JULIA PITNERISRAEL
PALESTINE POSTED
Friends of 11-year-old Palestinian student Lian Al Shaer get emotional on the first day of the school year, Aug. 29, 2022, near a picture of Lian, who was killed after sustaining injuries from the recent Israeli air strikes in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip. Israel claims that it is the curricula in schools that cause violence, instead of Palestinians’ lived experiences. (PHOTO BY YOUSEF MASOUD/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2022, pp. 24-25
Special Report
By Julia Pitner
THE ISSUE OF PALESTINIAN TEXTBOOKS is not a new one as indicated by the title of this article, which was taken from an academic piece written by Fouad Moughrabi in 2001. Twenty-one years and 14 curricula studies later, the issue of Palestinian textbooks remains as political as ever. Israel is again claiming that that Palestinian violence is caused by what is being taught in schools and the U.S. Congress is following suit demanding yet another review of the curricula.
In 2019, the European Union took the same path with a commissioned study on incitement in Palestinian textbooks which was completed just last year, after claims by IMPACT-se, a Jerusalem-based watchdog, that the curriculum for 2018-19 was “more radical than those previously published.”
“There have been allegations that some elements in Palestinian school textbooks are not in line with international standards for peace education. These allegations have been contested by multiple sources. Therefore, the EU is planning to fund a study, to be carried out by an independent and internationally recognized research institute,” an EU spokesperson confirmed to Euronews in May 2019. The EU froze funds to the Palestinian Authority until the study was completed by the renowned Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. Although the EU released the funds in 2021, the conclusions of the 2019-2021 Georg Eckert Institute report were immediately criticized and “contested by multiple sources.”
This has been the fate of all previous such studies since the first in 1998, by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) at the behest of the U.S. State Department, which came in response to allegations of anti-Semitic statements in their textbooks from the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (now called IMPACT-se).
The controversies of textbook curricula are not new nor is it unique to the Palestinian situation. It is happening inside the U.S. right now, as it has in other countries. As Michael Apple, an educational theorist who specializes in curricula and research explains in his work, textbooks are the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable class, race, gender/sex and religious groups. This was underscored by Moughrabi in his 2001 article when he wrote that by “focusing on what is included and excluded in school textbooks, these controversies serve a proxy for wider questions of power relations in society.” In the Palestinian context, these power relations and struggles are exacerbated by the ongoing political situation and are subjected to demands for review of only the Palestinian curricula in relation to incitement. The history, culture and context are thus sanitized, and the results used, not to improve educational standards, but as a weapon to further delegitimize the Palestinian narrative and lived experience.
The Israeli claim that it is the curricula in schools that is causing the ongoing Palestinian violence is disingenuous at best and willfully ignores the political and historical context. Before 1994, Palestinians had no control over what was taught in their schools. The Palestinian citizens of Israel were taught the Israeli approved curricula and yet there were protests and clashes inside Israel, commemorated every year by Palestinians as Land Day. After 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians there used heavily Israeli-censored textbooks from Jordan and Egypt, respectively. Yet again, there were ongoing protests and clashes, the most famous of which was the first intifada, which lasted until the advent of the Madrid peace process.
Although Middle East history is not a strong point among American legislators, it is an election year and so the House Foreign Affairs Committee jumped right back into the Palestinian textbook controversy with its September passage of the “Peace and Tolerance in Palestinian Education Act” bill. The bill sat dormant for over a year in the MENA subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee but was dusted off shortly before the chair, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) left his position in Congress to become the new head of the American Jewish Committee.
The original sponsor the bill, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and all but three of the 47 co-sponsors have benefited from pro-Israel campaign support while of the 20 members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, only four members of the Foreign Affairs Committee—Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Albio Sires (D-NJ), Gerald Connolly (D-VA) and Young Kim (R-CA)—have received no campaign support from pro-Israel groups.
The bill, should it become law, would once more require the Department of State to report on the curriculum used in schools in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority and in Gaza (aka UNRWA and Hamas-led schools) on whether the materials used encourage violence or intolerance toward other nations or ethnic groups, document steps the Palestinian Authority is taking to reform such materials, and whether U.S. foreign assistance is used to fund the dissemination of the offending materials. However, unlike past studies, Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), also a recipient of pro-Israel support, added two additional items to look out for—criticism of Israel and use of the word “apartheid” to characterize Israeli rule over Palestinians. Given the appetite his state, along with many others, seem to have for banning books and “critical race theory” aka inclusive history, ignoring the history and lived experiences of Palestinians seems somehow fitting.
In the end, the conflict is not inspired by the content of the textbooks but by the content of the politics of the conflict. Before the full House votes on this bill, the members would be well served to review the report of the U.N. Human Rights’ Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel on the root causes of the ongoing conflict there. Simply put, it’s the daily wounds of the occupation. Oh right, they are currently fighting to defund the Commission because it’s “biased.”
Julia Pitner is a contributing editor of the Washington Report. She lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
