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Educating Palestine tells the story of an emergent educational and historical discourse in Mandate Palestine as a space of negotiation between colonial administrators, pedagogues, teachers and students, one of essential importance to the formation of the Palestinian and Zionist (imagined) national self-portrait. It traces and delineates a genealogy of Palestinian pedagogic and historical knowledge through a combination of oral history, students’ journals and extensive archival work in the Zionist, Israeli State and Hagana archives. It intimately portrays its protagonists, teachers and students, emphasizing the encounter between them and the written text and the encounter between them and the national Other.Through an analysis of history textbooks, history syllabi and the history lesson, Educating Palestine investigates the way in which the old-new politics of identity in turbulent Palestine wrote itself into the past and literally change history. The incorporation of Arabic and Hebrew sources and a juxtaposition of the two education systems allows to highlight the reciprocal relations between the two. The book explores the continuous scrutiny and imagination of the national Other of both Hebrew and Palestinian pedagogues and its role in the crystallization of their national pedagogy. It argues that the evolution of education in Palestine stems from this interdependency.

With the expansion of public education, Palestine under the British mandate witnessed the emergence of a local pedagogic discourse and the proliferation of pedagogic literature, led mainly by government employees. This study focuses on the biographies and pedagogic work of these Palestinian educators. Specifically, it analyses authorship of educators who were employed by the colonial Department of Education, a system that offered ambiguous objectives for the Arab population. It locates the new Arab, a knowledgeable, modern citizen of the world, yet one who is firmly tied to his national roots and cultural heritage, as the embodiment of the educational vision. Through textbooks, school journals and archival documents, the study shows the complex forms in which nationalism, authenticity and modernism were articulated in pedagogic literature. It argues that the acquisition of knowledge was perceived as the key for personal and collective emancipation, and investigates the mechanisms through which historical, geographic and religious knowledge were created, adapted and translated in order to serve this educational goal. Furthermore, it underlines the role of the Zionist settler colonial project in the construction of the new Arab's image, therefore making Palestinian pedagogy a unique test case in the region's scholarship on interwar education.

During the final years of Ottoman rule and the three decades of British rule, Palestine witnessed the emergence of a community of professionally trained Palestinian Arab doctors. This study traces the evolution of the medical profession in Palestine against the background of the shifting cultural and symbolic capital of an expanding urban middle class and the educational possibilities that enabled this development. Palestinian Arab doctors are examined through a number of interconnected prisms: their activity in social, political, and professional regional networks, their modus operandi under British colonial rule, their response to Zionism and its accompanying influx of immigrant Jewish doctors, and their ability to mobilize collectively under a shared national vision.

Chapter 4 focuses on history textbooks authored during the Mandate period, and it traces the history of their writing and their use in schools. Textbooks represented the ‘correct’ and distilled formal knowledge required by the system. The chapter examines the central themes in these books and their dialogue with Ottoman, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Western sources, as well as the translation mechanisms employed as part of this dialogue. The chapter then applies a different lens to answer such questions as who wrote history? and why focus of the life stories of both Palestinian and Jewish authors? The sociological and intellectual affinities between these authors suggest that they were a distinctive group with specific characteristics. Finally, this chapter scrutinizes the loud echoes of the conflict in these texts.

Chapter 1 examines the evolution of the Palestinian and Hebrew education systems from the late Ottoman period into the Mandate and brings forward key players and institutions in this process. The chapter highlights the differences and commonalities between the two systems. Under British rule, the Arab system was administered by the colonial Department of Education, headed by colonial officials, while the Hebrew system remained autonomous to determine its general goals and curriculum. The chapter underlines the importance of the British national home policy according to the Balfour Declaration and its influence on the education of Arabs in Palestine.

While working on this book at a library in Tel Aviv University, a librarian asked me to sum up my research in one sentence and remarked that knowing how to do it was essential to all researchers. Giving her a definite answer was a challenging task then and it remains so now while summing up this book. Initially, it is a book about the Mandate period, but while writing the history of education, the late Ottoman period appears not only as background but as the essential foundations of the postwar reality. This was not confined to the educators that filled the ranks of Arab and Hebrew educational administration during the Mandate. The institutionalization of educational segregation and inability or reluctance to challenge it started before the first British soldier set foot in Palestine. This is a book about the British colonial project in Palestine and its grave repercussions in the field of education for its native population. The colonial Department advocated a policy of educational restraint, articulated in a history syllabus that sought to cleanse history itself from collective lessons, national ethos, and political agency. But the colonial angle tells only a partial story because this policy was met with a growing community of Palestinian educators and students who (naturally) found in the past a space in which they could ask questions about the present, and events or people that served as inspiration and possible models for the future...

Chapter 2 traces the causes of educational segregation between Arabs and Jews, and it elucidates its sustainability through the weakness or failure of those prominent educators who sought another outcome. First, it surveys British inability or reluctance in addressing the question of educational segregation. It then underlines the important albeit marginal role of missionary education and existent institutions of mixed education. Then it critically examines Zionist voices that envisioned Hebrew education as a mechanism of Arab–Jewish rapprochement, followed by a discussion on Jewish educators who crossed the boundaries of educational segregation and the price they paid for it. The chapter ends with an analysis of Arab educators’ views on educational segregation.

Chapter 3 investigates the engagement of both the Arab and Jewish communities with the education of the national Other, while stressing the importance that Arab and Jewish scholars, publicists, security apparatuses, and educators attributed to the way in which the other community was being educated and the reflective effect of this engagement. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to texts in Arabic and texts in Hebrew, written by educators, journalists, and intellectuals. The second part is dedicated to the work of the Shai, the Haganah’s intelligence service, and its engagement with Arab education. The chapter stresses the importance of the Shai’s reports as a characteristic of the Yishuv’s view of Arab education.

In the lives of two prominent educators, 1920 was an eventful year. Khalil Totah (1886–1955), then 34 years old, was appointed by the British to head the Men’s Elementary Training College, Palestine’s most prestigious school for the training of teachers in Jerusalem. This was a major leap forwards for the young MA graduate of Columbia University’s Teachers’ College. It was a significant period for Chaim Arieh Zuta (1868–1939), a pioneer in Hebrew education, as well. Zuta immigrated to Palestine from Czarist Russia in 1903 to continue his career as a teacher. Like Totah, Zuta engaged in the training of teachers at the Hebrew Teachers’ Training Seminar, another Jerusalemite institute of similar prestige. In 1920, both educators authored a historical guidebook to Jerusalem, emphasizing the ties between nation, space, and history: one city, one physical space, two images of social realities. In their surveys of schools in Jerusalem, Zuta wrote about Jewish schools, and Totah about schools for Arabs...