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From Middletown to the Middle East

~ Reflections on travel and teaching

From Middletown to the Middle East

Tag Archives: Palestine

To prevent attacks like Zion Square, Israeli schools must teach about Palestinians

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by tgilheany in Uncategorized

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Dan Bar-on, education, Gideon Sa'ar, Hebron trips, Israel, lynching, Palestine, Sami Adwan, violence, Zion Square

Zion Square (credit: Fabcom on Flickr)

Last Thursday night a group of Jewish Israeli teens attacked Palestinian teens in downtown West Jerusalem while hundreds watched in what the police are calling an attempted lynching. One young man was beaten almost to death.

In my interviews I spoke to several Israeli teachers who said it would not be possible in their school to teach the Palestinian narrative. One teacher said regretfully, “This school specifically is not a school of exposing. Because I teach history, I can talk about the politics and the Arabs and the Palestinians, but in general, they are the enemy. It’s not ‘let’s feel sorry.’” An educational scholar I spoke to while designing my questions explained to me that even using the word “narratives” would identify me as on the left, and so I should avoid it.

This is not to say that I did not encounter some schools that were seeking to broaden their students’ views. The head of one National Religious school reported that his school “sort of insists, and I think it’s pretty rare here, that they have a basic introduction to Islam and to Christianity. Actually it was a time when a Catholic nun to speak to the boys, which was quite an event. In the last years we’ve been bringing some Muslims to speak about being Muslim, which is pretty rare in this divided city.” Many teachers are seeking to teach effectively against prejudice, but the overall trend is toward silence or worse.

Living intertwined with the Palestinians, Israelis have almost all the power. Instead of internalizing the moral obligations that come with power, however, the message that many Israeli children seem to be receiving is of the need to protect their people at any cost. A secular teacher in my interviews, when asked to describe the history curriculum, replied with a laugh: “Zionism, Zionism, Zionism…If you learn general history it’s just…to make the table where we can learn on it Israeli history. [In] ancient history, we teach…from 550 BCE to the destruction of the Temple. And then it’s not important anymore. Nothing happened afterwards.” Another secular teacher commented, “We talk a lot about the Holocaust. It’s important, but it keeps us in the place where we are victims.”

Comparisons with the worst of Palestinian behavior also creates a permissive attitude. Instead of holding students to the high ethical standard that Jewish tradition and their material, military and educational level would demand, some commentators point to the actions of impoverished and poorly educated Palestinians who have lived under both Israeli occupation and corrupt Arab regimes. Articles like this one and this one comparing the recent attack with the lynching and murder of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah in 2000 imply that as long as the worst of Israeli actions don’t sink to the level of the worst of Palestinian actions, they are ethically acceptable. As a 14 year-old who participated in the attacks said, “He [a Palestinian victim] was beaten and should have been beaten until the end. For all I care, he should die. He’s an Arab. If you pass through Damascus Gate, they will stab you.”

Meanwhile the Israeli government makes the situation more complicated and fraught. Instead of moving briskly to the two-state solution, the government blurs the line between public and private right-wing incursions on Palestinian land, encourages Jewish building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and protects settlers who commit violence against Palestinians. Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar has developed a program to bring Israeli students to Hebron to learn the settlers’ narrative about that West Bank city – they hear little of the Palestinian view. None of this helps Israeli young people develop lucid ethical principles about their neighbors, to say nothing of the anger, confusion and resultant violence it encourages in Palestinian youth.

Thus Israel is left with a teen population, civilian and military, with an enormous amount of authority and privilege over its neighbors. Despite this massive power imbalance in their favor, significant numbers of these teens have internalized the message that they are the victims, with the right that victims feel to use all means to fight their enemy. They learn almost nothing about their neighbors: how those neighbors see themselves, the land, their history, their religions. They are encouraged to measure their behavior not against the high standards of Jewish tradition but against the worst events of the conflict. They see adults who do not draw bright lines of ethics but instead use power and obfuscation to advance their own interests.

The Israeli educational establishment, from Minister of Education Sa’ar to individual teachers can begin to reduce such attitudes by encouraging learning about the Palestinians. Programs such as “Side by Side,” developed by Professors Dan Bar-On and Sami Adwan, are ready to be implemented. The students deserve the opportunity to develop historical, intellectual and ethical tools to help them guide their decisions.

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Help designing Religion and Politics course, please?

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by tgilheany in Courses

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Arab Spring, course design, course readings, current-events, high school seniors, Israel, middle-east, Palestine, religion and politics, seminar

I am designing a seminar for 14 highly motivated, well-prepared U.S. high school seniors, and I need your help! My initial thoughts:

“Course title: Religion and Politics in the Contemporary World

Course description: How do people’s religious beliefs and practices influence their political beliefs and practices? How to their political views inform their religious commitments? To develop our understandings of how these two powerful forces relate to each other we will look at a series of present-day case studies:

-Religion in the 2012 United States Presidential and national elections

-Religion and the State in contemporary Israel

-the Arab Spring in Egypt

-Secularization and religious diversity in Western Europe

-Religion and the states of contemporary India and Pakistan

-other case studies to be selected as current events warrant”

What other themes should I seek to address? What key questions should be on the table? And most importantly from my perspective in building this class, do you have recommendations for readings? Reading level: New Yorker and Atlantic articles, newspaper articles, Ted talks, scholarly essays with minimal jargon, well-edited historical sources (ie, something from the 17th century can work if it is introduced clearly and edited down to 15-20 pages.) Essentially if it would work for a high-powered college freshman it will work with these guys.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

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Terrorism, and driving people from their homes: both are wrong

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by tgilheany in Uncategorized

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ethnic cleansing, Israel, Palestine, Terrorism

The Ibrahimi Mosque / Cave of the Patriarchs, in al-Khalil / Hebron

I’ve been reading about some of the Palestinian militants that have been released in exchange for Gilad Shalit. At least some are indeed terrorists, using the UN definition of “acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes.” Some aimed specifically at military targets, which most scholars would not classify as terrorism, but some went after cafés, buses, etc. One of the two women released, Amna Musa, is a powerful example: she convinced an Israeli teen to come with her and then had him shot. One man grabbed the wheel of a bus and drove it off the road – 16 people died. Another stabbed a 15 year-old girl to death. But Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas says to those released, “We thank God for your return and your safety. You are freedom fighters and holy warriors for the sake of God and the homeland.” Anticipating the Palestinian celebrations of the prisoners’ return, the Israeli press had been full of opinion pieces that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed in his speech, “The State of Israel is different from its enemies: Here, we do not celebrate the release of murderers.  Here, we do not applaud those who took life.  On the contrary, we believe in the sanctity of life.  We sanctify life.  This is the ancient tradition of the Jewish People.” The Israeli ethical critique of the Palestinians is a strong one: terrorism, and praise for terrorism, is wrong.

At the same time, I have been reading about and indeed seeing the careful, patient, often quiet, sometimes less subtle Israelization of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods. It is happening across East Jerusalem, in Hebron, in Bethlehem, and even in the Old City. Palestinian houses are demolished and turned into parking lots, and then five years later those parking lots turn into Israeli settler housing. A barrier necessary for Israeli security is placed not between areas of greatest Israeli settlement and Palestinian settlement, but through the middle of Palestinian areas. Schools are underfunded in Palestinian neighborhoods. Approval of home repair is delayed. Identity cards are revoked. Streets and then whole neighborhoods are renamed from a Palestinian identity to a Jewish identity. Settlements are placed on hilltops near Palestinian villages. An entire modern bureaucratic apparatus is mobilized to push Palestinians out of their homes.  As Prime Minister Abbas said in his U.N. speech, “The Israeli government …continues… the systematic confiscation of the Palestinian lands and the construction of thousands of new settlement units in various areas of the West Bank, particularly in East Jerusalem, and accelerated construction of the annexation Wall that is eating up large tracts of our land, dividing it into separate and isolated islands and cantons, destroying family life and communities and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of families. The occupying Power also continues to refuse permits for our people to build in Occupied East Jerusalem, at the same time that it intensifies its decades-long campaign of demolition and confiscation of homes, displacing Palestinian owners and residents under a multi-pronged policy of ethnic cleansing aimed at pushing them away from their ancestral homeland.” The Palestinian critique of the Israelis is a strong one: driving people from their homes is wrong.

Assuming two sides in any conflict are morally equivalent is intellectually lazy, or possibly dishonest. In this case, the two sides are not mirror images. Each has a different challenge in striving for a more ethical society. Each does, however, have a significant change it needs to make.

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Flowchart of my contacts

17 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by tgilheany in Fulbright project

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Israel, Palestine, teacher contacts

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Fulbright conference, day 1: skipping the small talk

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by tgilheany in Fulbright project

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cross-cultural, Fulbright, Israel, Palestine

Where I recover from my learnin'

Not for the first time (Telluride, Amherst, Klingenstein both times) I’m getting that honored / nervous / pretty-sure-someone-in-admissions-made-a-filing-error feeling. These Fulbright Distinguished Teachers are…well, they sure are bright and distinguished. I have met many master teachers, instructional leaders, and at least one state teacher of the year! The other teacher who will be traveling to Israel, Betsey Coleman from Colorado Academy, is an energetic fountain of stories, insights, readings and resources.

The indefatigable Fulbright staff has kept us moving and learning, connecting us to great resources. In our cross-cultural training, Craig Storti, author and trainer, had us rank our own countries on a series of indicators (direct-indirect, egalitarian-hierarchical, internal vs. external locus of control, etc.) Most of the Americans need to adjust to polite, circumspect societies, but (no surprise) those of us going to Israel and Finland need to prepare for even more blunt versions of ourselves. My Israeli counterpart (a school counselor named Dimona Yaniv who must be deeply valued by her students) described her countrymen as a six on a one to five scale of directness! (I need to make sure to prepare myself separately for Palestinian culture, which I believe is different in this and many other points of etiquette.) I had a wonderful lunch with Galit Baram and Tali Efraty from the Israeli embassy. Galit has been posted in Cairo, Moscow and now D.C., and has sent her children to international schools. She was enthusiastic about our choice of JAIS for the girls, which was reassuring. Fulbright DAT alums gave us great advice on managing finances, insurance, foreign university bureaucracy, and other challenges. We toured the sites of DC, and attended a rooftop reception.

After all this intense connecting, many of the teachers from abroad rallied to go out – perhaps to dance? I’ll admire their energy level from the restful confines of my (quite posh) hotel room.

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Recent posts…

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