Educating Our Children About Palestine

According to a recent Gallup Poll, only 17% of Americans sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, whereas 63% favor Israelis. What’s more, the percentage of neutral individuals is shrinking in favor of Israel. Taking into account the events of the past three years, Operation Cast Lead and subsequent findings of war crimes/crimes against humanity, the attack on the Freedom Flotilla, and the refusal to halt illegal settlement activity even when bribed, how could it be that the number of Americans sympathizing with Israel is at its highest since the beginning of the fruitless peace process 20 years ago? Clearly something is amiss.

Knowing what I know about Palestine, it is hard to understand how anyone could ignore the damage of occupation, siege and dispossession, choosing instead to sympathize with the perpetrators of violence. Even more disturbing are the consequences of these sympathies on Palestinians’ everyday lives. Every year the United States gives Israel nearly three billion dollars in aid, which Israel then uses to continue the systematic abridgment of Palestinian rights. Without losing my faith in humanity, the only conclusion I can draw from Gallup’s findings is that most Americans are simply mis/uninformed. Otherwise, how can it be so difficult to comprehend Palestinian plight? Why can't we understand that apartheid is just as wrong in South Africa as it is in the occupied West Bank? Why do we implicitly recognize the injustice of racism against African Americans but excuse Israel when it characterizes its Arab minority as a demographic threat? Why do we champion our 2nd amendment right to defend ourselves but castigate Palestinian children for throwing stones at the soldiers who come to take their land? I can only hope that the answer to these questions is simply that no one ever thought of things this way. Something must be done to change mainstream attitudes, not so that we care for Palestinians and not Israelis, but rather so that sympathizing with Israel does not come at the expense of Palestinian life.

Within this context, I attended a workshop last weekend aimed at educators and organizers interested in learning effective methods for raising the issue of Palestine with their students and community. Spearheaded by the Middle East Children’s Alliance, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and Rethinking Schools, the half-day workshop focused on techniques to incorporate Palestine into curriculums in a constructive and educational way that also facilitates the development of critical thinking skills.

Due to the highly controversial nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict among other factors, many school districts avoid the subject entirely. This leaves American students without a lens to interpret key historical developments within the Middle East, including our own military involvement. At the same time they are also exceptionally susceptible to Israeli propaganda and mainstream media bias, all of which contribute to the perpetuation of Palestinian suffering. However, the workshop does not aim to equip teachers with the tools to simply indoctrinate students for Palestine or against Israel. Instead, they are instructed on how to create an environment that values justice, equality and factual accuracy where resistance struggles of all types can be understood and identified with.

Naturally, part of the discussion centered on fears of possible backlash from students’ parents.  Two techniques were offered to mitigate these fears. The first was making sure that any lesson that mentions Palestine is perfectly relevant to the unit at hand, so that it can be defended on the grounds that it is an integral component of reaching an educational standard. The second was to implement the paradigm of “dual perspectives.” Various perspectives on a given event are presented, after which they are examined for legitimacy and their conformity to fact. In this way conflicting viewpoints are offered so students do not see a one-sided picture of things, thereby undercutting accusations of bias. At the same time, an emphasis on factual accuracy dictates that the side which best conforms to reality prevails. When developed within a framework that values social justice and equality, this method of appraisal results in a deeper understanding of Palestinian plight. Most importantly, this understanding manifests organically.

For example, Israel offers the perspective that the Separation Wall is necessary for the security of the State whereas Palestinians find it to be an unjust imposition. These positions seem irreconcilable. However, upon further scrutiny one sees that the route of the wall attests more to a land-grab than to improve Israeli security, thus delegitimizing the former point of view.

Instructors were encouraged to draw parallels between the concepts familiar to students and Palestinian history. These included:

• Manifest Destiny and Eretz Israel
• The ethnic cleansing of native Americans and the Nakba
• South African Apartheid and the different legal systems for Israeli settlers vs. Palestinians in the West Bank
• The Civil Rights struggle and the situation for Israeli Arabs
• Water conservation and Israel’s unfair allocation of resources
• Racial profiling and Israel’s system of checkpoints

Teachers also discussed including Palestinian artists, writers and poets in their humanities units to familiarize students with Palestinian culture. Some even suggested putting their students in contact with Palestinian youth by partnering classrooms together and facilitating pen pal programs.

Non-educators found that the most effective way to garner strength for Palestine solidarity was by illustrating common needs and concerns within their communities and those in Palestine. By drawing connections between all social struggles, whether for immigrant rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, indigenous rights, etc, we can see that the injustice suffered by Palestinians is not something too complex, foreign or removed to understand. Once that barrier is broken, a desire to end the occupation naturally springs forth.

With every day that passes, the occupation of Palestine and the perpetuation of the diaspora cause untold suffering. The United States is complicit in this crime. It is imperative that we do all we can to change the situation. By educating our children and our communities on the values of critical examination, justice, equality, and compassion we move one step forward. We owe it to them to raise this issue, confident in the knowledge that we are on the right side of history.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can incorporate Palestine into your curriculum, the following resources are extremely helpful:

Teaching the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict through Dual Narratives

US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network – Study to Action: Reader and Curriculum Guide

Why We Resist Occupation

To the States - Walt Whitman

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

Winning Hearts and Minds for Palestine

In encounters with latent Zionists (those who view the current situation in Israel and Palestine as a battle between two equally entitled, equally faulted parties for which concessions and compromise on both sides are necessary to end the conflict) many Palestine solidarity activists find themselves dismissed as zealots. In my personal dealings with such people I have been instructed that the “Israel/Palestine conflict has no room for zealots on either side.” Having dwelt on this accusation for a period of weeks, I have finally settled upon what I think is an appropriate response –apart from various sound bites familiar to the solidarity community such as “I can’t help that the truth has an anti-Israel slant” etc.

While it might be instinctive to ignore these remarks, I firmly believe that doing so would constitute a missed opportunity. As the legal approach to solving the Palestinian question consistently fails and endless (some say pointless) negotiations drag on, building popular resistance offers activists a chance to influence governments that enable occupation and apartheid while simultaneously eroding private financial support for human rights violations. Unlike their entrenched cousins, latent Zionists can still be convinced; we should not dismiss them, but rather confront the misinformation they’ve been exposed to head on.

Latent Zionists use the term zealot pejoratively in the name of a particularly dangerous form of "moderation." This moderation seeks to frame Palestinian solidarity as a similarly destructive parallel to radical Zionism, equating the oppressor with the oppressed. My accuser defined zealotry as charging the other party in the conflict with all responsibility such that a zealot for Israel  is one who believes Palestinians are solely responsible for their position whereas a zealot for Palestine believes Israel is wholly at fault. 

By these parameters any findings that consistently point to Israeli responsibility, however factual, must be dismissed wholesale as biased or counterweighted with an Israeli perspective regardless of this perspective’s truthfulness. Current mainstream reporting on the subject exemplifies this view, e.g. including Israel’s charge that flotilla members killed by the Israeli Defense Force were “terrorists,” that all Palestinian activists are incarcerated for “inciting violence” or that protests broken up violently with rubber bullets and copious amounts of tear gas are always the result of “rock throwing.”

Because the truth of the matter is simply that objective evidence consistently results in the determination of Israel’s ultimate culpability, in order to escape zealot-labeling (consequently losing the chance to win hearts and minds) we must alter this paradigm.

Latent Zionists hold the views that they do about zealotry due to a very specific misunderstanding of Israel’s origins. To correct this misunderstanding and thus escape zealot-labeling, we must take ownership of certain inescapable facts, namely that the State of Israel built itself on a policy of settlement and ethnic cleansing. We cannot equivocate about these facts, but instead strive to internalize them as part of the commonly understood Palestinian narrative. Israel has controlled the history of Palestine unchallenged in Western discourse for far too long. It is high time for the findings of the New Historians (whether they agree ethnic cleansing was coordinated or not) to replace the commonly perpetuated ahistorical myth of Israel’s “War of Iindependence.”

In doing so, it then becomes evident that such a definition of zealotry fails at the onset. History itself is zealous!

If we are successful, we can then do what Israeli Knesset Member Hanin Zoabi asked of Palestine solidarity activists in her series of lectures to the American public (I attended one of her events, sponsored by the Palestinian American Women’s Association, in October of this year) –we can put the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and equality in its rightful place among other democratic struggles in popular discourse.

Today no one would suggest that those who advocated British withdrawal from occupied India were zealots. Today, no one would argue that those who advocated civic equality in 1960’s America or more aptly in 20^th century South Africa were zealots. We have the opportunity and obligation to institutionalize the same attitudes about Palestinians both inside and outside Israel. This opens the door to resisting legitimate manifestations of zealotry when they are apparent in much the same way as taking control of charges of anti-Semitism gives us the chance to expose real racism.

Those who wish to erase Palestine and Palestinian identity are zealots. Those who wish to drive Israelis or Jews “into the sea” are zealots. Those who value justice, equality and respect for human rights are not.  While I do not believe activists should spend the majority of their time fighting every ridiculous insult thrown our way, it is not in our interests to be dismissed so easily. We must take the time to make ourselves understood, otherwise we can achieve nothing.