Epilogue

While working on this book at a library in Tel Aviv University, a librarian asked me to sum up my research in one sentence and remarked that knowing how to do it was essential to all researchers. Giving her a definite answer was a challenging task then and it remains so now while summing up this book. Initially, it is a book about the Mandate period, but while writing the history of education, the late Ottoman period appears not only as background but as the essential foundations of the postwar reality. This was not confined to the educators that filled the ranks of Arab and Hebrew educational administration during the Mandate. The institutionalization of educational segregation and inability or reluctance to challenge it started before the first British soldier set foot in Palestine. This is a book about the British colonial project in Palestine and its grave repercussions in the field of education for its native population. The colonial Department advocated a policy of educational restraint, articulated in a history syllabus that sought to cleanse history itself from collective lessons, national ethos, and political agency. But the colonial angle tells only a partial story because this policy was met with a growing community of Palestinian educators and students who (naturally) found in the past a space in which they could ask questions about the present, and events or people that served as inspiration and possible models for the future....

Teaching History

Chapter 6 examines the teaching of history through an administrative and pedagogical prism. It discusses the historical evolution of the Mandate’s curricula and history syllabi and traces their origins. The history syllabus is viewed as a complex colonial document that reflects the pedagogical negotiations, negations, and oversights in history instruction. The pedagogical characteristics of history teaching are surveyed in pedagogical articles and books published during the Mandate period. The chapter concludes with the problematic intersection between the educational aspirations reflected in the syllabus and the pedagogical discourse of the intellectual elite with the ‘normal’ or peripheral classroom, and the challenges facing rank-and-file teachers, while trying to comply with both.

Reframing the Pedagogical Map

Chapter 1 examines the evolution of the Palestinian and Hebrew education systems from the late Ottoman period into the Mandate and brings forward key players and institutions in this process. The chapter highlights the differences and commonalities between the two systems. Under British rule, the Arab system was administered by the colonial Department of Education, headed by colonial officials, while the Hebrew system remained autonomous to determine its general goals and curriculum. The chapter underlines the importance of the British national home policy according to the Balfour Declaration and its influence on the education of Arabs in Palestine.

A Coalition of Good Will: History Instruction in Secondary Education

Chapter 7 is dedicated to secondary education and the matriculation exam. Although only comprising a fraction of the student population, these private and governmental schools represented Palestine’s Ivy League. History instruction in these schools, which was heavily influenced by the Department’s Matriculation exam, was frequently discussed in meetings of the Palestine Board for Higher Studies (PBHS) that oversaw secondary and postsecondary education. This pedagogical attention was clearly disproportional to its quantitative share in the student population. Analysis of PBHS’ internal debates and the history syllabi of secondary schools sheds much light on the relationship between history teaching, identity, and nationalism.

Writing History

Chapter 4 focuses on history textbooks authored during the Mandate period, and it traces the history of their writing and their use in schools. Textbooks represented the ‘correct’ and distilled formal knowledge required by the system. The chapter examines the central themes in these books and their dialogue with Ottoman, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Western sources, as well as the translation mechanisms employed as part of this dialogue. The chapter then applies a different lens to answer such questions as who wrote history? and why focus of the life stories of both Palestinian and Jewish authors? The sociological and intellectual affinities between these authors suggest that they were a distinctive group with specific characteristics. Finally, this chapter scrutinizes the loud echoes of the conflict in these texts.

Peeking over the Fence

Chapter 3 investigates the engagement of both the Arab and Jewish communities with the education of the national Other, while stressing the importance that Arab and Jewish scholars, publicists, security apparatuses, and educators attributed to the way in which the other community was being educated and the reflective effect of this engagement. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to texts in Arabic and texts in Hebrew, written by educators, journalists, and intellectuals. The second part is dedicated to the work of the Shai, the Haganah’s intelligence service, and its engagement with Arab education. The chapter stresses the importance of the Shai’s reports as a characteristic of the Yishuv’s view of Arab education.

Learning History

Chapter 8 completes the analytical framework by leaving administrators and educators to delve into the students’ world to trace their voices as the product of this system. The chapter examines the omnipresence of history beyond the history classroom, and it takes a broad view of the educational rationale that sought to mould a historical consciousness through an educational calendar, field trips, and youth movements. The latter part of the chapter discusses students’ essays in school journals and the internalization of, and correspondence with, the material they were taught, thus underscoring the centrality and validity of historical study in these young people’s identity formation.

Roots of Educational Segregation

Chapter 2 traces the causes of educational segregation between Arabs and Jews, and it elucidates its sustainability through the weakness or failure of those prominent educators who sought another outcome. First, it surveys British inability or reluctance in addressing the question of educational segregation. It then underlines the important albeit marginal role of missionary education and existent institutions of mixed education. Then it critically examines Zionist voices that envisioned Hebrew education as a mechanism of Arab–Jewish rapprochement, followed by a discussion on Jewish educators who crossed the boundaries of educational segregation and the price they paid for it. The chapter ends with an analysis of Arab educators’ views on educational segregation.

Introduction

In the lives of two prominent educators, 1920 was an eventful year. Khalil Totah (1886–1955), then 34 years old, was appointed by the British to head the Men’s Elementary Training College, Palestine’s most prestigious school for the training of teachers in Jerusalem. This was a major leap forwards for the young MA graduate of Columbia University’s Teachers’ College. It was a significant period for Chaim Arieh Zuta (1868–1939), a pioneer in Hebrew education, as well. Zuta immigrated to Palestine from Czarist Russia in 1903 to continue his career as a teacher. Like Totah, Zuta engaged in the training of teachers at the Hebrew Teachers’ Training Seminar, another Jerusalemite institute of similar prestige. In 1920, both educators authored a historical guidebook to Jerusalem, emphasizing the ties between nation, space, and history: one city, one physical space, two images of social realities. In their surveys of schools in Jerusalem, Zuta wrote about Jewish schools, and Totah about schools for Arabs....

We the Semites: Reading Ancient History in Mandate Palestine

Chapter 5 deals with the representation of antiquity in textbooks, and it shows the resemblances between Arabic and Hebrew textbooks as to their use of the concepts of race and the disparities between them regarding territoriality and identity. Throughout the nineteenth century, new archaeological discoveries uncovered ancient Semitic civilizations, and identified their universal heritage and contribution to humankind. The chapter traces the employment of and engagement with the term ‘Semite’, which was a determinist racial label coined in a scholarly environment where the historicist tradition of the West had merged with biological research about the origin of the species. Further, the chapter explores the racial scientific discourse since the nineteenth century, until the Mandate period in Arab and Jewish historiography. Finally, the chapter illustrates the way in which the Zionist–Palestinian conflict wrote itself into ancient history.