The ABCs of Palestinian Nationalism

The theme for the Aziz Shahin School’s fourth-grade art class was written on the chalkboard in careful Arabic script: “Jerusalem is ours. We love peace.”

Forty Palestinian girls in striped smocks bent over their desks to draw the golden Dome of the Rock from Jerusalem’s Old City. They colored doves, olive branches and, atop each picture of the mosque, a black-white-green-and-red Palestinian flag.

“Why do we want peace?” the art teacher asked the class.

“So all of the prisoners will return to Palestine,” said one student.

“So we will have a homeland,” answered another.

“To free Jerusalem from the Jews who took it from us,” said a third.

The teacher beamed with pride.

If Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds any expectations that the Palestinians will become more flexible over time on such issues as Jerusalem and statehood, a peek into their public schools and new textbooks would convince him otherwise.

After nearly 80 years of British, Jordanian and Egyptian rule and Israeli occupation, Palestinian educators are in control of their classrooms for the first time and are using them to teach a new generation the building blocks of national identity. They are giving their first uncensored courses in Palestinian history, culture and citizenship--that is, membership in a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

But while enjoying their freedom from foreign domination, Palestinian teachers say they find it difficult to give some of these lessons in times of such political uncertainty: They are preparing students to become citizens of a state that does not exist. Half of the pupils drawing the Dome of the Rock have never visited Jerusalem and are prevented from doing so by Israeli closures.

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And the peace that students are supposed to love is a process on the brink of collapse. Israel has broken ground for a new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and Muslim extremists have responded by resuming terrorist attacks, including three suicide bombings. In response, Israel froze peace negotiations and closed the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The self-governing Palestinian Authority cut off security cooperation with Israel, and Palestinian youths have taken to the streets for daily clashes with Israeli soldiers.

“In our art classes, children draw representations of peace, but at the same time there is no peace,” said Imtiyaz Nazzal, the principal of Aziz Shahin. “If I were to take the microphone and speak to the school about ‘the peace,’ the girls could stand up and say: ‘What do you mean, peace? I wasn’t able to come to school yesterday because of an Israeli closure.’ ”

For decades, Palestinian identity was defined almost entirely by the struggle against Israel for a Palestinian homeland and, on a personal level, by confrontations with Israeli soldiers. It was nurtured in tightknit Palestinian families and in their communities, some scattered around the globe.

But under the Israeli occupation, any sign of Palestinian nationalism--a flag or Palestine Liberation Organization insignia--was banned, and soldiers searched schools at will for what was considered enemy propaganda.

They would have removed even the needlepoint picture that now decorates Nazzal’s office with the motto “Peace and Justice for Palestine.” In fact, they probably would have arrested her for having such an object.

During the intifada, their six-year uprising against Israeli rule, Palestinians forged nationalism in the streets by throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and marching in the funerals of “heroes and martyrs” to the cause.

While such scenes are again taking place, the Palestinian Education Ministry now wants its youth to develop a national identity at school too. As in other countries, Palestinian officials want their students to relate to positive national symbols--the Palestinian flag, the national anthem and pictures of the president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat. They emphasize Palestinians’ shared language, culture, history and, of course, national aspirations.

A plan for the first Palestinian national curriculum, developed for the Education Ministry, states that public education must “reinforce national identity and culture.” Public education also must “take into account the Palestinian aspiration to reconstitute its societal fabric and prepare the skilled personnel for the process of state-building.”

Under occupation, Palestinian students were given Israeli-censored texts--from Jordan in the West Bank and from Egypt in the Gaza Strip. Any references to the Palestinians as a nation or to their struggle for a homeland were omitted.

The Palestinians are now giving uncensored versions of these foreign schoolbooks to their 800,000 or so students from kindergarten through 12th grade while the Education Ministry goes about the formidable task of writing new texts for every grade and subject--about 300 books.

Those who must decide the content of these new texts say they are uncertain how to portray the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that began in 1993: Is it a success or failure? Shall Israelis be presented as friends and neighbors, or foes? What boundaries should be put on maps of Palestine?

“For me as an educator, it is not easy to decide how this will be done,” said Salah Yassin, the Education Ministry’s director general of curriculum. “We see no response to our demands for our own state. We did not get full independence yet. There is no agreement about the borders--that’s part of the negotiations. So what should I write for the kids?”

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While these issues remain on the bargaining table, the Palestinians, for example, continue to use the “historic” map of Palestine from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea--one that does not include the state of Israel.

“They are the original borders of Palestine,” Nazzal said. “We teach now--and taught during the occupation, when no [Israeli] soldiers were around--that there are Jews who came and settled and took our land and created Israel in 1948. And in 1967, they occupied the other parts.

“Of course,” she added, “we talk about the peace process. And also about who is obstructing the peace process”--that, in the Palestinian view, being Israel.

Sami Adwan, a Bethlehem University education professor, notes that many political issues cannot be dealt with definitively: Maps are never permanent; political definitions rarely are fixed.

“Reality changes. Remember that in the late 1970s, the Camp David agreements [between Israel and Egypt] were rejected by most Palestinians as treachery. Then, in the 1990s, we Palestinians made agreements weaker than Camp David and call it an achievement,” Adwan said.

The Palestinians who signed that peace agreement run the self-rule government and, under that, the Education Ministry. The Palestinian Legislative Council ultimately will set the guidelines for the texts, which are not likely to be critical of the peace process.

Nor will they read like Israeli texts. The interpretation of events by the onetime enemies will remain at odds, much as U.S. and Mexican history books tell different versions of the Mexican-American War.

“We don’t see our freedom fighters as ‘terrorists,’ just as Jewish texts say the Hagana was a national resistance movement,” Adwan said, referring to the Jewish underground that fought for the establishment of Israel. “We call our commanders fidaiin--those who sacrifice their lives for others. To us, they are heroes. The Israelis call them gangs and terrorists.”

Palestinians are setting out to write their history books at a time when Israelis are beginning to review theirs critically. After almost 50 years of statehood, many Israeli historians have come to believe that their early texts glorified the country’s founding fathers in excess and omitted key events.

Few Palestinians expect their first wave of texts to be any more objective than the Israelis’ were, particularly because they are being drafted by a pseudo-state still struggling politically against Israel. The books are not going to question the Palestinian leadership or even recall acts such as the PLO’s massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, educators say.

“Maybe it will not take 50 years like it did the Israelis,” Yassin said. “Maybe it will take 25 years. . . . But you need time to consider moral issues and put things right.”

The Education Ministry has produced one set of textbooks so far, paperback civics books for grades one through six that define such concepts as homeland, statehood and citizenship. Each book begins with a photograph of the Dome of the Rock.

The Palestinians are defined as descendants of the Canaanites--who, not incidentally, predated the Israelites--a people who spoke Arabic and lived in the land of Palestine. The authors seem to have avoided the question of how to portray the Jews, because Israelis are largely absent from these books.

In the third-grade book, a boy named Muntasar goes to Jerusalem and has a conversation with the holy city itself.

“Take me to your holy sites and tell me about them,” Muntasar says.

Jerusalem says: “My Islamic holy and historical sites are numerous. This is the Aqsa Mosque and this is the honorable Dome of the Rock. . . . See, to the west of the holy mosque is a wall with large stones, whose name is Burak Wall, where the angel Gabriel tied the winged horse used by the Prophet Muhammad on the night of the ascension.”

There is no mention that this is the same wall that Jews refer to as the Western Wall of their Second Temple.

A fairly straightforward history lesson appears in the fifth-grade civics book: “The war of Palestine ended in 1948 with Jewish control over most Palestinian territories. What was left is today known as the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the eastern part of Jerusalem. In 1950, the West Bank was united with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Gaza, however, went under Egyptian control. Many Palestinian residents of Nazareth, Haifa, Jaffa, Beersheba and other areas were affected.”

The Palestinians, it says, fled to other Arab countries and created the PLO and other movements. “After the June War of 1967 between Israel and the nearby Arab states, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in June 1967 and displaced thousands of Palestinians from their homeland.”

Among the “most important events” that follow are the 1973 war between Israel and Arab states, the Arab states’ 1974 recognition of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979.

Finally, the lesson says that the intifada began in 1987 and that the PLO and Israel signed a peace agreement in 1993, “resulting in the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority and the entrance of the Palestinian leadership and Palestinian forces to the Palestinian Authority areas.”

In the same book, fifth-graders learn the meaning of a state: “The state has either natural borders (like a river, sea or mountain range) or political borders drawn in agreements with the neighboring countries, which is the case with the Arab states. . . . Examples of states include Egypt, Syria and Palestine.”

For the students at Aziz Shahin, Palestinian statehood hovers somewhere between reality and dream. The girls learn traditional dances, practice the detailed embroidery of Palestinian dresses and set up displays on rural Palestinian life--all elements of a national culture. In the school courtyard each morning, however, the girls bellow out the anthem of a nation still in the making.

“Freedom fighter, freedom fighter,” they sing by heart. “By my resolution and my fire and the volcano of my revolt, by the height of the mountains and the tremor of the struggle, by the hurricane winds and the fire of the weaponry, Palestine is my home, Palestine is my fire.”