The viewpoints expressed in this paper are rooted in the authors'
experience of the Israeli educational system, both as professionals
and as clients - as teachers, teachers' trainers, and authors of
educational curricula, on the one hand, and as students and mothers
of children educated in the system. In other words, we very much
live and work within Israel's educational system. In addition, our
specific perception of educational practices in Israel and in
Jerusalem stem from a shared background of peace, feminist, and
human-rights activism.
Therefore, while definitely part of the system, we are at the same
time often deeply critical of it. The following analysis focusing
on parts of this criticism presents a view constructed cumulatively
over years of our own involvement and reflection.
Three Systems of Jewish Education
Jerusalem, like the whole of Israel, operates three systems of
Jewish education. The majority of Israeli students, about 71.4
percent,1 currently attend what is perceived by Israel's secular
Jewish majority as a secular, civic school system. A second system,
attended by about 20 percent of Israel's students, are the schools
operated by religious Zionist groups, which are often (though not
always) affiliated with the National Religious Party. Such schools
are overtly religious, dedicating daily blocks of hours to
religious studies, alongside subjects such as mathematics or
history, which are considered secular. A third school system,
titled the Independent Stream, comprises a broad range of
ultra-Orthodox schools, each affiliated with a specific religious
school of thought, or political party. About 8.3 percent of all
Israeli students attend Independent Stream schools.
The percentage of students attending the religious streams is much
higher in Jerusalem than in most of Israel, giving the religious
streams added weight in the dynamic that forms this binational
city. For instance, among some 58,700 students attending primary
schools in Jerusalem in 1994-95, about 29 percent (less than a
third)2 were attending secular schools, as opposed to 68.3 percent
of secular primary school students nationwide.3 About 47 percent of
Jerusalem primary school students - almost half - were studying in
the independent ultra-Orthodox stream, compared to a nationwide
percentage of 10.3 percent of primary school students. Moreover, a
comparison of average class sizes in the primary schools may give
some indication of the allocation of resources in the Jerusalem
educational system. The most crowded Jerusalem classes were in the
secular primary schools, averaging 29.5 students per class; the
Zionist religious classes averaged 26.5 students per class, and the
schools of the Independent Stream averaged 24.7 students per class,
despite servicing the largest portion of the student
population.4
The present discussion broaches the question of how the other
people, the Palestinians populating the other part of the city of
Jerusalem, are reflected and depicted by secular Jewish education
in the city. The overview it offers will cover the secular school
system but not the religious Zionist stream, which is also highly
nationalistic, or the independent ultra-Orthodox stream. Research
conducted among students of 27 countries, by a team based at
Hamburg University, has found the students of religious Zionist
schools in Israel to be the most nationalistic and most racist
group of all those studied by the project.5
Our assumption is also that attitudes to, and perceptions of, the
Other in the independent, Orthodox school system are fundamentally
similar to those of the religious Zionist system, with the
difference that they tend to be even less tolerant and more
blatantly expressed.
Secular Jewish Education in Jerusalem and the
'Other'
The perception of the Other instilled through secular education in
Israel is a product of the mainstream culture, which is
Jewish-Zionist, Ashkenazi, male-centered and militaristic. This
educational system includes almost no manifestations of any of the
non-dominant cultures of Israeli society: Palestinian culture,
Sephardi/Oriental Jewish culture, woman-centered or feminist
thinking, etc. For the most part, such schools of thought are
simply absent from the curricula, embodied in the world of the
Sabra-accented, Ashkenazi-descended, male Israeli Jew. The Other is
accordingly anyone who differs from the "us," either in nationality
(such as Palestinians), language/accent (such as new immigrants),
skin color (such as Ethiopian Jews), appearance (such as victims of
cerebral palsy), ethnicity, gender (such as non-military and thus
second-class women citizens). The educational system works,
although often implicitly, and to a large extent probably
unknowingly, to channel children into the mainstream. The products
of its success are those who have adopted the prevalent views of
this stream, that is, of the ruling culture.
Meanwhile, although this may often be inadvertent, the Other is
depicted as either inferior or as the enemy in a broad range of
forceful messages conveyed through Israeli secular education. And
indeed, such a depiction of the Other is one of the major bases of
the militarized education required and practiced in a society that
raises its children to comply with mandatory military service.
Dehumanization and brutalization, viewing the Other as a non-person
or an inferior creature, are components of the mindset that allows
one, as a soldier, to take another life.
Festivals and Their Significance
In pre-school and in the first six grades, children spend large
blocks of time studying Jewish holidays. Hanukkah, the Festival of
Lights, for example, commemorates the revolt of the Jews against
Greek rule in 167 BC. The uprising broke out after decades of Greek
control, in response to the coercion of Jews into the Hellenic
religion. Pre-school and elementary school children are taught that
the Greeks persecuted us, only to be defeated by the heroic Jewish
Maccabees. Constructing a clear dichotomy of good guys vs. bad
guys, the emphasis is on strong identification with the brave
fighters of the Maccabees who defeated the evil Greeks. Rather than
a universal message of freedom of religion, what is stressed is the
importance of Jewish freedom and nationalism, of power, of the
strength of the Maccabees.
The cumulative message of this seemingly "innocent" celebration and
study of festivals is twofold, then. On the one hand, it implies
that "the whole world is against us, one enemy after another have
set out to destroy us." On the other hand, it states "we're alive
to tell it, we've persevered," focusing on heroism, strength,
combat as the major means of survival. The lore, rituals and
traditions of religious and national holidays studied and observed
every year, from pre-school to sixth grade in Israeli schools, thus
convey the emotional and cognitive message that Israeli Jews must
be strong and united so as to face mortal danger. It is a message
of the victimized, rooted in the history of anti-Semitism and,
particularly, in the residual trauma of the Holocaust.
This message is introduced to children at an early age, prior to
the development of independently critical faculties. This sharply
decreases the likelihood of subsequent doubts, questions or
re-examinations of the assumptions, whether conscious or
unconscious, underpinning these holidays.
Another holiday - Jerusalem Day - specifically honors Jerusalem as
the capital of the Jewish state and homeland. Pre-school children
spend hours cutting out and pasting up images of the Old City and
the temple, invariably using gold and silver paper on black
backgrounds, to depict the gold and silver domes of the al-Aqsa and
Omar mosques alongside the temple. These images iron out the
complex historical-political realities, representing the city as an
ahistoric, timeless entity not unlike the imaginary,
gold-and-silver castles of fairy tales: an idealized, romanticized
perception of the city, detached from concrete reality, conceived
through an exclusive prism of Jewishness vs. non-Jewishness. Within
such a sovereign Jewish entity, the city is said to be "united" or
"reunited" as Israel's "eternal capital."
Oppressor and Oppressed
The Old Testament is studied consistently in Israeli secular
schools, over eleven years of school, from second grade on, for
three to four hours a week. These Bible studies provide an occasion
to focus on the persecution of the Jews, for instance by Pharaohs,
and the exodus from Egypt. The implied analogy to the Jews' flight
from Europe and the Holocaust, and their conquest of the ancient
homeland of Palestine from its native inhabitants, is
obvious.
In addition, the very antiquity of the biblical source and its
worldwide recognition as a revered, authoritative text, are taken
to demonstrate that "we" were "really" here first, that the Jewish
people has a rightful claim to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel,
and particularly to its capital, "united" Jerusalem.
In the higher grades, history, too, has traditionally been taught
from a mainly Israeli-Jewish, Zionist perspective. From this
viewpoint, anti-Semitism is the major axis along which the Jewish
people relates to other nations. History, by and large, has been
perceived as two millennia of anti-Semitism, during which various
oppressors plotted against the Jews. Thus history studies have
added rational "facts" to the emotional sense, derived at a younger
age, of a continuum of plots against Jews in different countries,
occurring in contexts as disparate as medieval Spain (the Spanish
Inquisition and the 1492 expulsion of Spanish Jews), and the
17th-century Ukraine (the Chmielnicki peasant revolt and pogroms).
The resulting view has been simplistic, black and white, posing a
choice between just and unjust, right and wrong.
Less Demonization
Until very recently, modern history in the curricula of the higher
grades usually presented the historiography of the
Jewish-Palestinian conflict as a military history, battle by
battle. For the most part, it omitted the cultural, economic, or
social contexts in which both these battles and other events were
taking place. Here too, the actual Palestinian Arabs, whose homes
and lands were at stake in the history of Israel's foundation and
growth, were effectively erased from the picture, obscured behind
the vague and inclusive term "Arabs." The central motif was clear
and straightforward: Jews defending their lives against their Arab
aggressors.
In the past few years, a serious attempt has been made to provide a
broader and more varied account of national Jewish history. The
Ministry of Education changed the entire structure of history
studies, canceling the former rigid divide between world and
national history. As a result, several new textbooks for high
school and the upper grade of junior high were published. In
bringing up to date the history both of the twentieth century and
of the Israeli-Arab conflict, they placed the establishment of the
State of Israel in the broader context of other national struggles,
such as India's independence and partition from Pakistan, or the
wars in Vietnam. In addition, Israeli history was no longer related
as a history of wars, but now devoted substantial space, rather
than merely paying lip service, to issues such as immigration or
economic development. In these textbooks, modern history was
brought up to date to include the Israeli-Egyptian peace accords,
the Oslo agreement and the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty. As a
result, the term and conceptual framework of "peace" entered the
discourse as a feasible reality, and the Other became somewhat more
visible and human.
Palestinians are identified in such books as Palestinians, rather
than lumped together and erased under the category of "Arabs." The
narrative became more complex, describing controversy and divisive
issues in Israel. Some books, for instance, wrote of the
Palestinian national catastrophe of 1948, introducing the
Palestinian term "Nakba" and clearly connecting this event to the
national success achieved by Zionism in founding the State of
Israel. Regional and world conditions were included. Arab countries
were portrayed as responding to, and acting within, a variety of
global forces and trends: economic, political, social, religious.
This has decreased the demonization implied through earlier
textbooks and concepts of history, supporting perceptions of Arabs
and Arab countries as explicable, rational, and, therefore,
potential partners for peace negotiations and treaties. These new
works are not presented incontestably as "the truth" and don't
conceal the author's views.
'Insufficiently Zionist'
The actual substance and views presented by these books, and their
authors' relatively explicit positioning, have fed considerable
controversy. All of these textbooks (which only number about 3-4)
were compiled and developed according to the guidelines prescribed
by the Ministry of Education core curriculum. In no way can they be
suspected of non-Zionist or anti-Zionist perspectives, or even of
truly multiple narratives. The outlook they convey is a firmly
Zionist, though liberal, one. However, heated public debate aroused
by this school of curricula engulfed Israel's Knesset and media,
which saw the controversy in political rather than educational
terms.
The current situation includes the disqualification of one of the
more controversial textbooks, by the new minister of education,
Limor Livnat, a Likud right-winger. The grounds cited for
disqualifying it for study in schools were its failure to
incorporate sufficiently Zionist views. Very recently, another
local peace education curriculum developed by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa
Municipality, dealing with tolerance and Jewish-Arab coexistence,
was disqualified by an appointed committee within the Ministry of
Education.
The last few years in Israel have witnessed some honest educational
work aiming to provide more complex pictures of reality, presenting
divergent views of the Jewish-Arab conflict, and of the Arab Other.
They have seen the beginnings of the Arabs' portrayal as
understandable, equal human beings. However, this approach still
constitutes the center of an ideological and political power
struggle being waged between right-wing and left-wing circles in
Israel, the outcome of which still remains to be seen.
The Holocaust and Its Lesson
Finally, the Holocaust has naturally been the linchpin of this
multi-channeled portrayal of Jews as victims throughout all of
history. It represents the epitome of the Jewish sense of
powerlessness, manifested in the myth whereby Jews went "like sheep
to the slaughter." While children study the uprising in the Warsaw
Ghetto and the activities of Jewish partisans, the central messages
carried by schools, the media, commemorative institutions and
rituals, emphasize the victimization of the Jews, with which the
children are called upon to identify. During the Holocaust they/we
were helpless and vanquished. It could occur and be imposed upon
them/us because they/we had no independent means of protection, no
state or, in other words, no army and no sovereign territory to
escape to. This, it is stated, can never be allowed to happen
again.
The account usually provides no options outside the victim vs.
perpetrator pattern, no alternative strategies for self-protection
(such as peace, for example). The internal world-picture conveyed
is that of the persecuted, an internal reality characterized by
aggressiveness, vulnerability, anger and guilt. As absolute
victims, they/we cannot wrong, only be wronged. All evil is
projected onto the Other, our enemy, who understands nothing but
the language of force. And force or strength is the only option
that will ensure our physical survival. The strongest survive; the
weak are in danger of extinction. The only choice is to be strong
and ready for war. The victim psychology provides justification for
wars into which we are forced, wars of which we are - again and
always - the victims, as they/we were in the Holocaust. It provides
full justification for the demonization of the enemy. The highly
publicized Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961), gave expression to
the central role of the Holocaust in the education of new
generations of Israelis and Jews.
A three-year study of students in high schools and teachers'
colleges, conducted by Nili Keren, Gila Zelikovitz and Yair Oron,
has found that many of the students - now three or four generations
after the Holocaust, did not view it as history, but rather as
pertaining to their own existence.6 Keren has found that, due to
the way in which the topic is handled and taught, many students
tend toward the paranoid attitude that the entire world is against
us. While they demonstrate considerable knowledge of anti-Semitism
and the Holocaust, they show very little knowledge about subjects
such as Christianity, Islam, the Jewish-Arab conflict, and they
understand the concept of racism to pertain mainly to Jews.
Jewish secular education in Israel and Jerusalem thus gradually and
consistently, if not always consciously or intentionally, has been
constructing a message which is particularistic rather than
universal, portraying the Jews in the constant face of an enemy.
This interpretation hardly needs the history of the
Jewish-Palestinian conflict to augment it. As the State of Israel
is the only answer to the Holocaust, the Arabs have been equated
with the worst and most nightmarish of the successive forces out to
destroy the Jews. It remains to be seen whether the recent
indications of the changing, more peace-oriented attitude towards
our neighbors will be able to exert a real influence on the
educational system.
Interestingly, the secular school system constructs this portrayal
implicitly and largely through omission rather than the overt
representation of Arabs or Palestinians. During most of the early
years of secular education, Arabs as such are not explicitly
present. Students at non-religious schools repeatedly report that
they have hardly ever discussed Palestinians in class, as a study
topic.
In studying Jerusalem and its significance, what is stressed is its
importance to the three main monotheistic religions, unrelated to
the actual neighbors, the physical, living Palestinians who share
the city with the students. It is put into highly abstract,
generalized terms - Christianity, Islam, Judaism - obscuring the
human embodiment of these terms in communities and ethnic groups.
The image is thus idealized, presenting a fiction of coexistence,
pluralistic, tolerant, visible in the churches and mosques and holy
Jewish sites side by side. The focus is on the buildings, the stone
shells, or, at most, on the usually peaceful flow of
tourists/pilgrims of all religions from all over the world. But the
congregations, the people who populate these buildings regularly,
and do not coexist peacefully, have been "whited out."
When Jewish students in Jerusalem study the environs of their
schools, they tend to concentrate on the segregation between Jews
from different Diaspora communities and its reflection in various
Jerusalem neighborhoods. Little mention is made of eastern
Jerusalem and its Palestinian population. This entire part of what
politicians, the media, national and school ceremonies often term
the "reunited city" stays shrouded in silence, fully in keeping
with the fact, physically known and obvious to most secular Jewish
Jerusalemites, that the other half of the city is dangerous, out of
bounds, never visited.
Similarly silenced is the evidence of a previous Palestinian
presence in parts of West Jerusalem. N. described a field day they
had conducted a year before he/she was interviewed, when students
explored several neighborhoods surrounding the school. One group
went to the old part of Malha. "I looked at the old architecture of
the neighborhood. Houses built by Arabs who lived there and I think
in the Six-Day War they were evacuated. How it's a different kind
of building, structured in a different way. I don't think there was
any discussion of the fact that they were evacuated." Here too the
people and the complexity of relations with them, whether present
or absent, are erased, and the buildings are isolated as a safe
study subject.
Jewish Self-Perception
When some of the students were asked about what they learned under
the heading of "Tolerance," a nationwide study topic in civic
studies, it was the secular-Orthodox chasm that occurred to them in
answer. The present reality of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict was
a non-topic, even though some of these students had participated in
an extended series of meetings with Palestinian contemporaries from
nearby Israeli Arab towns. Such programs were described by several
children as "nothing much," or "not serious," N. said.
It is not surprising, of course, that these children couldn't speak
each other's language. However, while a majority of Arab children
growing up in Israel usually end up learning a great deal of
Hebrew, which they need in order to function in the Hebrew-speaking
state, most Jewish children get a maximum of an hour or two a week
of Arabic, for one to two years during primary school. Many study
no Arabic at all, and those who do, often tend to forget the basics
due to disuse. This fact goes hand in hand with what we view as an
erasure of the existence, the history and even the presence of
Palestinian Arabs in both the country and the city of Jerusalem. We
believe that this erasure is one of the means of maintaining two
levels of awareness, vital to the liberal Jewish consciousness
embodied in the secular school system. It is an aspect of the split
of this consciousness into two detached and non-communicating
realms, a split that keeps at bay the duality, clash and dissonance
between these realms.
On one level is the perception of the Other that we have described
above. On another, partitioned from the first by a barrier of
silence, is secular Jewish self-perception. On the first level, the
Other has been largely stereotyped, dehumanized, perceived in black
and white, providing full justification for his/her brutalization.
Meanwhile, on the separate second level, a liberal self-image is
carefully preserved through the avoidance of any overt statement of
hatred. The liberal, secular consciousness cannot afford to see
itself as intolerant, hating, dehumanizing, xenophobic. So the
image of the Other almost automatically mapped onto the Arab has
been constructed, whether intentionally or not, through hidden
means built into the secular educational system. The bearers and
receivers of this secular liberal education can accordingly retain
an image of themselves as tolerant, open-minded, humane and,
consequently, right. And the silencing mechanism is established as
a central tool, a message in its own right for managing the
dissonance between their attitudes towards Palestinian Arabs and
their liberal self-image.
Some Concluding Remarks
Since October 2000, we have witnessed a spiraling rise in violence
in Israel-Palestine. A large percentage of the Jewish-Israeli
public have concluded that the Palestinians "betrayed us," that
they supposedly chose armed struggle over a very generous peace
offer, that therefore they are no longer serious partners for peace
negotiations. Many of the people expressing such views would
formerly have classified themselves as liberal or left-wing. In our
view, the speed with which such people have reverted to earlier
characterizations of the Palestinians as a one-dimensional enemy is
actually strong evidence of how effective Jewish education has been
in entrenching a demonized, superficial and intolerant image of the
Other.
The sense of "betrayal" is explained by many as resulting from the
Palestinians' alleged irrationality and unpredictability: "We
offered them more than ever before and they preferred
violence…." This, too, demonstrates how easily the
Israeli-Jewish public, all products of the state education system,
regress to viewing the Other in stereotypical, dehumanized
black-and-white terms. Questions such as: What were the
Palestinians' reasons? What arguments were they offering? How did
they reach their conclusions and choose their actions? These all
stay unasked: the automatic assumption, in the best tradition of
the Orientalism described by Edward Said, is that the Palestinians,
in fact, have no good reasons, that they act on irrational
emotions, vindictively, impulsively, even when such action is
against their own best interests.
This reaction not only follows from, but also feeds or re-feeds
into, educational concepts and practices. It is part of the vicious
circle re-arousing and reinforcing a stereotypical and fearful
image of the Other. Disqualification of the new textbooks on
history and coexistence is a tangible part of this circle. While
these steps originated with the new rightist minister of education,
the disqualification has not aroused any real resistance or debate
among most educators. This itself reveals how deep-set the
prevalent images are and how readily educators have reverted to
them under the present circumstances.
While today's circumstances may seem increasingly hopeless, it is
our belief that, in the end, the only viable alternative will be a
peace agreement and cooperation between the two peoples of Israel
and Palestine. However, if there is to be peace, it can only exist
- in the long run and especially in Jerusalem - if it becomes a
peace between people, not merely between peoples. As far as Israel
is concerned, it is unclear how many Israelis can grow up to create
such a peace, while the education of Jewish children in all of
Israel, as well as Jerusalem, includes - in its very structure -
the mindset of barring and overpowering the Other. As demonstrated
by the international Hamburg University study - conducted after the
Oslo agreement and very soon after the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty -
Israeli students (both secular and religious) ascribe relatively
little importance to peace.7
Throughout the years of peace negotiations conducted with the
Palestinians and with various Arab states, there has never been an
education committee among the many bodies appointed to the business
of peace-making. At no point did anyone seem to be seriously asking
what fundamental changes are needed in the way Israeli and
Palestinian children are schooled, in the material they are taught,
if they are to become adults who live with each other in peace.
Achieving peace is viewed as one more military operation. This is a
forceful example of the militaristic thinking that has guided peace
processes in our region, and of the lack of investment in
deconstructing the enmity, of truly building alternative ways of
thinking and acting. Peace is perceived in Israel, and in Israeli
education, as merely the lack of war.
1. These and the following nationwide statistics were
reported by Chinuch Acher, October 8, 1996, and pertain to the
school year of 1994-95.
2. These and the following figures for Jerusalem are based on The
Israel Statistical Annals 1995, Central Bureau of Statistics, pp.
267-268.
3. These and the following nationwide figures were reported by
Chinuch Acher, op. cit.
4. Ibid.
5. Reported on by Arieh Caspi, Ha'aretz, Nov. 11, 1996.
6. Reported on by Joseph Algazi, Ha'aretz, Aug. 15, 1996.
7. Arieh Caspi, Ha'aretz, op. cit.
