Israel, Palestine, and Teaching

We watched in horror as Israeli tanks and bulldozers blasted into Palestinian neighborhoods in the West Bank in late March and early April. Ostensibly, this was an operation to root out the networks responsible for launching the terrible suicide attacks within Israel. But the invasion was carried out with little regard for civilian casualties. "This is horrifying beyond belief," said UN Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, when he surveyed the scene at the end of April.

Why should Rethinking Schools comment on these events? What do they have to do with the lives of teachers and students in the United States? Plenty. The situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories - and the entire Middle East - has never been more perilous, has never felt so intractable, so likely to spin out of control. It puts all of us at greater risk. In narrow dollars and cents terms, the United States offers Israel precious resources to buy the tanks, bulldozers, and armored personnel carriers that crashed through Palestinian towns and refugee camps - instead of using those funds on pressing human needs like education and health care. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid - $10 million a day, according to former President Jimmy Carter, writing in The New York Times - a clear instance of our money spent on bombs instead of books. And as educators, we ought to care not just for children here but all over the world.

From a curricular standpoint, teaching materials and texts have largely failed to equip students to reflect intelligently about the root causes of this long conflict and the U.S. role in it. We need to educate ourselves on this crisis because we need to educate our students.

EDUCATION MINISTRY RANSACKED

The attacks on the Palestinian education system during the recent Israeli incursions reveal that authorities were not simply hunting down "terrorists." They aimed to shatter an entire cultural infrastructure. According to eyewitness accounts as well as reports in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, on April 3, at about 4 p.m., approximately 30 armored personnel carriers and tanks broke through the gates of the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Education in Ramallah. The Ministry oversees the schooling of 1 million Palestinian children. Soldiers ordered four employees to open office doors; when keys couldn't be found to some of the doors, the Israelis broke them down or blasted them open. Israeli Defense Force soldiers vandalized or looted everything they could find. They stole or destroyed computers, overhead projectors, VCRs, and other educational equipment. Sometimes they simply cracked open computers and tore out their hard-drives. Soldiers stole or ripped up files, student records, and official transcripts, leaving debris heaped on office floors, and they blasted into metal filing cabinets, destroying the contents. Israelis also blew open the Ministry of Education's main safe, stealing promissory notes, cash, checks, and checkbooks. (For more details, see the website of the Israeli peace group, Gush-Shalom, http://gush-shalom.org. A listing of web resources is on page 25.)

Israeli authorities contend that this latest operation was launched only after their country had endured horrifying suicide bombings. Indeed the Israeli people have suffered dreadfully from the indiscriminate suicide attacks - and nothing in this editorial should be read to minimize this suffering.

But it is disingenuous for Ariel Sharon's government to present its latest incursions solely as retaliation for Israeli civilian casualties, or to "root out terrorism." Israel's attacks on Palestinian civil society have many antecedents, and suggest other aims: to crush the development of a viable Palestinian culture, to deny Palestinians' quest for statehood based in the West Bank, and to preserve Israeli colonial occupation. Israel seeks to maintain an apartheid-like system of vast inequality, where Gaza and West Bank settlers - 80 percent of whom were born in the United States or Europe - live in subsidized communities on Palestinian land, have access to all the best resources, especially scarce water, and even drive on their own private roads.

In 1989, during the first intifada (Palestinian uprising), three Rethinking Schools editors traveled to Gaza and the West Bank on an educators' delegation sponsored by the Middle East Justice Network. They witnessed similar Israeli attacks on Palestinian education: The government had shut every school in the West Bank - all 1,194 of them - and had even forbidden teachers to create and disseminate make-up work to their students during the forced school closures. Librarians were prohibited from ordering and shelving books. Universities were also ordered closed, and professors could be jailed even for holding informal seminars in their homes. In Gaza, where schools remained open, Israeli soldiers regularly shot at students with lethal "rubber bullets" - actually steel pellets the size of marbles covered with a thin plastic coating - and tear gas canisters (labeled "Made in the U.S.A.").

Even before Israel had shut the schools, it had tried to suppress anything Palestinian - outlawing the display of the Palestinian flag and banning any school map or text that contained the word "Palestine."

So this latest incursion is not an anomaly. It's part of a long-standing pattern to stifle Palestinians' quest for a nation.

OUR ROLE

We in the United States have a special responsibility to work for a just peace in the Middle East. It's our dollars that bankroll Israel's repressive policies. Rethinking Schools urges readers to take action on several levels:

• Demand that both the United States and Israel heed the broad international consensus calling for a twostate solution and for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. This would include ending the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, dismantling colonial settlements, and recognizing, in the words of a UN resolution passed just this past March, that the region must become a place "where two states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side within secure and recognized borders." Such a solution will be neither ideal nor easy to achieve, but it is the only currently realistic alternative to endless war and occupation. Israel and the United States remain virtually alone in their failure to acknowledge that these are the conditions necessary for a lasting peace.
  
  
• Initiate gestures of solidarity with Palestinians whose lives have been so disrupted by the recent invasion and with Israelis who are working for justice. These might include writing letters, signing petitions, sending money to solidarity organizations, or even traveling to the Occupied Territories to offer support. The courageous efforts of the Israeli "refuseniks" - soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories - offer a measure of hope and especially deserve our solidarity.
  
  
• Endeavor to create curriculum that can engage our students - and fellow educators - in thinking critically about the roots of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, that can foster a critical media literacy about U.S. press coverage of events in Israel/Palestine, and that can nurture empathy for the lives of Palestinians, who have too often been portrayed solely as terrorists or pathetic refugees. But a word of caution:We need to recognize that when we critique Israel, this can feed some students' and colleagues' anti-Semitism - a prejudice with a long and sordid history in America and the world. This is one reason why it's so important to emphasize the diversity of opinion among Jews inside and outside Israel. It was not "the Jews" who prosecuted the recent incursions into Palestinian territories - it was the state of Israel. And it's a reason why critical inquiry into the Palestine/Israel conflict needs the context of a broader curricular examination of the roots and consequences of anti-Semitism.

As we have on other occasions, Rethinking Schools offers its critical teaching listserv as a site for discussion of these and other vital issues. Our students - and our society more broadly - will be best served by our dealing forthrightly with the most difficult issues of our age.

Summer 2002