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Long-term Lessons in Peace
Isabel Kershner
FILLING IN THE GAPS: After a year of learning about the Israeli 'other,' Palestinian eight-graders at theTlitha Kumi school in Beit Jala will soon meet their counterparts from West Jerusalem's Beit Hinuch. |
In a hallway of a Talitha Kumi secondary school in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem in the West Bank, hangs a gallery of photos from the Intifada years. There�s a curly-haired child poised to hurl a stone; a Palestinian teen being dragged off by Israeli soldiers, arms twisted behind his back, face contorted in pain and rage; there are women posing with their own framed portraits of martyred sons; and protesters, described in the caption as Christian human rights workers, being beaten to the ground by Israeli soldiers.
Most Israelis would find the display and the messages it conveys to the pupils disturbing, if not provocative. It would be easy to come to hasty conclusions about the glorification of violent struggle and the encouragement of hatred of the Israelis.
But other walls in the hallways of Talitha Kumi tell a different story: nature protection posters feature migrating birds that know no borders in Arabic, Hebrew and English; and doves are prevalent, even as the logo on the school T-shirt. In fact, as a private German-Christian school that can set its own agenda more freely than PA government schools, Talitha Kumi, with 850 pupils from kindergarten through secondary school, has become something of a testing-ground for Palestinian and Israeli peace education pioneers trying to change the old patterns of conflict in the minds of the next generation.
Nothing is coincidental in this spic-and-span Lutheran institution that�s almost 150 years old.
�The Intifada pictures were part of a project we did two years ago on daily life in Palestine over the past few years,� explains Wilhelm Goller, Talitha Kumi�s personable German principal, noting that the continued presence of the exhibit hadn�t gone without debate within the school itself. �It�s part of Palestinian history, and you can�t hide it. It�s not a glorification, but an acknowledgment of that history, of how people suffered.�
Goller compares the exhibit to the corner of remembrance many schools in Israel maintain to honor students who have fallen during military service or as victims of Palestinian terrorism. Israel�s schools, he notes, honor their own �heroes� of the 1967 war � the war that Arabs view as a calamity, and that resulted in Israel�s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Since the peace process got under way, much has been made of what Israeli and Palestinian children learn about each other in school. Israeli watchdogs have decried the presence of flagrantly anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli material in the uncensored versions of the Jordanian textbooks used in the West Bank schools since the Palestinian Authority took over in 1994. Palestinians retort that it took Israel 50 years to begin to acknowledge the existence of the Palestinians by name in some of their own textbooks.
Peace education expert Ruth Firer of the Hebrew University�s Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace and her Palestinian partner, Sami Adwan, a professor of education at Bethlehem University and head of the non-governmental Wiam Center for Conflict Resolution, recently completed a five-year study of ninth-grade history and civics textbooks in use in their respective education systems. As well as examining the messages within the texts, Firer and Adwan focused on what is missing. They found that both the Israeli and Palestinian curricula reflect the influence of a �war culture� in which texts mainly emphasize the narrative of the �national self,� focusing on periods of conflict in the last century and all but ignoring peaceful periods in which the two sides coexisted.
Likewise, fair treatment of the other side in the conflict has largely been omitted. �In both cases,� says Adwan, �the �other� is not included in the narrative.� And while it�s true that Israel has started referring to the Palestinians in its textbooks, �they do so for their own sake,� Adwan muses. �We know we are here. Actually, it makes us laugh. Of course it�s a positive thing, but you know, it did take 50 years.�
With much fanfare, the PA�s Ministry of Education recently unveiled the initial textbooks of its own curriculum � the first authentic Palestinian curriculum in history � in time for the opening of the school year in September. First and sixth graders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will now be studying from these texts, rather than the old Jordanian and Egyptian texts that had been used since 1967. Second and seventh grade books are to be introduced next year. But here, too, Israel is barely mentioned and doesn�t appear by name in any of the maps. Itamar Marcus, director of research for the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace � a private organization that started the whole textbook controversy two years ago with its study of the materials in use in PA schools � notes that in the new texts, Israel is only referred to in the context of being a colonialist occupier.
It is into this void that a new and extraordinary school of peace educators has stepped: Firer and Adwan, in their joint Learning to Live Together project, and, independently, education and conflict resolution experts at the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), a joint Israeli-Palestinian non-governmental organization. They are pioneering methods aimed at changing the way Israeli and Palestinian youths perceive and know each other by trying to fill in the gaps.
While the two programs are unique in various ways, they are based on a shared concept of getting into the classroom through the regular teachers and supplementing the official school curricula on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides with specially composed alternative material.
Firer, a historian who�s worked in peace education for 20 years, has come to the conclusion that only long-term intervention in education can have an effective impact on students. What used to pass as peace education projects in the 1980s, based on random one- or two-day meetings between Israeli and Palestinian youths, proved ineffective and sometimes did more harm than good. �Without the correct preparation beforehand,� Firer remarks, �if the youths hated the other before meeting, afterwards they knew why. The Israelis would come under attack, and after a while would refuse to go back.�
Years of academic research and practical preparation by Firer and Adwan culminated last year in the introduction of their three-year peace education program, based on what they call �fill-in packages,� into Beit Jala�s Talitha Kumi and the Beit Hinuch secondary school in West Jerusalem. Very much a pilot project, �Learning to Live Together� started with seventh graders who will continue the program through to ninth grade. The 50 or so pupils involved on each side haven�t met, but will do this year and may join up for a two- or three-day trip to Jordan.
So far, the pupils� peace education has been confined to their respective classrooms where their own teachers in history, geography, literature, English and civics have taught dozens of �peace education units� composed by themselves, under the guidance of Adwan and Firer. It�s important for peace education to come from the pupils� regular teachers, stresses Firer, as they are the �real agents and role models.� The �packages,� she explains, have three goals: to help the students know the �other�; to show what the two sides have in common; and to destroy stereotypes that lead to racism and hatred.
The idea, adds Adwan, is �not to deny one�s own identity or rights, or to lose one�s sense of self, but to be able to recognize the other as well.� Values such as tolerance, forgiveness, peace and human rights can only be understood, he argues, when looked at from a position of strong personal identity and self-esteem.
But like the Intifada pictures on the Talitha Kumi wall, the building up of the self can be disturbing for the �other.� The teachers, all products of their own societies, did much of their training together a year before taking the program into the classroom, and were subjected to a lot of soul-searching, note Firer and Adwan.
On a videotape Firer shows this reporter of one of last year�s English classes at Beit Hinuch, seventh graders were introduced to a Mexican-looking puppet called Ali. The teacher skillfully built up stereotypes in order to break them down. The Israeli students, who had previously been asked to draw pictures of Arabs and Jews, had mostly depicted the Jews as ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs in traditional headdresses or smoking narghilas. At the end of the class they were shown a series of photos of similar-aged youths who looked just like them, sitting at computers. Not suspecting that they were looking at a peer group of Palestinian students, they were asked to suggest names for them. Needless to say, Arabic names were not the first to spring to mind.
In other disciplines as well, Firer challenges Israeli teachers and pupils to see the positive or common aspects of the Palestinian other. In history, for example, she suggests that teachers draw a parallel between early Islamic society and the nomadic past of the early Hebrews. Or in architecture, that they include an example of an Arab-style house and discuss how that style has influenced Israeli architecture.
Since the Israeli and Palestinian education systems have little in common to begin with, the peace units, or packages, are tailored to each side. They also have to be �rooted in reality,� says Adwan. So one of the Palestinian packages focuses on Abraham as a joint ancestor of both Arabs and Jews, while in a civics class, students role-play a girl sending a letter to her father who is sitting in an Israeli jail. �You can�t talk to them about peace without including these things,� says Adwan. �We don�t want to delude the children that we have the peace we want yet. That�s dangerous. They would accuse us of deception.�
In another �fill-in package� on the Palestinian side, two sensitive issues that are barely dealt with in the official textbooks are connected � namely, the Palestinian refugee experience and the Holocaust. Unlike the spare, factual references to the Palestinian refugee issue in the old texts, the fill-in package provides pupils with the flavor of the refugee experience and a description of the suffering. And in that context, they are introduced to the issue of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
It�s clear that the Palestinian �fill-in packages� cater strongly to local political sensitivities, and at times seem more concerned with boosting the Palestinian identity than with coming to terms with Israelis. But Adwan defends the need to tread more carefully on the Palestinian side, arguing that it is too early to expect perfect symmetry. �The Israeli public expects as much from the Palestinians as they expect from themselves, but that�s not fair,� he declares. �We�ve been under occupation. We�re at different stages. It�s patronizing to pressurize me into talking about things that aren�t ripe, that don�t reflect our daily lives.�
The Learning to Live Together project is unique in its length. But Firer and Adwan hope to break more new ground in the field of peace education by evaluating their project by rigorous academic standards. In the coming years, the groups of children who have participated in the project will be assessed and compared with a control group of peers who haven�t. The results, Firer hopes, will serve as a model for peace education planners in the future.
IPCRI�s �Pathways into Reconciliation� project, also based on incorporating alternative material into the existing curricula, boasts of being the largest peace education program in operation. Launched in 1996, it now involves 10 Palestinian schools (including Talitha Kumi) and 10 Israeli schools, including secular Jewish and Arab institutions. It also takes a warts-and-all approach. �Peace education is a process of self-awareness and consciousness,� says program director Marwan Darweish. �It�s not about lovey-dovey let�s-be-friends activities. Being nice to each other isn�t the end goal of our vision or strategy. We�re talking about change.�
A one-year program for 10th graders only at this stage, it is based on prepared texts that were designed by a steering committee of experts on each side. Again, the teachers are trained together. And again, the experience can be a difficult and painful one for teachers and students alike. Anat Reisman-Levy, the project coordinator for the Israeli schools, notes that in joint encounters, �the secular Israeli youths get asked by the Palestinians why they are here, and they don�t have answers. They come back and demand to be taught.� Though the values the project intends to inculcate, such as equality, tolerance and human rights, are the same on both sides, the techniques necessarily differ. For example, in the Israeli classrooms, issues such as equality will be examined through experiential group work that dramatically challenges the pupils� own perceptions of themselves.
In the Palestinian classroom, where modern workshop-type activities are less ingrained and the traditional �frontal� teaching method still reigns, a peace education unit might take the form of grammar exercises built around the Israeli-Palestinian treaty of mutual recognition of 1993, says Nedal Jayousi, the Palestinian coordinator. Still, the IPCRI program is designed to encourage more modern methods on the Palestinian side too, he says. So an English comprehension exercise based on a passage about Amnesty International will be followed by a field trip to the local Amnesty branch in Bethlehem; and a discussion on the Palestinian refugee question may be based on the critical study of texts showing both Palestinian and Israeli points of view.
OTH ADWAN AND FIRER, AND IPCRI�s project coordinators say they work with neither encouragement nor active hindrance from the PA Ministry of Education. In the absence of a final peace deal, and in the face of continued Jewish settlement expansion and the existence of Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank, PA officials have continued to maintain that the time for joint peace education projects is not ripe. Nevertheless, Jayousi, through his own contacts, has managed to take IPCRI�s project into eight Palestinian public schools and hasn�t been stopped.
On the Israeli side, the peace educators report a more helpful attitude in recent years. Firer says that former education minister Yossi Sarid had even expressed willingness to publish the 50 or so Learning to Live Together fill-in packages in three languages � Arabic, Hebrew and English � so that they could be put to wider use.
In the meantime, the pioneers are working in an ambiguous, murky zone of conflicting messages, particularly on the Palestinian side. Childrens� programs on official PA TV over the summer have been infused with messages that Palestine includes all of Israel, from Metulah to Eilat, according to Palestinian Media Watch, a private Israeli watchdog organization also run by Itamar Marcus. In mid-September, the PA�s own Information Ministry website was featuring Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and Nazareth as �Palestinian cities� on its homepage. Even in the Talitha Kumi school, pictures of Israeli brutality take prominent place alongside the peace posters.
�These are the conditions under which we live,� remarks Talitha Kumi principal Goller. �We have to accept and admit in our ideas of peace education that this conflict is on the table. No one knows what will be three months from now � a peace deal, or a confrontation worse than the Intifada.�
For the peace educators, though, time is of the essence. �We know there are checkpoints,� states the Truman Institute�s Firer, �but we can�t wait.�
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Palestinian Affairs
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