Date post: | 15-Oct-2014 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | christine-clark |
View: | 45 times |
Download: | 0 times |
Clark 1
Abstract: The conflict between Israel and Palestine has important roots in the events which took place before the end of the Mandate period. These events fostered nationalism within both the Palestinian and Jewish communities. However, while the effect of Jewish education on nationalism has become an important area of scholarship, too little attention has been paid to Palestinian education during the same period. Lack of material is a major problem for scholars, however this paper is able to delve into the issue though the use of first-hand accounts and education data collected during the period in question. This paper argues that the education Arab school children received in Palestine during the Mandate was an important part of the formation of an imagined Palestinian community. Schools for Arabs proliferated during the Mandate period, tended to include only Arab students, and taught in Arabic beginning in this period. These factors contributed to the gulf between the Jewish and Arab communities and created a climate conducive to conflict between two groups which had very little contact during their formative years.
Learning PatriotismArab Education, Unity, and Political Efficacy in Mandate Palestine
The years of the British Mandate were an important period of growth for the Palestinian
community and the changes the polity underwent during this time were important formative
experiences for people of Palestine. Many factors were at work during this period; however,
education played a defining role in forming a unified Palestinian identity and increasing
Palestinian political efficacy. While pan-Arab nationalism became popular during the Ottoman
period, education played a major role in focusing nationalism in Palestine on the Palestinian state
rather than the Arab nation. Greater access to learning and education, brought on by new British
policies, helped to unite the separate groups within the Arab community into a single, distinctly
Palestinian polity with a growing sense of nationalism. The community’s unity and national
sentiments were later strengthened and tempered the Palestinians’ experiences during the 1948
war and in the refugee camps. While the trials of the war and the camps were important aspects
of unity and nationalism, education was a major factor in starting the process.
The late Ottoman and Mandate periods were important times of social and political
change for Palestine. The events that occurred during these years changed the face of the Middle
Clark 2
East and the futures of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples irrevocably. Although the Ottoman
Empire was once one of the major power centers of the world and had acted as a leading power
in the region for many years, by the mid to late 19th century, its influence had waned and it had
become the “Sick Man of Europe”. Major Western powers, taking advantage of the Empire’s
weakened position, began to consolidate their positions within the Middle East, primarily
through the medium of capitulations. These capitulations, which were basically agreements with
the Sultanate, allowed Westerners special privileges, such as exemptions from Ottoman taxes
and laws, and gave the West a foothold in the Empire.
World War I was an extremely important period for the Middle East, primarily because
the great Western powers exerted such control over the region after the fall of the Ottoman
Empire. During the war, the European powers crafted a multitude of secret agreements and
treaties, such as the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, which
arranged the parceling out of the Middle East after the war. Unfortunately “decisions were…
made primarily with a view toward the European, rather than toward local actors and interests”1
and the secret agreements the powers made, more often than not, contradicted each other.
The most important document pertaining to the Middle East written during the Great
War, however, was the 1917 Balfour declaration. This short letter, sent from British Foreign
Secretary Balfour to Baron Rothschild, declared Great Britain’s support for national Jewish
home in Palestine. The document, which many scholars agree was purposefully written to be
ambiguous, did not specify whether this “national home” was to be an independent state or a
homeland and it did not give any indication as to how much of Palestine was to be dedicated to
this national home. Even Chaim Weizmann, future President of Israel, was perturbed by the, as
1Krämer, Gudrun, A History of Palestine (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008), 141.
Clark 3
Norman Rose puts it, “misty phraseology of the Declaration”2. The declaration, once discovered
by the Arabs, was not well received and most of the Arab leadership rejected it outright. The
document does not even refer to the Palestinians as a people; rather they are described as the
“non-Jewish communities”. The Balfour declaration continued to influence British policy until
1948 when Britain left Palestine and the state of Israel was founded.
After the war ended, the Middle East was divvied up among the victorious European
power and in 1922 Great Britain, which had already set up a civil administration in the Holy
Land, was granted the Mandate for Palestine. The Arab and Jewish communities, which had
generally existed peacefully together for years, were already experiencing strained relations by
the time the British took over. The Jewish community, which had always had a small presence
in Palestine, had been growing rapidly, primarily “through immigration [and] the share of Jews
doubled between 1872 and 1880 from around 13,900 to 26,000”3; by the end of the war the
number increased to approximately 65,300 and this number would more than double by the end
of the 1920s.The rapid increase in the Jewish population was an important aspect of the tension
between the two communities.
A great deal of the tension growing between the two communities originated in the rural
areas, however, as more and more peasants moved into the cities, hostility and violence began to
break out in urban areas as well. Many new immigrants, especially those who were part of the
second and third aliyas, were settlers eager to start a new life in their ancestor’s ancient
homeland. They wanted to distinguish themselves from the “anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jews
as parasites living off their “host societies”’4 and create an image of a new, strong Jew. To this
2 Rose, Norman, A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine 1890s-1948, (London, Pimlico, 2010), 16.
3 Krämer, Gudrun, A History of Palestine (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008), 137.
4 Ibid, 111.
Clark 4
end, many new settlers bought land and created socialist communities which emphasized
agriculture and physical labor in order to move away from the older conceptions about the
merchant Jew. The immigrants emphasized that, rather than hiring work out, the land was to be
worked solely by Jewish labor. Despite the fact that the new Jewish residents had legally bought
the land, many Arabs, especially Arab peasants, believed that the land the settlers had purchased
had been stolen out from under them. Due to the Ottoman land reforms of 1856 and 1858, a
great number of Arab farmers, whose families had lived in the same place for centuries, were
tenement farmers who worked the land for absentee land owners. These farmers considered the
land they worked to rightfully belong to them, however, the legal owners of the land, many of
whom resided in distant cities such as Beirut, thought nothing of selling the land to eager Jewish
immigrants. These settlers, in turn, believed that, as they had paid for the land, it belonged to
them and that they had the right to do with it as wished. As a result a number of Arab peasants
were evicted from their homes. Most of these newly landless peasants were forced to migrate to
the cities where unrest grew.
The period between the 1920 and 1948 was characterized by increasing violence and
hostility between the Arabs and the Jews. During this time, there were several riots which ended
with many deaths, including the 1920 Nabi Musa riots in Jerusalem and the 1921 Jaffa riots. The
British tried to rectify the situation and formed several commissions charged with finding
stability for the struggling country; however none of these commissions were met with success.
During this period the Jewish community continued to grow through immigration. At the same
time, the yishuv was setting up governing institutions which eventually created a state within a
state. This state in waiting eventually became Israel after the 1948 war. While the Jewish
community was getting stronger and stronger, the Arab one was becoming weaker and more
Clark 5
fractured. The Arab leadership, considered by many scholars, such as Rashid Khalidi, to be
ineffectual and a primary cause of Arab society’s weakness relative to the yishuv, was beset by
internecine fighting and wrapped up in bureaucracy as they attempted to negotiate with the
British. This period was crowned by the Arab Revolt (1936-1939) was primarily led by the
illiterate Arab-peasants and eventually put down harshly by the British. The Revolt probably hurt
the Arab community and weakened their ability to fight in 1948. During the revolt Jewish forces
worked together with the British and were able to get weapons while the Arabs lost both men
and weapons. The Arab community took years to recover from the harsh tactics used to quell the
revolt.
In 1948 the British gave up their mandate in Palestine and withdrew from the country.
After their withdrawal war broke out almost immediately. Although the hegemonic
interpretation of events has traditionally viewed Israel as David and the Arab juggernaut as
Goliath, recent scholarship, especially that by Israeli “new historians”, argues that Israel was
actually much better prepared for the war and that it even had more men than the Arab states
overall. The Arab states, they argue, were only looking out for themselves, even worked against
each other at some points and were not particularly interested in the Palestinians. There were
atrocities on both sides during the war, but eventually Israel came out victorious and a large
percentage of the Palestinian population had fled the country. Eventually these people ended up
in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan where they were subjected to harsh conditions.
In this paper I will investigate the role education played in the Palestinian national
consciousness during the mandate period through the use of data gathered by education scholars
and primary sources such as the memoirs of Palestinians who grew up during the mandate. I will
first track the growth of education, starting in the Ottoman era, in order to examine the
Clark 6
development of education in conjunction with Palestinian identity and nationalism. I then move
on to argue that education played an important role in the early years of Palestinian nationalism
and unity. Although I recognize that the 1948 war and the hardships refugees faced in the camps
were defining experiences for the Palestinian community, I believe that the education young
Palestinians received under the British Mandate was an important step in the identity formation
process. The lessons learned in the classroom as well as the improved communication speed
brought on by increased literacy as a result of education are aspects of the identity formation
process that cannot be ignored.
In order to capture daily life under the mandate system, I used diaries and memoirs which
allowed me to explore the effects education had on regular people. Finding the translated
memoirs of people who had grown up under the British Mandate presented itself as a problem
since, unfortunately, there are precious few English language sources which deal with daily life
under the mandate and many the and diaries of many teachers and students are only available in
Arabic. However, I found two excellent sources in which the authors detail their time in school.
These memories are especially useful in conjunction with each other since the authors are so
different from each other and represent different parts of Palestinian society. I use the memoirs
of noted literary scholar and novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra extensively. Jabra, who hailed from a
poor family, was a Christian who grew up in both Bethlehem and Jerusalem and who eventually
traveled to Lebanon and England to pursue his higher education. A Mountainous Journey,
written by nationalist poet Fadwa Tuqan, also an Arab-Christian, but unlike Jabra from a notable
and wealthy family, was also very useful. She was educated in the school system up until the age
of 13, after which her family forced her to discontinue her formal education. Her brother,
Ibrahim Tuqan who was also a nationalist poet, became her tutor and had a huge influence on
Clark 7
both her and her poetry. Later, after the death of her parents, Tuqan studied at both the American
University in Beirut and Oxford. Her memoir contains a great deal of useful information on both
her life and that of her brother’s. I use these primary sources extensively in order to demonstrate
the importance of school and learning to young Palestinians during this time period. These
authors dealt with a wide range of topics, as well as their school education, however, and the
manner in which they saw the changing world they were living in sheds light on the effect
education had on their lives even if education was not directly mentioned.
Education “has always been recognized as an important instrument of social and political
development,”5, however, it, unfortunately, is often forgotten by scholars examining Palestinian
history during the Mandate despite the integral role it played in Palestinian unity and
nationalism. Typical of this problem is Rosemary Sayigh’s classic book, The Palestinians: From
Peasants to Revolutionaries, in which she argues that education only played an important role in
unity and nationalism after the Diaspora and, in fact, played a divisive role during the mandate
period. However, the years spanning 1917 to 1948 were a pivotal period of social upheaval as
Palestinian society underwent a knowledge revolution and was transformed from a society which
largely relied on oral modes of communication to one with a “massive reliance on the written
word”6. The defining characteristics of this revolution played themselves out in the classroom,
which was not only a vehicle promoting literacy, but a place where children developed feelings
of unity, attachment to the Arab state, and nationalistic feelings for their homeland, forming what
Benedict Anderson would term an imagined community . The people within the imagined
community, or nation, see themselves as connected to one another even if they are separated by
5 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 18.
6 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 1.
Clark 8
great distances, have never met, and have very few similarities besides their membership in the
national community. This is an important idea because the nation is more than a state; it is a
group of people who feel connected to each other by more than their residence within the same
borders. The imagined community, which was developing in Palestine, was positively influenced
by the school education which allowed Arab children to see their connections to other Arabs
beyond their local attachments. The imagined community formed in the classroom was integral
to the unification process which brought together the Arabs of Palestine.
The history of education in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine is important to understanding
the effects learning had on the Arab population. The system the Ottomans began to develop in
the 1860s and which the British continued to modify and improve upon after they received the
mandate for Palestine, shows an interesting correlation between rising discontent within the Arab
polity and the education Arab school children received under the mandate. Therefore it is
important to include a short summary of the education system in Palestine and how it developed
under the country’s various suzerains.
The British colonial government was an integral part of the development of the
Palestinian education system; however, the British did not completely rebuild the education in
Palestine, but rather relied on existing Ottoman structures. The resulting system was somewhat
of a hybrid which combined the old Turkish arrangement, itself based on the French education
scheme, and British practices7. The system the British found was largely based on the education
reform begun by the Ottomans in 1869 as a part the Ottoman Empire’s attempts to modernize
during the Tanizmat Period8. The school in the Turkish education system was meant to teach
7 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration, (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 19.
8 Ibid, 19
Clark 9
Ottoman children westernized values and give them a modern education which would allow the
Turkish state to compete against its enemies in Europe. This system included all levels of
schooling from lower elementary to university, but elementary education was the only level that
was widely available since it was “gratuitous and theoretically compulsory”9 . However,
elementary schools were actually very exclusive in nature, despite the fact that they were meant
to be universal. Tibawi notes, that “although theoretically open to all Ottoman subjects… state
schools were in practice almost exclusively for Muslim children”10 and even further, most of the
students who attended these schools were members of the elite strata, primarily because the
language of instruction was Turkish (although Arabic was normally used in the lower elementary
schools). Therefore, most schools were effectively open “to Turkish speaking students only,
sons of notables or civil servants, to the practical exclusion of the children of the mass of the
population”11. Later, public schools were opened which were meant to provide a "minimum
elementary education for the masses”12, however Ayalon notes that “the [Ottoman] state’s
education endeavor… left nearly 90% of all Arab children out of the circle of school-goers”13.
Higher education in the Empire was even more scarce and exclusive than was elementary
education. In 1914, there were only three secondary schools in Palestine which were located in
major urban centers, effectively cutting off higher education for most rural children14. In fact, the
secondary school in Jerusalem, which used Arabic in addition to Turkish as the language of
9 Ibid , 20
10 Ibid, 19
11 Ibid, 133
12 Ibid, 133.
13 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 21.
14 Tabawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 20.
Clark 10
instruction, was built “partly as a concession to Arab national feeling”15 and was most likely a
placating measure since Arab nationalism was very strong during the waning years of the
Empire. Palestine did not even have a university during the Ottoman period and those who
wanted to continue their education had to travel outside of Palestine.
Islamic religious schools filled the gap left in government education for poor Muslim
children. The kuttab school and its secondary institution, the madrasa, were, previous to the
Ottoman educational reforms, essentially the only institutions available to many Turkish
citizens16 and even for a long time after the reforms were implemented, as shown above,
remained the only schools available to the general Muslim population. While, in 1914, the
Ottoman state system accounted for 8,248 children, the kuttab system educated even more,
teaching 8,705 students17. These religious schools were notoriously poor and many times failed
to impart the basic skills such as writing, reading and arithmetic to their pupils. Qur’anic
memorization was the primary goal in the school; however, literacy was divorced from these
lessons as many of the students memorized without understanding the material. The low level of
education students received from these schools was almost to be expected since many of the
teachers could not read themselves and some of them had only memorized portions of the
Qur’an18. Palestinian parents knew that these schools were poor; this is reflected in some of the
popular sayings of the time such as “stupider than a kuttab teacher” and “stupidity is with
weavers, teachers, and yard spinners”19. Although some students were able to achieve literacy
15 Ibid, 20.
16 Ibid, 131
17 Ibid 20.
18 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 30.
19 Ibid, 28.
Clark 11
later using what they had learned at the kuttab or madrasa, most students left school either
illiterate or with a low level of literacy which was easily lost without practice. This system did
not substantially change under the mandate. Although the Department of Education was
reforming the school system, only those schools that were absorbed by the government system
were reformed; some schools were left as they were. These schools provided an importance
service since they were able to service the more rural areas and those students who could not get
into a government school; however they also continued to leave their students illiterate or barely
literate.
Christian and Jewish students in the late Ottoman period were primarily enrolled in
foreign schools operating in Palestine under the capitulation system. The Ottoman state had
been content to leave the education of the minority religious communities to the communities
themselves since non-Muslim communities were traditionally allowed to self-govern their
internal affairs. German, French, and English missionary schools, which taught in the language
of their home countries, were the primary sources of foreign education for Christians and some
Jews, with some Muslims also attending these schools. Private schools, which taught in Hebrew,
were also opened by new Jewish settlers in Palestine. The Ottoman government did not interfere
in these schools and they were left to their own devices until WWI when many of them closed.
After the Great War many of these schools reopened with the exception of some schools whose
home countries were on the losing side of the conflict. These schools, on the whole, tended to be
better than most of the Ottoman government schools.
After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, a British civil administration for
Palestine was put into place in 1920 and the League of Nations granted Britain the mandate for
Palestine in 1922. The Government Department of Education was created almost immediately
Clark 12
under the control of Director of Education Humphrey Bowman who began to formulate policy to
improve the system. The British used the formula which had been effective in many of their
other colonial holdings; rather that scrapping the existing system and starting anew, the English
superimposed their changes onto the existing Ottoman structure. These changes only affected
the former Ottoman state schools, the new schools established by the mandate and the kuttab
schools which were absorbed by the state system. The remaining kuttab schools and the foreign
schools remained private institutions and therefore were unaffected by the British run
Department of Education. The most important changes the mandate government implemented
were adoption of Arabic as the language of instruction and greater admission of Christian Arabs
to the state school system. These changes precipitated the divide between the Arab and Jewish
public school systems and were important to the development of two separate national
communities. The schools controlled by the Mandate government were taught in Arabic and
catered to Arabic children, both Muslim and Christian, while the Jewish system was controlled
by the Zionist organization and taught predominantly in Hebrew. Tibawi notes that “the future
division of public schools on racial and linguistic, or simply national groups into an Arab Public
system and a Hebrew Public System had its roots in these formative years [of the early
mandate]”20.
Throughout the period Great Britain controlled Palestine, Arab education continued to
improve and the number of people able to access public education drastically increased. For
example, in the last years of the Ottoman Empire during the 1914-1915 school year, there were a
total of 8,248 students out of a school age population of 71,933 which is approximately 11
percent. However, during the 1943-44 school year, the percentage of children in school had
20 Ibid, 28.
Clark 13
increased to approximately 21 percent (64,790 students out of 300,000)21. Although this increase
may not look impressive, it was actually astounding since the definition of the school age
population is not consistent. While 1914-15 statistic defines school age population as between
seven years and eleven years*, a total of four years, the 1943-44 statistic increases the number of
children included in the school age population since it covers nine years (between the ages of
five and fourteen)22. The improvements the British implemented were aimed at eliminating
functional illiteracy, which was the primary goal of the mandatory ruler’s education system23.
To this end, the Education Department worked to increase the number of teachers trained and
provide elementary education to all school age children. The elementary education, which
consisted of four years of school in the rural areas and five years in urban areas, was thought to
be enough to provide students with a basic level of education and permanent literacy*. This
would fulfill the terms of the mandate which stipulated that the government had to work to
improve the native people of Palestine in order that they might achieve independence in the
future.
One of the biggest problems with the education system under the Mandate was that it was
not able to provide education to all of the Arab children within Palestine or even all of those
children who desired education since“… government and non-government schools together,
could most of the time satisfy no more than half the demand for places [of learning]”24.
Palestinian parents were actually very interested in their children’s education and even peasants
21 Ibid, 270.
*The ages at which school was theoretically compulsory under Ottoman Law
22 Ibid, 270.
23 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948, (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 23.
24 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 57.
Clark 14
in small villages worked to get their children a school, as Ami Ayalon notes,” the post-Ottoman
Palestinian community demanded education and was prepared to shoulder some of the cost”25.
One village, as Ayalon quotes, wrote to the government stating that “[they had] put together 150
pounds out of [their] meager resources… [so that their] children [did] not have to remain in dark
ignorance in the epoch of light, when the entire world from end to end is striving to eliminate
illiteracy”26. However, the Mandate government was still not able to meet the demand for
schooling so “many parents, therefore, who were able to pay the small fee, found no alternative
but to send their children to kuttabs if there were any in their quarter or village”27. Rashid
Khalidi also notes that in 1931, when the last complete census was taken before the end of the
mandate “only about 22 percent of Palestinian Arabs were literate, as against 86 percent of the
country’s Jewish population”28.
In her book The Palestinians: from Peasants to Revolutionaries, Rosemary Sayigh
argues that the Palestinian national consciousness grew in the face of oppression and the
hardships the community endured. She emphasizes the importance of the camp experience in
unifying the Palestinian people since “painful as it was, the refugee phase of the Palestinian
struggle was full of political lessons that perhaps could not have been learnt any other way”29 .
Sayigh also identifies British oppression played a role in uniting the community in the face of a
common enemy. Sayigh actually does recognizes that education plays an important role in
25 Ibid, 23-5.
26 Ibid, 25.
27 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company Ltd, 1956), 57.
28 Khalidi, Rashid, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston, Beacon Press, 2007), 14.
29 Sayigh, Rosemary, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London, Zed Books, 2007), 147.
Clark 15
Palestinian society, however, she does not see it as an important factor in the growth of political
efficacy during the mandate period, rather, for her, it became a unifying force only after the
Diaspora. She explains that Palestinian peasants recognized the importance of education since
they believed that it was the key to improving their lives and that “their oppression as a class
were tied to their exclusion from knowledge”30. This emphasis on education, she argues, would
later create a connection between the land of Palestine and the Palestinians in exile since the
hunger for knowledge created continuity between Palestine and the Diaspora31. However, she
argues that, during the mandate period, “the majority of the educated classes [were] non-militant
and ‘moderate’ in their stance towards the British” and that their moderation “deprived [the
resistance] of organizational and ideological development”32. For Sayigh, education was more of
a divisive factor before the 1948 as she sees it as a wall between the classes, while after the
dispersion Palestinians were united through their common desire for knowledge.
Roderic Matthews and M. Akrawi, who studied and collected data on education in the
Middle East for the American Council on Education during the late 40s, note that “Education
makes the person, and persons make the nation”33; Palestine was no exception and education
played a defining role in forming and growing Palestinian nationalism. The classroom was a
bastion of nationalist activity in mandate Palestine despite the Mandate government’s control
over the system. Education played an important role in increasing fostering the Palestinian sense
30 Ibid, 33.
31 Ibid, 34.
32 Ibid, 61.
33 Roderic, Matthews and Akrawi M., Education in Arab Countries of the Near East: Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon (Washington, American Council on Education, 1949), v.
*Permanent Literacy denotes a literacy which is retained even after long periods of disuse
Clark 16
of nationhood though the increased literacy and communication as well as increasing a sense of
unity between Muslim and Christian school children.
The education system formed under Ottoman suzerainty was important first step,
however, the British changes to the system were integral in uniting the Palestinian people. As
discussed above, the British expanded the education system to include a greater percentage of
school age children and “it is one of the remarkable aspects of the British administration of
education in Palestine that Muslim and Christian pupils, hitherto educated as a rule in separate
schools, were for the first time in modern history educated together under a national system”34
which used Arabic, as opposed to Turkish, as the language of instruction. This was an important
change since Arabic has an important and exalted place in Arab cultural heritage and because the
use of the vernacular as the language of instruction allowed students from the poorer segments of
society, who did not speak Turkish, to enter the government education system.
The Arabic language plays an important role in Arab culture and history and its use in the
classroom recalls the language’s storied history and importance to the Arab nation. The language
unites the people of the Arab world and defines that world’s very boundaries. Although the
people of Palestine were developing a Palestinian nationalism separate from the Arab
nationalism that had been especially popular during the Ottoman period, the use of Arabic would
have emphasize Arab culture as a whole. Arabic’s literary heritage is also unique as well as
extensive and the Arab people regard the spoken and written word as a high art. Arabic poetry
has always played an important role in Arab society and has been a major part of daily life for
centuries. Fadwa Tuqan, one of the most famous poets of the modern Arab world, notes in her
memoirs that “there was always a strong tie between the Palestinian poet and the movement of
34 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company Ltd, 1956), 73.
Clark 17
the struggle. The Palestinian poet was the direct product of the current struggle in Palestinian and
at the same time an effective force influencing that struggle”35. Arabic poetry and literature was
not just a pastime of the wealthy, rather it was a motivating force for the entirety of the
Palestinian people. The use of Arabic in Islam is also an important aspect of the language. The
Qur’an is only the true Qur’an when it is in Arabic, and even those Muslims who do not speak
Arabic, are required to pray and recite the Qur’an in the language. The switch from Turkish
would have emphasized break from the Ottoman state as well as the importance of Arab culture
and history.
The British decision to use Arabic as the language of instruction within the Mandate run
state school system created a sense of unity within the polity and strengthened Palestinian
nationalism immeasurably. Just as Hebrew was the nationalist language of the Jews, Arabic was
the nationalist language within the Arab community. During the Ottoman period, most schools
taught in Turkish, except the very lowest elementary schools; this left education open to the elite
strata, since the poorer members of society could only speak Arabic. Once the British took over,
they switched the language of instruction over to Arabic, which allowed a greater number of
children from poorer families to enter school. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who came from one such
poor family and who attended a state school, recalls that his classes included students from all
walks of life, writing that there were those who “wore shoes and socks; some wore shoes without
socks; and others were barefoot and had dusty feet and soiled legs. [And] there were those who
wore fezzes, caps, head kerchiefs with black rope, or casquettes”36. His description of his
classmates demonstrates the economic diversity within his class. Jabra’s account validates
35 Tuqan, Fadwa, A Mountainous Journey, (London, The Women’s Press, 1990), 92.
36 Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood, (Fayetteville, The University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 107.
Clark 18
Tibawi when he says that “during the last years of the mandate, pupils in the Government school
system represented fairly accurately the social structure of Arab society”37. No longer was
education available only to the sons of elite, Muslim families as was largely the case under
Ottoman rule, rather, there were children from all levels of Palestinian society and both
Christianity and Islam enrolled in the government schools. The use of Arabic as the language of
instruction was an important aspect of this change since it aided nationalist goals by making
education more widely available to everyone, from the poorest family to the richest one.
The use of Arabic was an important aspect of the nationalism which arose in the schools.
Although Muslims and Christians sometimes clashed, they were generally united as Arabs
against what they perceived as an imperialist Zionist threat. The school curriculum was designed
to ensure that these two religious groupings viewed themselves more as Arabs than they did in
terms of their religious communities since “Every effort was made by Arab national leaders to
brush aside religious prejudices and to consolidate the national solidarity of the young generation
in the schools”38 and Ayalon is quick to point out that under the mandate, “only a sixth of class
time was allocated to the study of religion”39.
As the relationship between Arab Muslim and Christians became closer, the divide
between the Arabs and the growing Jewish community only widened. There were almost no
Jewish children in state schools and many Jewish children went to schools run by the Zionist
organization and taught in Hebrew. These factors ensured that the children from the two
communities had almost no contact with each other and knew next to nothing about the people
with whom they shared Palestine. Noted literary scholar, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra recounts in his 37 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 70.
38 Ibid, 72.
39 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy1900-1948, (Austin, University of Texas, 2004), 34.
Clark 19
autobiography his impressions of the Jewish community as a child living in Bethlehem. He
remembers that he was afraid of the Orthodox Jews living in his town and that his mother
“continually warned [him] against those Jews, saying they kidnapped children in Jewish festivals
in order to slay them and mix their blood in the dough of unleavened bread”40. In fact, none of
the memoires examined in this paper, make anything more than a passing reference to the Jewish
community in Palestine. Jabra’s reference to the warnings his mother gave him is certainly the
most personal of any of the other references made about the Jewish community.
The growing linguistic divide between the communities also made communication
between Arabic speaking Muslims and Christians and Hebrew speaking Jews increasingly
difficult. Many of the early Jewish settlers created educational institutions which taught solely in
Hebrew and “by 1910 the first graduates of these schools, who were fluent and natural in
Hebrew, had begun to marry each other [and create] the first generation of children who spoke
nothing but Hebrew in the home”41. Bernard Spolsky and Robert Cooper, who studied the
languages of Jerusalem and the revitalization of Hebrew as a modern language, argue that the
Hebrew became the predominate language within the yishuv through school instruction. Children
learned the language in school and then brought it home to the rest of their family and, later,
many married and raised children in Hebrew speaking households. Although many native-
Hebrew speakers in Mandate Palestine probably were also able to speak Arabic, the fact that two
languages were growing side-by-side within Palestine created barriers between the Arab and
Jewish communities. There was no national newspaper in Palestine; there were Arabic
newspapers, Hebrew newspaper and English newspapers. This trend was realized throughout the
40 Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood, (Fayetteville, The University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 70.
41 Spolsky, Bernard and Cooper Robert, The Languages of Jerusalem, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), 66.
Clark 20
mass communication media and it was probably manifested itself in daily life as well since
linguistic barriers breed other barriers since people cannot or do not communicate with one
another. In fact, Zionists leadership made an effort to promote the use of Hebrew because
Hebrew was thought to be an important part of the nationalist endeavor since it would serve as
“their national language, an all-purpose vernacular that would…mark the distinction from life in
the Diaspora”42.
Assaf Likhovski notes that “education is a project of identity formation… [and] Colonial
rulers sought to use primary, secondary and higher education to transform native students into
willing collaborators.”43The British government, like the Palestinian nationalists, realized that
education was important to control and they did not hesitate in their attempts to dominate the
schools, teachers and curriculum. However, “In general, the teachers – even those with modest
cultural attainments – were so fired by the claims of nationalism that they found no difficulty in
circumventing the restrictions in the classroom”44. The British attempted to exercise their control
by limiting the associations teachers were allowed to join. The Young Men’s Muslim
Association, for example, was a religious group with a national orientation that the British
prohibited government employees from joining. However, the Young Men’s Christian
Association was a group which the government actually looked favorably upon. In fact, teachers
were actively involved in nationalist movement and in resisting the mandate government. During
the 1936 Arab Revolt, “it was an open secret… [that] many teachers, specially (sic) those whose
42 Ibid, 58.
43 Likhovski, Assaf. Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 106.
44 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration, (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 197.
Clark 21
schools were closed, acted as clerks and organizers of supply behind the lines”45. The school
was a recognized ideological battleground between the British and the nationalists, and neither
side was willing to cede ground to the other.
Nationalists in the mandate did not leave education purely in British hands and they
attempted to influence the government schools’ curriculum, teachers and students. Some
nationalists even went so far as to open their own schools which emphasized Arab history and
culture and which were “neither Muslim nor Christian in the usual sense [and whose] general
tone was distinctly national”46. Foreign schools were especially criticized by Arab nationalists
because the nationalists believed that the schools “consciously or unconsciously promoting
respect and allegiance, not to an Arab culture and Arab nationalism, but to a welter of cultures
and national ideologies”47. State schools also did not escape the nationalist’s ire and they were
also criticized for their scanty treatment of Arab-Muslim culture. The nationalists wanted to
change the curriculum to one which was “more balanced… [but] with a definite national bias”48.
However, for the most part, the nationalist endeavor to alter school curriculums through official
channels failed, forcing them to turn to alternative methods.
Once nationalists realized that they were unsuccessful in altering state schools from the
top, they attempted to alter schools from the bottom and the inside by reaching out to teachers
and students49; this tactic was fairly successful in inciting nationalist fervor within the schools.
The teachers were sometimes put into a difficult position since they were employees of the
45 Ibid, 198.
46 Ibid, 65.
47 Ibid, 65.
48 Ibid, 91.
49Ibid, 196.
Clark 22
mandate government and therefore had to follow its directives or risk dismissal. However, as
Tibawi notes, “the balance between the two loyalties [the government and the nation] was not
always even [and] in times of crisis [the teachers’ loyalty] sharply swung in favor of the national
side”50. Many teachers were actively involved with the nationalist movement, such as Jabra
Ibrahim Jabra’s teacher in Jerusalem, Ibrahim Tuqan who may have been nationalist poet Fadwa
Tuqan’s brother and teacher and an important nationalist poet in his own right*. Jabra
remembers that his teacher “used to transform the Arabic class into an hour of magic with his
poetic sensibility… [and that he] did not abide by the prescribed materials or books”51. Jabra
particularly recalls the Tuqan teaching the class about Ahmad Shawqi’s Majnun Layla (Layla’s
Mad Lover), which was a play based off a classic Arab love story. This emphasis on classic Arab
literature was an important part of encouraging nationalist thinking. Arab nationalists, as noted
earlier, had criticized the school system for what the nationalists considered an incomplete
coverage of Arab history and culture, recognizing that these subjects are important because of
their ability to incite nationalist fervor in students who learn of the glory of their past.
Students were also heavily involved with the nationalist movement and worked in their
own way towards furthering the movement’s goals. “[Students] participated in the strikes that
took place in 1929, 1933, and 1936, and they took part in the movement of civil disobedience
that was called for by the Arab higher Committee as an answer to the British insistence on
opposing Arab national demands, forcing the authorities to close schools all over Palestine for
50 Ibid, 196.
*Although I was not able to positively confirm the identity of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s teacher. Ibrahim Tuqan was in Jerusalem in 1932, which is the year Jabra is describing and had been a teacher at different schools around the Middle East. He was also a graduate of the al-Rashidiyya school which Jabra is describing here.
51 Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood, (Fayetteville, The University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 182
Clark 23
six months”52. The schools were alive with nationalism and “even without national control of
education, nationalism thrived in the schools”53 since, “amidst such turmoil no school system
could be conducted in complete isolation from its environment. The people genuinely wanted
their children to be educated according to their new ideals, and persistently strove to influence
the Department of Education in that direction”54.
The school system played an important role in turning out nationalist thinkers and leaders
during the late Ottoman period and mandate. Students, such as Ibrahim Tuqan, who was
educated during the late Ottoman period, became important thinkers and led a rallying cry which
other Palestinians followed. Tuqan was a nationalist poet, widely known as the “Poet of
Palestine”. His poetry reflected the turmoil in which his country was embroiled. As his sister,
Fadwa, remarks in her memoirs “Nothing is born from a vacuum. What about our nationalistic
poets? Ibrahim grew up in a land whose depths were seething with events, and among a society
in which the seeds of revolt were always present”55. Ibrahim attended the al-Rashadiyya school
in Nablus, a public school as well as St. George’s School in Jerusalem which was a private
Christian school. His education, which he received in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire,
played an extremely important role in his upbringing since he was exposed to new modes of
thinking, especially in the Christian school. Ibrahim, in turn, was able to influence and teach his
sister Fadwa Tuqan who also became a nationalist poet despite her family’s traditional values.
Fadwa rose to become and extremely an extremely important poet under the tutelage of her older
52 Abu-Ghazaleh, Adnan, “Arab Cultural Nationalism in Palestine During the British Mandate” Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring, 1972, Vo1, No 3), 41.
53 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 195.
54 Ibid, 195.
55 Tuqan, Fadwa, A Mountainous Journey, (London, Women’s Press, 1990), 71.
Clark 24
brother and her poems have inspired generations of Palestinians. In her memoirs she notes that
“poetry… was an activity which, together with journalism and various other literary genres,
contributed to the awakening of the people’s patriotic and political consciousness in cities and
villages alike. All this led to the outbreak of the 1936 Palestinian rebellion”56. Through her
writings, which were strongly influenced by her education with her brother, she was able to
instill nationalism in her people.
The increasing literacy rates in Palestine were largely due to the increase in education,
however, despite the fact that more people were becoming literate; a large proportion of
Palestinian society remained unable to read or write. Many scholars argue that the illiterate
peasants, who were the primary fighters during the 1936 Rebellion, had no education and
remained unaffected by education. However, education actually had far reaching effects and was
able to touch most members of Palestinian society. Ami Ayalon studied literacy and reading
trends in Palestine in his book Reading Palestine and he notes that “It was in the open public
domain that the largest number of people accessed the contents of written messages”57.
Education, which was generally available only to children, had the greatest impact on the
younger members of society who were taught to read and write and were affected by the
nationalism popular in the schools of the time. However, the effects of education also filtered
through adult society as children brought what they learned in the classroom back into the home.
School children were able to read to their families, and many people learned of the news by
listening to one literate person read a newspaper out loud to a group. Therefore, despite the fact
that many people were illiterate and had no opportunity to get an education, school helped to
spread nationalism among every facet of Palestinian society. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, corroborates
56 Ibid, 92.
57 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948, (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 103.
Clark 25
these claims when recalls one of his neighbors, Musa al-Khuri, in his memoirs. Jabra writes that
“although [Musa] was illiterate, he was fond of political discussion and followed events as
reported by others, especially those who read newspapers,”58 and that “he used to buy a
newspaper every Sunday morning [and] he would give it to any young man… who appeared to
him to be literate and ask him to read the headlines aloud”59. Most people, even those in rural
areas, would have had access to a public place where news could be read or heard by the people
of the village. While Ayalon states that cities would have had a more dynamic flow of
information, he goes on to say that most villages “had one central public institution, the
madafah… [which] served as a gathering spot where news was reported and public issues
deliberated”60. Therefore, even those peasants who participated in the 1936 Arab Revolt would
have been affected by the knowledge revolution sweeping the Arab community in Palestine.
Education during mandate Palestine played an integral role in the unity and nationalism
growing within the Arab polity at the time. Although the British were not able to make education
universally available, what they did provide made it possible for Arabs in Palestine, even the
illiterate peasants, to learn about the turmoil in their country from sources such as newspapers.
Palestinian society today, which is bonded together in an extremely strong imagined community,
would not have been possible without the experiences of war and life in the refugee camps,
however, education played a defining role in the creation and the undeniable strength of that
imagined community and its importance should not be forgotten by scholars of the period.
58 Jabra, Ibrahim Jaba, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 167.
59 Ibid, 168.
60 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 106.
Clark 26
Works Cited
Abu-Ghazaleh, Adnan. "Arab Cultural Nationalism in Palestine during the British Mandate." Journal of
Palestine Studies 1.3 (1972): 37-63. Print.
Ayalon, Ami. Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948. Austin: University of Texas, 2004.
Print.
Jabrā, Jabrā Ibrāhīm. The First Well: a Bethlehem Boyhood. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1995.
Print.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: the Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston: Beacon,
2006. Print.
Krämer, Gudrun. A History of Palestine: from the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of
Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008. Print.
Likhovski, Assaf. Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina, 2006. Print.
Matthews, Roderic D., and Matta Akrawi. Education in Arab Countries of the Near East: Egypt, Iraq,
Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education,
1949. Print.
Rose, Norman. A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine, 1890s to 1948. London: Pimlico, 2010.
Print.
Sayigh, Rosemary. Palestinians: from Peasants to Revolutionaries : a People's History. London: Zed,
1979. Print.
Spolsky, Bernard, and Robert Leon Cooper. The Languages of Jerusalem. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Print.
Clark 27
Tibawi, Abdul Latif. Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: a Study of Three Decades of British
Administration. London: Luzac, 1956. Print.
Tuqan, Fadwa. A Mountainous Journey: an Autobiography. London: Women's, 1990. Print.