[MUSIC] Thanks for joining us again in our journey toward the better understanding of Israel's state and society. When we looked at Israel's demography with Barbara Okun and Eliahu Ben-Moshe, we learned that a little more than 20% of Israel's citizens are Arab, Muslims or Christian or Arabic-speaking Jews. Before 1948, the Arabs in Palestine struggled to establish their own national home in the territory that is now Israel. As told us, many of them fought side by side with the armies of the neighboring Arab states to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in this territory. Thus, during Israel's War of Independence, many of them fled the country, believing they would be able to return to their homes when they Arab countries won. Others were forced to leave, as the Israeli troops saw them as security threats. As soon as the war ended, however, the Arab residents who had stayed within the borders of the Israeli state were granted Israeli citizenship. Making them the largest national minority in the new state. Despite the Arab residents' formal and legal integration into Israeli society, security concerns and doubts about their loyalty to the new state would shape the complex relationship among the Arab minorities, the Jewish majority and the state in the years to come. To what extent can the Arab or Palestinian citizens of Israel truly become equal citizens? To what extent do they want to become an integral part of Israeli society? In no way can we cover this complex and politically loaded subject in one short lesson. Our guest speakers today, Dr. Yael Berda from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Dr. Samira Alayan, from the Department of education here at the Hebrew University, will talk to us about the state's role in shaping the integration of the Arab Palestinian's minority in Israel. Palestinian-Israeli relations, and the Israeli state's role in shaping these relations, are at the core of Dr. Berda's research. A sociologist and human rights advocate, Dr. Berda's studies have looked at the bureaucracy of the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territory and have explored the influence of colonial administrative legacy on the contemporary military civic administration in occupied territories. In other studies, she examined the persistence of bureaucratic legacy, following independence in former colonies. Focusing on population management practices and the construction of political membership in state afflicted by the partition plans, Israeli, Cyprus and India, Dr. Samira Alayan is senior lecturer and a researcher at the School of Education at the Hebrew University. And a lecturer, a teacher trainer at the College. Her studies focused on education in conflict laden societies and the educational experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as the Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Among other issues, she examined Palestinian citizens' experience of good and significant learning, along with questions about education and identity in the Middle East. She's the co-editor of the politics of education reforms in the Middle East, self and other in textbooks and curricula, published in 2012. Together, they will help us shed light on the processes of the exclusion, inclusion, and assimilation of the Palestinians in Israel. >> So I want to talk about a period of time in the history of Israel that people don't know a lot about. And it's a period in which, after the war of independence that the last shot was fired in the spring of 1949, Israel established a military government in the north, the south, and the center of Israel. In order to control the Palestinian population that remained, following the war of independence, called by the Palestinians [FOREIGN], and during this period of time, there was an entirely separate government that controlled the lives of the Palestinian minority. That, for the most part, were not yet citizens. They would become citizens a few years later. But during that time, it was an extremely important time in the history of the Palestinian minority, and I think that we need to know more about it. In order to understand today's current political situation with the Palestinian minority, and all kinds of policies that are hard to understand if we don't know about this history. So, I'm just going to give a brief outline about how the military government worked, and what it did. And of course, it's very little and there's a lot more information about this. And I'm hoping that you can email me if you're interested in hearing more about this. Or also, you can Google it and learn more about this military government that was from 1949 to 1966. So, the Israeli leadership had a difficulty. What to do with the Palestinian population that had remained within the boundaries of 1948? And one of their decisions was that they were going to use the structure that the British mandate government that had ruled Palestine for 30 years, used in order to control population. So the major legal tool that was used during the military government were the emergency defense regulations of 1945. These regulations enabled military commanders, governors, and district commissioners to have arrests and searches and seizures. But most importantly, what the regulations allowed them was to prevent full freedom of movement, and to require permits. So people needed to have a permit in order to move from place to place, from their village to the city or from city to city. And that enabled the military establishment to check people and survey them. For security purposes, but also for the purposes of showing who's the sovereign and who's in-charge. Because at the time, that was still a very, very contested issue. And so this military government structured Palestinian life in a way that constantly, Palestinians had to Be in contact with police and military officials in order to carry out their daily life. In order to have work, in order to receive licenses, in order to travel, in order to go to school. And so it was not a civilian life, it was a life controlled by the military. And that had incredible implications on the way people perceived themselves and the way social life was organized in the 5 Palestinian cities and the 100 villages that Palestinians remained in. >> So, if I'm focusing on education. So, I would like to give some background information about the Palestinian living in the State of Israel. In order to illustrate the differences between the Palestinian living inside the State of Israel and the Palestinian living in the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and Gaza. So I will start to give some back information what's happening with the Palestinian population. So it's very important to know that after the establishment of the state of Israel, the Palestinian were divided into four group. The first, group A it's 1948 Palestinians, the citizen of the State of Israel. B, this is the 1967 Palestinian resident of east Jerusalem. C, the West Bank and Gaza, and D the Refugees. In my lecture, I will focus in group A and group B. Group A, this means the group that 1948 Palestinians, those who stayed in their homes after the war of 1948 and become a citizen of the State of Israel. And Group B is 1967 Palestinians, those who continue living in East Jerusalem after the 1967 war as a resident and not a citizen. And were governed by the state of Jordan until then. So I will start to give history background about the education and about the population. So before the establishment of the State of Israel, 700,000 Arab lived in the country, and they including a group of academics. After the State was established, the number of the Arab decreased to 156,000. Most of the academics were either deported or they left on their own accord, and thus become refugees. The remaining population consists of farmers, fellahin. This caused a shortage of academic-trained people in the education system. So today, the Arab population in Israel is 20% of the general population, including the resident of East Jerusalem that was next to the State of Israel in 1967. The Palestinian in East Jerusalem are resident and not citizen, meaning they holding a Jerusalem ID card and not the Israeli passport. Their education system is unique. And I will talk about the education system later. So I will go back to the Palestinian inside Israel, the citizen of the State of Israel, and I will talk about the definition and the labels they call the Palestinian inside Israel. So they have many different labels. One of them is Israeli Arabs. Minorities, Arab minorities, Israeli Palestinian Arabs, Palestinian Israelis, Arab of the State of Israel, the insider Arabs, our Arabs, in 1948 Arabs, and the non-Jew sector population, etc. So we can see all that, they have a lot of labels and definition. And all these definition refer to a group of people living in the State of Israel who are, in one hand, Palestinian Arab who belong to the greater Arab nation and, specifically, to the Palestinian nation. On the other hand, they are Israeli passport holders entitled to equal right as all other Israeli citizen. If I will go out of this population, there is 81 are Muslim, 10% are Christian, and 9% are Druze living in the northern region. And if I will go to the education system in Israel and watch the condition and relate it to the earlier lecture. So we can see that Israel has one education ministry which control all the verger sectors, the Jewish state school, both secular and religion, the Arab school, both public and private school, including the East Jerusalem sector, and the Druzian school sector. All of them, they have one education system. So if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the influence or the impact to the Arab teacher. We can see that, as I mentioned before, that in 1948, most of the academic were deported or left the country. Those who remained were mostly fellahin, or farmers. And only 4% of the teaching staff in those years were academically trained. And the remainder of the staff was employed by the Education Ministry, despite their inability to teach properly. And if we talk about the military government until 1966, we can see that teacher were forbidden to be involved or even speak about the pressing political issues whether inside or outside the classroom. These cause conflicting expectation for the teacher. In one hand, the teachers were closely supervised and forced to distance themself from any political involvement if they wanted to remain employed. And on the other hand, as the only remaining model of the Arab educator elite, the community expected them to provide an example for the population and to commit to the local leadership. If, after in 1966 the military rule were finished, so replaced by a Civil Administration and I will talk about what's happening in the education after this session of Yael. >> So, like we heard from Samilla, life under the military government was a very controlled one, where people had to think about what they were going to say, how they were going to act, and what they were going to do. You literally had to plan your life a lot. Think about if you would have to ask for a permit to go anywhere. Or if you had to think about what kinds of things you could talk about in a classroom. Then you wind up thinking a lot about what you're planning to do and policing yourself a lot. And that ended, the military government ended in 1966. There was a big debate and controversy in the Israeli Knesset, the parliament, for years and years about relinquishing the military government. And even the head of the opposition, Menachem Begin, was the most fierce opposition to the military government. Finally in 1966, it was Ended. And between 1966 and 1976, something very interesting happened to the political culture of Palestinian citizens of Israel. And in order to illustrate that, I want to talk about one event. I want to talk about Land Day, on the 30th of March 1976. What happened on Land Day? A few months prior to that day, the Israeli government, headed by Prime Minister Rabin and Defense Minister Peres, had decided to confiscate 20,000 dunams of Palestinian land in the Galilee. And in order to make more room for the city of Karmiel to expand. And that decision created great ripples of anger and heave protest all across the Galilee, and especially in the village of Sakhnin. I hope you get a chance to visit the village of Sakhnin and Arraba. It's a very beautiful place. These are very beautiful places on the road between Acre and Safed cities that are very important to both Jews and Palestinians. So let's talk about Land Day. On that day, the Palestinian minority staged numerous protests, and Prime Minister Rabin made the decision to send in military forces and police forces to quash the protests. During which, three people were killed by police forces, and that created great anger amongst the Palestinian citizens of Israel. And it also, despite it being a very difficult moment, created a beginning of a negotiation between the leadership of the Palestinian minority and the Israeli government, including the police. About what did it mean to be a minority in Israel? What kind of rights did it entail? What kind of importance it was to have a participatory democracy in which Palestinian citizens would feel equal? And so on the one hand, while it was an extremely difficult day, it was also the beginning of a new relationship that was closer to equality and was less between subjects and rulers as it had been during the years of the military government. It was a regeneration of the democratic politics of the Palestinian communities in Israel. And so following Land Day, Tawfiq Ziad was elected to be the Mayor of Nazareth, that was one important point. And the second was the establishment of Hadash, HaHazit HaDemokratit LeShalom uLeShivion. In Arabic, it's al-Jabhah ad-Dimuqraṭiyyah lis-Salam wa'l-Musawah. And it was some members of the Communist Party together with new Arab leadership that had come out of the Land Day protest had formed a new political alliance. And this political alliance began to talk about citizenship rights and what the citizenship mean in Israel, not only for Palestinians but for all citizens. And a discussion began about civil and political rights that became a very important one later on in the 90s as the Supreme Court established, through its rulings, a judicial constitution. So we see how the Palestinian minority had an important impact on all of the political discourse within Israel, which is something that sometimes we forget when we think only of the conflict as two different parties. We forget how important it is when minorities challenge the central authority and ask for more participation and more voice. And so about 20 years after Land Day, another important thing happened. And that was the creation of Balad. A group of highly intellectual Palestinians, Palestinian citizens of Israel, had decided to break off from Hadash and create a party that, in Arabic Tajamu, was more interested in having more cultural autonomy for Palestinian citizens of Israel. And also demanded that Israel be a land for all its citizens and challenging the idea that Israel was a Jewish and democratic state together. And this was a major challenge. It happens in 1995, two years after the Oslo Accords, which was the peace agreements between the Palestinians that lived in the territories, the 67 Palestinians as called them, and the Israeli government. But the Arab minority was saying something different. They were saying, we have our own politics. Our politics are not only the same politics as the Palestinians in '67, and they're also not the Israeli politics of the Jewish citizens of Israel. We, as Palestinian citizens of Israel, have our own political needs and our own political rights. And it became a very, very contested issue. So I want to jump to the events of October 2000, which were perhaps one of the most important political events that were in Israeli political history. And have an incredible impact on the discourse on civil rights and political rights within Israel. And so very, very briefly, of course, all the facts are always contested. So I'm just going to tell the story and let you Google it. So in October 2000, the Second Intifada began, it was called Intifadat El-Aqtzah. It began the same day that then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon went to visit the temple mount with 2,000 policemen, and there began riots. From those riots and protests across both the Palestinian territories and inside Israel. And in the Galilee, during one of these protests in Wadi Ara, there were police fired live ammunition, and that killed 13 protesters that were all Palestinian citizens of Israel. And that event sent shock waves through the entire political system, and especially within the Palestinian minority, but not only. It was almost like a game changer, a resetting of the stage, when everybody began to question, what does citizenship mean? If citizens can be killed by police during protests, would they have been killed had there been Jews there? Why did the policemen feel that they were in life-threatening danger even though these were citizens that were protesting? And what this led to was a very big controversy that the state established a committee named [FOREIGN], it was named after Judge who was a Supreme Court Judge who headed this committee. And they worked to investigate what happened during that day when the protesters were killed by police. The investigation did not, there was a big report, the investigation did not bring solace to the bereaved families or to the the Palestinian community. It also didn't put to rest the questions of citizenship, power and authority, and the use of force against people protesting. And constantly moving around the issue of rights versus security, there became a big rift between Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Jewish majority. In which Palestinians felt that they no longer could think of themselves as equal counterparts to the political discourse and had to make big changes in order to achieve that equality. And so this political situation and security situation had an extreme impact on both the relationships between the minority and the majority. And also within the Palestinian communities, and how they viewed themselves. >> Back to the education system in Israel. During the 1970s, the situation over the Arab teachers in Israel began to improve. In the course of the 80s, there was a dramatic rise in the number of Arabic academics and academic school faculty members. And in the 90s the great majority of teachers were academically trained and only a small minority of 2% were not. In the year 2000 the situation improved even more, and most of the new teachers today are academically trained. The situation of the teachers were difficult. So until the 80s, teachers were forbidden to encourage or to engage in discussion of political issues that could provoke nationalistic emotion among the students. Even though such sensitive issues as land, national identity, civil rights struggle, were to be found in the history and civic textbook, they were never discussed in the classroom. And when the rule were changed and the teachers allowed to discuss such issues in the classroom, especially after the Lebanon war in 1982, and the and massacres. However, teachers were still afraid to discuss such topics because they were expected not to provoke incitement in the classroom and to educate their students towards a peaceful coexistence. Before we start to talk about textbook and what the content that pupil in Palestinian society have, I would like to say that the school is very important place in the life of the Arab student, and this is for tourism. The first reason that a teacher and textbooks are the basis of the knowledge that student must learn. Second, because the Arab society has a shortage of of social organization and places of culture event. Therefore, the school is very important to have the Palestinian culture and to learn about the values in the school. So I will go now through the textbooks, and before that, I will say why textbook is important. Textbooks and educational material has a strong influence on student inside and outside the classroom. Not only because they convey actual knowledge, but also because they convey [COUGH] the images, sorry, the images of history, the concept of time, and offer a political and social representation and values that society want to pass to the younger generation. Therefore, to control the education regulation and the content of the textbook is a powerful instrument used by educational authorities to influence the formation of identity within a given group. And this is the method how it's. So what the content of that Arab student and what they focus about and what they are talking in the classroom and study. So the focus of the curriculum for the Arab student, the textbook taught in the Arabic school are based on the general Israeli education system, which teaches of the love of the Jewish homeland and the history of the state of Israel. So, this is the focus and what the pupil study in the history textbook. So, the Arabs have three history textbooks for the middle school. And two history textbooks for that high school. And what they study, what the content in the middle school books, is introduce topics about the Muslim world and the Islam in different period, before and after Muhammad the profit. The Renaissance, Europe in the Middle Ages and the Jews in the Middle Ages. The history of the Jews from the Middle Ages till the Zionist movement. They tell how the Jews survived war and the Holocaust. The French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and the First World War. And in the high school books they study the Second World War and how the Jews established the state of Israel, the Palestinian Cause, and the last unit of the British Mandate and the PLO. As you see from the content, what the other pupils study in the school textbook, this is Israeli curricula. It focuses on the Israeli vision, as I mentioned before. So if we look deeply and analyze the textbook, so we can see that all the topics are presented for the Arab pupils it's from one point of view, and it is the Israeli one. In the past few years we have seen small change in how the books present the Arab-Palestinian living in the State of Israel. But the definition are translated from the Jewish history textbook written in Hebrew. So there is no definition of Palestinian identity, etc., in the textbooks. If we look to this point, so we can analyze that this mean that the history textbooks for the Arab students in Israel do not allow them to learn history from the Arabic perspective, and do not introduce the students to Palestinian historians and writers. This is because the curricula is focused on promoting Jewish Israeli territorial identity and Jewish history and culture. I'm going back here to try to explain why it is like this. So the Israeli attitude toward the Arab Palestinians in Israel, they still view the Arabs as dangerous to the existence of the state of Israel. They are different from the Jewish population in their language and culture and they are a developmentally traditional society. They speak the Arabic language, and belong to the greater Arab Middle Eastern Nation. And they are an invisible part of the Palestinian population, which is engaged in ongoing conflict with the state of Israel. So what's the effect of this curricula? When a student is not allowed to study about his or her own history, identity and culture, this influences his or her education in the following ways. First, it causes a crisis of identity. Second, a feeling of estrangement from the state of Israel. And, third, a feeling of discrimination. After this session, I will go to second group, B, the East Jerusalem school. But first we will hear Yael back and then I will give this session, thank you. >> So feelings of discrimination and estrangement from the state were heightened by steps, legal steps, that the Israeli parliament took, beginning in 2003. In 2003 in August, a temporary amendment to the citizenship law Established that, basically, Palestinians living inside of Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel, could no longer marry and then request citizenship for their spouses if they came from the occupied Palestinian territories, or even from East Jerusalem. And what that meant was that this idea of family unification in which each citizen could choose their husband or wife from whoever they want, and then request the country grant them citizenship so they could live together, became an impossibility for most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. And the reason given for this amendment to the law was a security reason. The idea was this was after five years, six years, of heavy terrorist attacks, some of them carried out by Palestinians coming in from the territories. And a few of them carried out by people that did have permits having to do with their family relationships. And so this justified a sweeping Amendment that basically said to the Palestine citizens in Israel, you can no longer choose who to make a family with. And this created an extreme challenge for many Palestine communities, but also for many Jewish Israelis that felt that this wasn't quite the way to go in order to enhance security. But, like we said before, this is all very controversial. So I'm going to let you Google it and maybe learn more about this amendment that was enacted as a temporary measure in 2003, but has been since enacted every year until now, 2016. One can only hope that the conflict, as long as it continues, has less of an impact on civil and political rights that are very basic, such as family unification and deciding to choose who to love and who to marry. I will start to talk about school in East Jerusalem. This is the second group of the Palestinians living in the state of Israel. They are living in East Jerusalem as a resident and not a citizen. Thus, they are allowed only to vote at the municipal level and not in a national election. Their education is controlled by the Israeli Ministry of Education, but their textbooks come originally from the Palestinian Ministry. The schools in East Jerusalem, they are run by two opposing governments. The first one is the Israeli government, the second one is the Palestinian Authority. How it works, I will give this a graph. And if we are looking to this graph in front of us, we can see the responsibility of the two governments. In the right one, we can see the Israeli government took responsibility above that school in East Jerusalem from the year 1967. And in the Arab side, or before 1967, the Jordanian government had the responsibility of the education until the Oslo process in 1994. And after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority took the responsibility of the education and living. And on the Israeli side, the Municipality of Education and the Minister of Education has their own responsibility. So we can see from the graph which responsibility has every government. So the Palestinian has the responsibility of the curricula, the textbook, the examination, the report card. And the Israeli one, they have extra funding, building, special program, and so on. Following the Oslo Accord, if we'll go back in history, the Palestinians begun to put some of the materials about Palestinians in textbook. But they started to produce textbooks and to take responsibility for their content, a process that began only in 2000. Before that, and before the Oslo Accord, the same Jordanian and Egyptian textbook continued to be used in the Palestinian schools, including East Jerusalem schools, but were censored by the Israeli military education commander. After Oslo process, all public education institution were transferred to the Palestinian National Authority. But the Egyptian and the Jordanian textbook were still used in Palestinian schools for some time until very gradual replacement by the Palestinian textbooks. And my question is, why Palestinian textbooks used in the West Bank and in Gaza are used also in Jerusalem? So we try to get the answer. Important to know that the Palestinian textbook has no power because they are produced and written under occupation. No freedom, there is direct and indirect censorship. The Palestinian textbook were being produced from 2000 until 2008. Since then, they have been used in almost all Palestinian schools, West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem, east Jerusalem schools. And the textbook issued by the Palestinian Ministry of Education, there is some information about Palestinian cause. However, in east Jerusalem, these books are censored by the Israeli Ministry that wishes to exclude these chapters or sub-chapters. And the textbooks students receive have many blank pages, and what's that mean? I will show you here example for this book. For example, if we took this book and we can see here, and I can show you in the camera too. That this book we have here the label of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Ministry of Education. And we have the Palestinian flag and it's written in Arabic, also the Palestinian State. When this book enter to east Jerusalem, so the same book which you can see here, this is the same book. They took over this system, and there is no label for the textbooks. So we can't know if this really a textbook, the Palestinian Authority take responsibility about the content. If you go through inside the book, so we can see also that this book they took the label inside in the first page of the book. And if we go deeply to the content of the book, this is the Palestinian textbook, the original one, and when it's entered to Israel. So we can see here that when they took, this chapter is presented that Zionist movement. And if we go in this chapter, we can see when it's present to the pupil what the aim of design as woman, so we can see in the right, blank pages where they deleted. I will show you here the book, so you can see here, there is no content, nothing in the text book. But the same book, the original one, we can see that here we have some of the content that the pupil in Palestine study about the Zionist movement. If we go through other books, this is another textbook for grade 9, so we can see the same procedure. They took over the symbol of the Palestinian Authority, deleted it when it's entered to east Jerusalem. But that difficult situation that for that pupil in East Jerusalem. When this chapter's telling about the Palestinian cause, and the pupil expected from the school to give some information about his culture and his history. So what's going, when it's entered to the state of Israel? The state of Israel took over the whole chapter, and that pupil got blank pages. This is a book that you see in the slide. So, this is the start of the chapter, and when the pupil in east Jerusalem open the chapter, so he can see just blank pages, white pages. And you can see that the whole chapter is with white pages, and when it's finished about the Palestinian cause, then it start to talk about Europe or America, so that textbook continue to present the content. My conclusion, none of the Palestinian Arab school either inside Israel or in east Jerusalem teach Palestinian history or culture. While Arab Israeli schools teach the Jewish curricula, the East Jerusalem schools teach the Palestinian curricula censored and partial. Therefore, Palestinian pupils leave school with a frustration feeling that the system has not provided them with the material they need in order to form their identity. >> One of the features that set Palestinian citizens of Israel apart from Jewish citizens is their exemption for military service. When non-Palestinian citizens, men and women, are required to serve in the army after completing their high school education. Palestinians, and especially the Muslim among them, are exempt and serve only if they volunteer to do so. Because military service is often considered an entry ticket into the mainstream Israel society, many use their military network to gain employment in the Israeli labor market. This exemption often means limited employment opportunity for Arabs in Israel. And adds to their other political, educational and cultural barriers that Palestinian citizens encounter in their integration into Israel society. In fact, the recruitment of young Palestinian citizens into the Israeli military is at the center of a much heated political debate in Israel today. On the right wing, some politicians have argued that equality in rights requires equality in duties. And therefore, Palestinian citizens of Israel should serve like anyone else. Palestinian Knesset members on the other hand argue that these young Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot be forced to fight against their brothers in the Palestinian Authority or in other Arab nations. Beyond its centrality to the understanding of the relations of the state with its largest minority, this debate also attests to the general centrality of the military service in Israel. Our next lesson will focus on that phenomenon.
