Education and Peacebuilding in Israel and Palestine

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 43, No.3, Spring 2020 Education and Peacebuilding in Israel and Palestine Saliba Sarsar* At a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been intractable, there are those who are engaged in peacebuilding or in community-based areas, and who do so in order to set a foundation for peace before and after a peace treaty is signed. Their attention is to generate new awareness and action or to foster transformative ways of thinking and behaving that advance a fair, viable, and maintainable peace. This article moves from the macro to the micro levels of understanding the interconnections of education to peacebuilding. It first reviews the environment in which learning occurs. Second, it presents the institutional and organizational frameworks through which varying perceptions of peace and peacebuilding materialize. Third and last, it examines facets of the competing historical narrative issue in order to discover “the truth” and arrive at common ground, which is essential if dialogue, peace, and reconciliation are to grow. Overall Environment for Peacebuilding Peace initiatives ought to be easy, but are often replete with challenges. What peacebuilding work is done and how successful it is depends on the nature and circumstances of the society in which it takes place. A military occupied territory allows for far fewer opportunities than an independent state. A divided society tends to be polarizing to politics and other aspects of daily life. That has been the case of Israel and Palestine. Human Rights Watch reports that, “The Israeli government continued to enforce severe 90 *Saliba Sarsar is Professor of Political Science at Monmouth University. His B.A. in political science and history interdisciplinary, summa cum laude, is from Monmouth and his doctoral degree in political science is from Rutgers University. He is the author of Jerusalem: The Home in Our Hearts and of Peacebuilding in Israeli-Palestinian Relations. He is the co-author of Ideology, Values, and Technology in Political Life and of World Politics: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Among his edited and co-edited works are What Jerusalem Means to Us: Christian Perspectives and Reflections; Palestine and the Quest for Peace; and Principles and Pragmatism. 91 and discriminatory restrictions on Palestinians’ human rights; restrict the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip; and facilitate the unlawful transfer of Israeli citizens to settlements in the occupied West Bank.”1 The contention between Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas continues. “Both the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority… in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza arrested opposition supporters and other critics, and mistreated and tortured some in their custody.”2 Moreover, Israel’s 2016 “transparency law” and 2018 “nation-state law,” for example, discourage peacebuilding. The transparency law requires nongovernmental organizations to account for foreign donations if over half their funding originates from international donors, which mostly targets left of center or peacebuilding organizations that are against rightist policies or that advocate for Palestinian rights. The nation-state law makes the right to exercise national determination unique to the Jewish people, establishes Hebrew as Israel’s official language and relegates Arabic to a special status, and considers Jewish settlement as a national value that will be promoted and developed.3 The country is increasingly moving to the Right. More representatives to the Knesset are bringing this ideological bend to its legislative agenda. Jewish settlers are becoming more emboldened. Gershon Baskin, a pioneer in Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, shared his anguish about what is transpiring in Israel: The aspiration of being a society based on equality no longer exists in our reality. The Israeli outstretched hand of peace is no longer found. The failure of the peace process… the continued rounds of violence, the systematization of the occupation and our means of control and domination, the transformation of the occupied people into a transparent people, the tolerance of evilness in our system of control, and our refusal to take responsibility for our own actions have removed for me the beauty of our home.4 Elements within the Israeli and Palestinian societies, moreover, present obstacles. On the Israeli side, peacebuilders are portrayed as anti-Israel or traitors. Some of the Jewish fundamentalist settler youths have...