Cultural hegemony, resistance and reconstruction of national identity among Palestinian students in Israel.

• Author: Makkawi, Ibrahim
• Position: Essay

INTRODUCTION

IN THIS ESSAY, I FOCUS ON the experience of the Palestinians who fell under Israel's control in 1948 and their struggle to maintain and preserve their national identity despite systematic Israeli efforts to create a state of hegemony through the control of the economy, society, the media and educational institutions. More specifically, I discuss ways in which the formal educational system for Palestinian students in Israel is designed to control, shape and manipulate their national identity. Also, discussed is their ongoing struggle and resistance against such a colonizing education.

COLONIZED NATIONAL MINORITY

The most fundamental myth created and advanced by the Zionist movement in its attempt to establish a Jewish state in Palestine has been its systematic denial of the existence of the Palestinian people (Schoenman, 1988). Palestine was "a land without people for people without land," goes the Zionist argument. However, within their internal circles, the Zionists were well aware of the fact that the native Arab people of Palestine aspiring for their own independence and self-determination had populated the country for centuries. Addressing an audience of Israeli students, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defense Minister at that time stated that, "... we came to this country, which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages ... there is no single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population" (Haaretz, 4 April 1969). Just three months latter, Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, was quoted in the press arguing that, "... it is not that there were Palestinian people in Palestine considering themselves as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist," (London Sunday Times, 7 June 1969).

The inevitable clash between the Zionist colonial endeavors and the national aspirations of the indigenous people of Palestine resulted in the majority of Palestinians being into refugees (number about five million today), the destruction of nearly five hundred of their towns and villages and the construction of new Jewish settlements on their ruins. The Palestinian people, who remained in their homeland and became Israeli citizens after 1948, constitute the last challenge for the Zionist myth of Palestine as a land without people. The systematic ethnic cleansing campaign conducted against the Palestinian people by Zionist organizations, which have resulted in the capture of their homeland and the creation of the refugee problem is documented by a group of Israeli new historians (e.g., Pappe, 1994; Morris, 1989; Beit-Hallahmi, 1998).

The second myth fashioned by Zionist propaganda is Israel's claim of being a Western democracy (Davis, 1987). The common practice among Western scholars studying the Israeli political system is their tendency to single it out as the exception in a region otherwise lacking in democratic regimes. It is a strange hypocrisy for Israel to claim itself as a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time. According to Rouhana (1989), "a state that is defined as belonging to only one people, when its population is composed of two, cannot offer equal opportunities to all its citizens" (p. 40). More succinctly, the Jewish-Zionist nature of the state of Israel exposes its Palestinian citizens to an inherent conflict between their national identity as Arab-Palestinians and their civic status as Israeli citizens (Rouhana, 1997).

Unlike many Third World minorities living in Western societies, the Palestinians in Israel did not immigrate to the new system; rather, the system was imposed on them resulting in the destruction of their society and the disposition of the rest of their people (Makkawi, 2004). From the perspective of the Palestinians, it is clear that the state of Israel was established to serve the goals and objectives of another colonialist group, which could be achieved only at the expense of their own national goals and aspirations for self determination (Rouhana & Ghanem, 1993). Before the conquest of 1948, Palestine was far from the image of an empty or underdeveloped land waiting to be "civilized" by Jewish settlers. Palestine was a highly developed Arab region during the British Mandate. Urban cities such as Haifa, Yafa, Akka, Nazereth and Jerusalem, were the centers of vibrant and widespread economical and intellectual activities. The fragmentation of the Arab homeland by the European colonialists into more than twenty regional states run by dependent monarchs, could not be completed without carving Palestine out and handing it over to the Zionist settlers who would establish a colonialist post dividing the eastern and western parts of the Arab homeland.

Today, the Palestinians in Israel live as a second-class citizen in a colonial-apartheid regime that does not lose any opportunity to marginalize, exploit, and manipulate their collective identity and existence according to the needs of the Jewish majority (Makkawi, 2000, 2004). Although one can make a clear analogy between the Israeli regime and the Apartheid regime of South Africa with regard to the status of the Palestinians in Israel (Zureik, 1979), one must remember that while the entire native population of South Africa remained in their homeland, the native Palestinians were forced into exile leaving a small minority of them behind. As a colonial entity claiming to represent the national aspirations of the world Jewry, the Jewish state in Palestine has been unable to draft a constitution which would simultaneously define its relationship with its non-Jewish Palestinian citizens and non-citizen Jews, the world over, let alone the Palestinian refugees insisting on their right to return to their homeland.

Instead, Israel has what is called "basic laws", two of which illustrate the essence of its apartheid structure. First, the "law of return" applies only to Jews. Any Jewish person, anywhere in the world, by religious-ethnic definition, is entitled to immigrate to the state of Israel and acquire citizenship. The same right is denied to Palestinian refugees who were expelled from the territory on which Israel was established in 1948. Second, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) which was established by the Zionist movement before the creation of Israel itself, is the only authority in charge of land. Only Jews can buy, own or lease land from the JNF, a right, which is denied to the Palestinians who are also citizens of Israel (Davis, 1987).

Social scientists who study the Palestinians in Israel have been limited in the research questions they ask and subsequently in the conclusions they reach; not only by the scope of their academic disciplines, but more importantly by their ideological and political views regarding the conflict in Palestine. The most important and obviously the most controversial issue in discussing Palestinians in Israel has been the definition of their collective-national identity. It is sufficient to briefly examine the different names or labels given to this group of Palestinians by different scholars in order to understand the inherent relationship between the researchers' political ideology and their scholarship. Israeli Arabs, Arabs in Israel, Israeli Palestinians, Arabs of the inside and Arabs of 1948, are all labels given to the same group--Arab-Palestinians who are formal citizens of the state of Israel. In official Israeli statements the term "non-Jews" is used very often in referring to these Palestinians, as if they have no culture or national identity. Apparently, they are defined only in relation to the Jewish majority!

Arab-Palestinian society during the British Mandate over Palestine (1917-1948) was composed of three socioeconomic classes. The majority of the indigenous Palestinian population was found in the lower class, including rural landless peasants and urban proletariat. The middle class included different groups whose occupations required some level of formal education. They included shopkeepers, teachers, minor government clerks, artisans, and liberal professionals. The upper class consisted of landowners, business people, the wealthy, and the social and religious notables of a countrywide level (Nashif, 1979). The size of the clan and its economic power, mainly land ownership, formed an important aspect of the social and political structure of Palestinian society. Large and influential clans were found in the upper class and hence controlled most of the political power in the country. Political leadership in Palestinian society at that time "was largely concentrated at the upper tip of the socioeconomic pyramid composed of a small group of heads of old and influential clans, other members of the land owning aristocracy, wealthy merchants and traders and some professionals" (Nashif, 1977, 114).

Needless to reiterate that in 1948, the state of Israel was established as a result of a war and conquest leading to a mass expulsion of more than two thirds of the indigenous Arab-Palestinian people. All of the Palestinian leadership and intellectual elite were expelled, leaving 160,000 leaderless and mainly poor people under the control of the newly created colonialist state. The sudden change in the status of the Palestinians who fell under Israel's control was very traumatic. It took them a few years to realize its impact on their collective existence. Marl (1978) describes candidly this collective trauma of becoming a Palestinian minority in Israel.

The Arabs who remained within the boundaries of the newly created state of Israel can best be characterized as emotionally wounded, socially rural, politically lost, economically poverty-stricken and nationally hurt. They suddenly became a minority ruled by a powerful, sophisticated majority against whom they fought to retain their country and...