Editorial: They Can Take Everything but Our Minds
In the last issue of al-Majdal, we explored legal avenues for holding accountable Israeli perpetrators and those complicit in violations of international law. All the pending cases discussed in that issue have since been dismissed, whether through legislative intervention (as with the Daraj case in Spain), or findings that the cases were not justiciable or the plaintiff did not have standing (as with the al-Haq case in the U.K. and the Bil'in case in Canada). Once again, Palestinian victims were denied effective remedies because challenging Israeli impunity was judged to be too politically sensitive for the courtrooms of the richest and most powerful countries in the world.
In the same period, however, Israeli impunity was
challenged by another judge who delivered his team's assessment of
war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel and
Hamas during Israel's military offensive against the occupied Gaza
Strip between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009. At the end of
September, the U.N. “Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict”
headed by Judge Richard Goldstone submitted the Mission's
meticulously researched report to the U.N. Human Rights Council,
including a set of practical recommendations aimed to ensure that
Israeli perpetrators will be held to account for the first time.
The “Goldstone Report” is assessed in Reem Mazzawi's commentary for
this issue of al-Majdal
.
While the Goldstone Report and its recommendations were
ultimately adopted by the Human Rights Council, it is important to
note that the Council had initially decided to defer the vote on it
to its next session in the spring of 2010. Such a course of action
would have stripped the report of much of its value in securing
redress for the Palestinian victims. The news that came out of the
U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva was that the official
Palestinian delegation played a major role in initiating the
scandalous deferral. It was at this point that Palestinian civil
society came alive; phone calls to officials, press releases,
articles in various Palestinian and international media outlets,
and demonstrations erupted in protest, and ultimately played the
central role in pushing the Palestinian Authority and the PLO to
give the Report their full backing. As a result, the Human Rights
Council resumed debate of the Report in its 12th Special Session
and ultimately endorsed the report and its recommendations on 16
October 2009.
By passing this test, Palestinian civil society proved its
mettle in defending the fundamental rights of the Palestinian
people. The individuals running the organizations and networks that
make up this civil society are largely a generation of Palestinian
activists raised in the 1980s and the first Intifada, which was a
period marked by intensive popular political education among
Palestinian society. This education has enabled them to continue
the struggle for the rights of the Palestinian people until today,
despite the severe constraints posed by Israel's occupation,
apartheid and colonization and the fragmentation of the Palestinian
people.
One of the questions often raised is whether future
generations of Palestinians will be able to continue and develop
the struggle for justice and freedom – a question that forces us to
examine the current state of Palestinian education. Specifically,
we need to look at how children and youth learn about the history,
geography, society, politics, and culture of Palestine, and about
Zionism and Israel's colonialism, occupation and apartheid, which
constitute the root cause of the ongoing Nakba
of the Palestinian people. The importance of understanding the
Nakba – the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestine - stems
from the need to challenge and reverse it. This issue of
al-Majdal examines current educational efforts which
some authors in this issue have called Palestinian “National
Education,” “Teaching Palestine,” or what we call “Nakba
education.”
Nakba education is not new to the work of Badil.
Our Youth Education & Activation Project is
currently in its fourth year, supplementing the education of over
300 Palestinian refugee children aged 14-17, throughout historic
Palestine as well as in Syria, each year. Through the program,
children learn and discuss the contemporary history of Palestine,
the living conditions of displaced Palestinians in other parts of
the world, and the rights of Palestinian refugees. Youth
participants visit their places of origin, contribute to annual
Nakba commemorations, and develop ideas on how to defend their
rights.
Nakba education is not limited to Palestinians. The growth of
international solidarity with Palestinians has shown time and again
that the most successful form of solidarity starts with
self-education and the education of others. The tools and methods
for such education and awareness raising have varied, but there is
still much work to be done to share the experiences and lessons
learned on how best to sensitize activists and the broader public
to the Palestinian Nakba – a topic that has been neglected far too
long.
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, Nakba Education means more
than challenging a “sensitivity” or breaking a taboo. Nakba
education is anathema to the Israeli system itself. A law bill
currently under discussion in the Israeli parliament, for example,
proposes to effectively criminalize the commemoration of the
Nakba,1 and consecutive ministers
of education have made sure that public schools in Israel would
teach Zionist history and concepts and exclude the history and
experience of the Palestinian people. Thus, for example, Israel's
current Minister of Education Gideon Saar announced on 1 September
2009, that his Ministry would launch yet another initiative for
“entering Zionist concepts into the Arab education system” and to
“begin teaching a new subject containing Zionist principles such as
the Hebrew calendar, the Israeli national anthem, and the
centrality of Jerusalem [to the state of Israel]” as part of the
curriculum in the coming school year.2
His ministry has also pulled the new history textbook "Nationalism:
Building a State in the Middle East," from the hands of history
teaches until the chapter on the Nakba is modified to remove any
mention of the expulsion of Palestinian refugees.3
The authors in this issue of al-Majdal, are directly
involved in the process of Nakba education in various places,
directing their work at different communities, and cover various
aspects of the topic. Rami Salameh looks at education in
Palestinian elementary and high-school classrooms and the need to
develop the pedagogical methods in Palestinian Authority schools.
Said Barghouti examines the way Israeli history textbooks over the
past forty years have presented the history of the land to
Palestinian students. Dan Walsh examines the way the “Middle East
Conflict” is taught to U.S. high school students, suggesting that
Palestinian poster art can be used to present this topic in a more
accurate and student-empowering way. Also in the U.S.,
members of the Palestine Education Project
describe their work with students in Brooklyn to learn about the
experience of Palestinians and draw connections with their own
lived experiences. Nidal al-Azza shares his reflections on
teaching Palestinian refugee rights under international law to
Palestinian law students. Also looking at education in the
classroom, Amaya Galili describes How do
we say Nakba in Hebrew? a recently
launched resource packet developed by Zochrot in Hebrew for
teachers wishing to engage Jewish-Israeli students about the
Nakba.
Other authors focus on Nakba education outside of the
classroom. Khaled al-Azraq, a political prisoner for the past
twenty years, tells us how the Palestinian prisoners' movement has
educated its cadre. Mo'ataz al-Dajani looks at the efforts of
al-Jana Center in Lebanon to engage Palestinian children and youth
in the writing of their own history by engaging with older
generations and with their surroundings, while Rich Wiles describes
the educational activities of refugee community centers in the
Bethlehem district.
While the articles in this issue provide
a small sample of the forms that Nakba education can take, the
experiences and work described by these authors offer a useful
guide for others engaging in this field. Sharing and learning from
the experiences of others is one of the ways educators can learn,
and this issue of al-Majdal aims
to be a contribution to this shared learning
process.
Endnotes
1Badil Resource Center, "The World Must hold
Israeli Racism to Account," Press Release of 4 June 2009:
http://www.badil.org/en/press-releases/50-press-releases-2009/368-press507-09
2Arabs 48, "Saar Retreats from Imposing
'Hatikva' on Arab Schools but Insists on Zionist Principles":
http://www.arabs48.com/display.x?cid=6&sid=5&id=65376
3Or Kashti, "Israel pulls textbook with
chapter on Nakba," Haaretz, 21 October 2009:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122006.html