,actually runs the department’ (p. 1080).

This contrasts sharply with the state’s Jewish religious school system,which is physically and administratively separate from the state’s secularJewish school system, and maintains completely autonomous control overits educational policy, aims and goals (Adalah 2003; Mar’i 1978; Swirski1999).

2 Press conference regarding the alternative concepts for Arab students, in Sawt Al-Haqwal-Hurriya, 9 December 2005: 14 [Arabic]).

3 The Peled Committee, appointed in 1975, was the first ever to include Arabrepresentatives. Its report proposed some significant changes, including distinct objectivesfor Arab education stating that their public education was to be grounded ‘on thefoundations of Arab culture, the achievements of science, the aspiration for peace betweenIsrael and its neighbors; and love for the land that is shared by all its citizens and loyalty tothe state of Israel’ (Ministry of Education 1975: 14). However, the Ministry of Educationchanged the wording for the Arab educational objectives in the document they published,by deleting the words ‘that is shared by all its citizens’ from the objective relating to lovefor the land; while the objectives for Jewish education were accepted without modification(Ministry of Education, 1977). As Al-Haj (2002) stated: ‘even after the revision of theobjectives proposed by the Peled committee, Jewish students are able to love Israel as theirhomeland and the state of the Jewish people, while Arab students are to internalize themessage that they are not full citizens but junior partners in Israeli society and must obeythe rules set by the Jewish majority and consistent with the basic ideology of the state’(p. 176).


Reform efforts have repeatedly failed to bring about change, sincenone of the recommendations of the many committees appointed bythe government to study or improve the Arab educational system haveever had any binding power (Abu-Saad 2001; Al-Haj 1995). As such,Palestinian Arab students continue to be subjected to a curricular andeducational programme designed to address the needs and meet theconcerns of the ruling majority, and ensure the marginalisation, de-education and control of the minority.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates how Israeli educational policy and curriculumare designed to silence the Palestinian Arab narrative while reshapingregional history for Arab students to fit the Zionist narrative. The sense ofPalestinian Arab belonging to the Zionist national project – e.g., buildingthe Jewish state – can only be partial and incomplete, if it exists at all;yet, the development of identification with the Palestinian Arab peoples issuppressed. The study of extensive required curricular materials is used tomake the Palestinian Arab student understand the history and empathisewith the suffering of the Jewish people. Thus, the policy and content ofthe state-controlled educational system for Palestinian Arabs aim to re-educate the students to accept the loss of their history and identity. And itprepares them – ideologically and practically – to accept the superior statusof the Jewish people, and the subordination of their needs and identity tothe needs of the national Zionist project.

Returning to the example of indigenous and settler geographies inNew Zealand, Carter (2005) questions whether the ‘new version’ ofthe landscape and history, that rendered the original ‘invisible’, actuallyobliterated it, or whether it was instead only lying ‘dormant and forgotten’beneath the newly developed towns, cities and farms (p. 16). She arguesthat although the European settlers’ new developments ‘reshaped thephysical place of the river’s environment and denied any Ngai Tahuconnections, the connections nevertheless remained, because of the beliefsheld by Ngai Tahu that . . . they would continue to be an integral part ofthe landscape’ (p. 16).

Settler colonial cultures have developed ways of using language, history,geography, and the educational system as a whole, to create dominantrelationships with their conquered territories that subdue or render otherassociations invisible. However, Carter (2005) suggests that:

the older landscape will be maintained through the way each groupmaintains its relationship with it. Merata Kawharu noted that older ways ofunderstanding the environment lay dormant under farms, towns and


reserves. But the way that each . . . community remembers and discusses thelandscape helps to maintain their particular way of knowing and ‘seeing’.(p. 21)

These processes of remembering and discussing the indigenous history,landscape and identity are particularly critical for the Palestinians, sincethey were completely removed from many of the places that became theIsraeli state in 1948. As such, the dominant narrative may have even morepower to obliterate indigenous identities and relationships to landscape,because they no longer physically exist. This makes it all the more essentialfor the Palestinian community in Israel to be cognizant of the de-educatingpower of the official government curriculum in the Arab school systemin Israel, and to use the memory and the re-telling of their historyto actively resist this de-educational process. In light of the widespreadsuppression of the indigenous Palestinian narrative in the formal educationsystem, the role of the community in transmitting its history and identitythrough informal channels becomes all the more critical. Samie Sharkawi,a Palestinian educator who went to the Arab schools in Israel, describesthe process as follows:

At home I was pulled towards my roots; at school, consistently andpowerfully, I was uprooted. Looking back I can smile at how home wonin the end. Education – that was the magic word, the key word. That’s wherewe have to bring both the light and heavy tools and continue to work.(Quoted in Golan-Agnon 2006: 1083)

She went on, in her professional life, to become involved in workingto make substantive changes in the Arab school curriculum. Despite themagnitude, if not seeming impossibility of the challenge, her belief inan old saying she learned from her mother prevents her from losing hope:‘You can’t hide the sun with a sieve’ (quoted in Golan-Agnon 2006: 1083).Drawing upon this analogy, Golan-Agnon (2006) suggests that it is actuallythe Ministry of Education that is engaged in the impossible task by tryingto use the curriculum in Arab schools to de-educate Palestinian studentsand dispossess them of their heritage and identity. In the final analysis, likehiding the sun with a sieve, it cannot be done.

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