Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

You are here: Home » International » Middle East » Issues - their Identifications as precondition for solutions » Issue: Education or propaganda to hate?

Issue: Education or propaganda to hate?

In Israel a lot of critical things were said in March about the way Palestinians would educate their children to hate the Jews while compared to that in their own system, so they claim, prayers for peace were first in place. They did not reflect upon confusing religion with culture.

Still that comparative note on education in the Middle East needs some further elaborations, especially after the Israeli army literally ransacked the Palestinian ministry of education in April and destroyed in the process the very organization of memory needed to run properly at all any school system.

Among the materials either destroyed or taken away are included besides computers and files on discs, written or printed teaching materials, records about students and notes by teachers about their pupils. Learning proceeds according to constant evaluation; without such measures of progress, there is no proof possible for anyone to be able to judge if the person has qualified him- or herself according to common accepted standards of education and knowledge.

As such the incursion is a violation of ‘cultural intimacy’ needed for the education of the Palestinian people, including children, youths and all adults. Such is the nature of cultural education that it goes with values, language, forms of perceptions, wisdoms of how to survive etc. and is, therefore, a most complex art of making things possible by letting younger generations learn from the previous ones.

By the same token, Israeli governments come repeatedly under pressure to grant especially the extreme Right religious schools that follow a non-secular vision of the world and is linked even with the demand to be exempted from military service, something obligatory to all other Israeli citizens.

Thus that act alone of destroying the Palestinian educational base during the incursion of the Israeli’s army into Ramallah needs to be assessed both in terms of motivation and damage inflicted.

As for motive, like in many other cases, discussions and opinions expressed before March 29, 2002, indicated that Israelis had become convinced in several factors adding up to make possible suicide bomb attacks. One of them was the educational policy implemented by the Palestinian Authority. It became to Israelis a severe point of contention because to them it was but an education towards hatred of Jewish people.

There is a point, for if true, it will make understanding of the other most difficult. As Brendan Kennelly in Ireland would point out: the ‘most difficult thing to unlearn is learned hatred’. It shows itself wherever there is continual conflict and when at the first spark or provocation, there is given such readiness to let violence speak again, that it is simply frightening to what extent such hatred can go. The Protestant side throwing stones at Catholic mothers taking their children to school, as the case in Northern Ireland, is such a sad reminder.

Thus this matter of educating towards hatred has to be examined. At the same time, it is known that separated school systems shall but reinforce fear and lack of intimate knowledge of the other, so that hatred can easily be developed in mutual isolation. Only intercultural learning and conflict solving learning strategies can overcome that. There have been some models in that direction, but even once the pressure to be only with the one and not the other side, that even those careful nurtured bonds seem not to be enough.

On the damage side, and after the incursion in April there has not yet been enough time to do a full assessment, it has to be said, that by destroying the ‘memory of the Palestinian education system’ a horrific cultural wound has been inflicted. For it that has robbed the Palestinian Authority and its educators of a chance to do some careful probing into an unknown future. Culturally speaking, this should take place under own, equally non-violent terms. There can only be learned out of own mistakes, if the education of the Palestinian people is not dictated by any outside force, but rather is developed out of own painful and truthful experiences. Many have been made in the course of the history of the Palestinian people. There are the stories of refugee camps stretching now over a time span of three generations. All along, and especially after the Oslo agreement, they experienced a modest freedom that comes with the possibility to take educational matters into your own hands. It touches upon the cultural dimension that underlies the existence of people.

As life continues in its many varied forms, experiences are compounded by cultural reflections and expressions, e.g. the poems by Mahmoud Darwish. They deal above all with a struggle to gain dignity on own terms, that is without the need to compare. This defines not merely freedom in cultural terms, but in the case of the Jewish or Palestinian people with special fates linked to that search for cultural terms. For instance, in Mamoud Darwish’s poem is reflected a wish that the Palestinians can do things on their own, that is without feeling inferior to the others. That struggle for own terms involves also not copying the bad habits of the others.

Thus that cultural damage caused by the incursion is as great as the loss of trust between people when it comes to collaborating with the Israelis or vice versa with the Palestinians about a common future in the region.

Altogether ‘terrorism’ has led to such a swift shift in priorities, that culture is left way behind these new developments. For rather than investing in the future through education, and that includes learning about the history of other people and their cultures, new forms of propaganda are linked to increased expenditures on military and intelligence capacities. But by excluding culture, including the art of dialogue and questions of a critical mind, any approach to reality becomes the same as all others and therefore indifferent to cultural differences. Unfortunately these developments show that the so-called soft approach of cultural reflections towards peace as a way of living together has no place in a world of seeming ‘tough’ politics.


^ Top

« Issue: Suicide bombers in the Middle East | Issue: Anti-Semitism in Europe »