INTERVIEWS

Idan: Before talk about education, I just wanted to ask, are you hopeful about the current renewed ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas? Professor Barak-Corren: It’s a tough question because, first, there were so many attempts at arriving at a ceasefire that failed during the current war, so for every hopeful moment that the war might be finally wrapping up, we had probably about twenty false alarms, to the extent you could use this term for describing something positive. So that is reason number one why I think it's hard to be hopeful. The second reason is that one has to understand that the negotiations are trying to square a circle or circle a square, in the sense of trying to achieve something that is nearly impossible. What everybody seems to agree on - everybody in the liberal democratic world - is that Hamas should not be part of the day after in Gaza. At the same time, you are negotiating with Hamas, and Hamas is trying to do its best to survive in the day after in Gaza, to continue to build, renew, re-empower and reboost its war machine. And so every deal that was on the table, especially the closer you get to potentially ending the war, is one that's going to be gut wrenching and possibly one that might deliver an immediate relief in the price of ongoing hostility. And unfortunately, from everything I’ve heard so far, it seems like nobody had managed to square the circle just yet. So these are the kind of deals we are facing. You can't really be optimistic about these kinds of deals. Idan: I read your “Blueprint for Transformative Reconstruction in Gaza Post Hamas”, and I saw that you and your co-authors mentioned that dismantling Hamas is a pre-requisite for beginning the plan. So at this point in time, do you think that Hamas is sufficiently destroyed to begin a reconstruction? Professor Barak-Corren: I think so. But, in order for this situation to be stable, somebody else has to come in and solidify the absence of Hamas as both a military presence and a civil administration - a government - in Gaza. So by now, and this is in fact the past few weeks, have been the first time to really see the decline of Hamas not just as a military power but also as a governing power, so you could see that other political and military forces in Gaza are challenging openly Hamas, are taking over territory and managing it, coordinating themselves - despite Hamas - with Israel, with humanitarian organizations, this is the first time we’ve seen that since the onset of the war, which really tells you something about Hamas finally loosening its grip on Gaza. However, speaking of the ceasefire, if Israel now evacuates Gaza, and lets Hamas have time to reorganize, and probably by force, seize control over Gaza again, then you will not get the starting conditions for a true day after. In order for the situation to cement, and for Hams to finally be removed from the governing future of Gaza, some other benevolent force has to get in to help with the transition. Idan: To segue into the topic of education, can you tell me a little bit about how Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are educated on the conflict? Professor Barak-Corren: Sure. So first just in terms of resources, you could've also seen a few of the resources in the bigger paper, and I would just recommend to you - and maybe also put some links on your website to both the leading think-tank, impact SE, on this topic. This is the organization to have produced the most recent and updated works also. There are a few reports that are older, but this is the organization that really keeps track of that, so that's resource number 1. Resource number 2 which I would recommend is Anet Wolf and Adi Schwartz’ book called The War of Return that gives the long arch of history on a very important part of Palestinian education. So that’s just the outset. In terms of a broad overview, most of Palestinian kids are being raised in UNRWA schools. So these are schools that on the one hand - or at least on the face of it - are international humanitarian supported schools run by an international organization - a UN agency - UNRWA, and this organization on the face of it is committed to the values of human rights and dignity that the UN charter is committed to. However, a long series of reports have shown that UNRWA schools in fact teach very selectively these subjects of human rights and liberalism. In fact, they do teach these topics when it comes to Palestinians, but when it comes to Israelis, to Jews, they teach a lot of antisemitism and hostility to Jews, to Israel, and this ranges between complete erasure of Israel, of Israeli history, of Jewish history, and Jewish ties to the land, to open hostility towards Jews and Israelis. There are some famous examples that I’m sure you’ve heard of, but if not, you could really find them in those reports. Some of the famous examples are math exercises or grammar exercises with Jews instead of neutral topics like oranges and apples. Martyrs, shaheeds, guns in the context of a fight against Israel. Short stories that are about terror attacks, glorifying martyrdom, glorifying terror, and a bunch of other examples. Now of course Palestinian kids learn a lot of other stuff. And also I want to say there is a limitation to these reports. The vast majority of these reports focus on textbooks, so the written materials and programs you can find. So you can find all of that very openly online on the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education sites and surveys. In-depth studies that collected textbooks have found that also in the publish printed textbooks, but there are almost no studies of when to the classroom saw what the teachers infused students with on a daily basis, and also of course at sixteen years old yourself, you experience as every other kid experiences, that there’s lots of education that goes on outside of school, in the extracurricular activities, in youth movements, etc, and there haven’t been studies on these aspects as well, even though a lot of it is publicly organized by the Palestinian Authority. So there is a limit to what we know. What we do know is very concerning. Idan: So in terms of who actually controls the Palestinian curriculum, is it UNRWA that shapes the textbooks or is it coming from the Palestinian Authority or some other entity? Professor Barak-Corren: So that's a great question. So, the Palestinian Authority is the one responsible for the content of the textbooks. UNRWA in fact explicitly says that it does not have the authority to dictate, and the UN in general always says it doesn’t have the authority to dictate for the countries, for the political entities, with whom it works the content of textbooks. At the same time, when UNRWA has been accused over the years over the content of the textbook, it kept denying the allegations, saying “No, we are committed to liberalism and human rights. We would not allow it.” So there is tension here between those statements of UNRWA. The Palestinian Authority certainly takes full responsibility over the textbooks, and is ultimately in charge of designing them, but UNRWA is supposed to also be at least monitoring position over them, which clearly it hasn’t been doing, and one should by the way know that even though UNRWA has this outer face of being a UN organization, almost all its workers are local Palestinians. So there is no real disconnect. UNRWA is the largest employer in the Palestinian Territories, and there is lots of fusion between Hamas and UNRWA in Gaza, for example, and the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA in the West Bank. It’s weaved into the fabric of Palestinian society. If you imagine an international organization staffed with Americans, French, Spanish, Belgians coming to Palestine to teach the kids - no. One hundred percent of the teachers and principals are Palestinians employed by UNRWA. It's a very thin layer of non-Palestinians who are really at the very top of UNRWA. Idan: What are some possible solutions to the harmful education that Palestinians learn in Gaza and the West Bank? Professor Barak-Corren: So, there are various models actually. So here I think we could say that there are lots of hopeful examples to look to, starting with Palestinian education. So if you’re taking a look at, for example, the changes that Palestinian education in East Jerusalem have been going through over the past 5 or 7 years or so, they have been massive. And there were efforts - there are civil organizations in East Jerusalem working on teaching the kids a Palestinian curriculum that's not focused on hatred towards Israel, and acknowledges the existence of another people on this same land. Going a bit further, you could look at the education of Palestinian Israelis. So they learn in Arabic, they learn Palestine history, they also learn Jewish history, they learn all of the STEM, English, general World History subjects, as well as Arabic and Arabic poetry and literature and Arabic history. Everything together. If you go a bit further and you look at moderate Arab countries like Morocco, like the Emirates, even Egypt and Jordan, you might've expected them to modify their curriculum earlier because of the peace agreements with Israel. In fact, one of main reasons why those peace agreements never became a warm peace is because those countries didn’t actually modify their education, and so it's only the very, very recent years that Egypt, for example, had started to slowly erase antisemitic rhetoric from the textbooks and infuse a little more religious tolerance. Look, the Quran, for example, is an amazing, vast, expansive, very rich resource. You could find in the Quran examples that call for the killing of Jews, and you could find in the Quran examples that call for living alongside Jews. So there is a question for every education system. What do you focus on? The Emirates, for example, made a choice when they were preparing towards the Abraham Accords. They removed those first references and started to insert those religious tolerance references. And so you begin to see these things happening in the Middle East, and, of course, the more the better. Idan: So I know you talked about how UNRWA is, on the face, an international organization committed to human rights, but in reality, it's not so near that description. Do you think there is any hope for a reformation in UNWRA, or any way UNWRA could play a role in these education reforms that you described? Or do you think the organization is irreversibly harmful to education? Professor Barak-Corren: Unfortunately, here I’m very pessimistic. So UNWRA, in fact maybe ironically so, because it’s such an old organization, so established, so firmly rooted in Palestinian society, and also such a major backbone and supporter of the Palestinian narrative of the annihilation of Israel and the ultimate full return into every part of Israel and the erasure of Israel as a nation state of Jewish people - because of that, and because there have been multiple efforts to reform UNRWA, and because UNRWA has resisted them time and time again, denied responsibility, never truly examined itself, was never of the attitude of really looking for those flaws and correcting them, but instead kept concealing and denying its collaboration with Hamas or its educational hostility - I really think and I’m saying it’s very unfortunate that UNRWA is irredeemable. And, of course, this is very bad because UNRWA has become a steadfast support for many aspects of Palestinian civil life, and it provides a lot of social services that are very important. And it's going to be hard to replace UNRWA, and every new organization that will enter its shoes will have a hard time and we will have to be very careful - and I’m saying we, I mean everybody who cares, from donor countries to Palestinians and Israelis collaborating this - not to fall again into the same pattern that created UNRWA as a corrupt organization that it is. I think that the best option would be, and that goes back to the document that I wrote that you referred to, is to start a true Palestinian government that might take time with a lot of support and monitoring for quite a few years, but that would dismantle UNRWA and would actually take the responsibilities. If one truly wants to see a vital sustainable nonviolent Palestinian state, ultimately, it's not a sustainable model to build half of the capacity of the state on an international organization. That was always odd from an international perspective to preserve UNRWA, rather than try to build sustainable independent Palestinian solutions. I think that's the direction to go. Idan: I also saw, in the report that you sent me, the fear of what you referred to as cultural discordance, where a reformation to the Palestinian education system is so different from the original narrative that Palestinians are educasted with that it backfires and creates a disconnect in Palestinian society. What I’m wondering is, where is the line between a new system that embraces Jews and Israel - where is the line from that to an education system that is so far from the original Palestinian narrative that it backfires? Professor Barak-Corren: Yes, that’s a very good question and one that we wrestled with a lot, and I can say, already at the outset of answering, that we don’t have all the answers, and if we are ever at the point where we can really start this process - and I’m not sure that we're there yet. So in that sense, our research is to some extent visionary. I'm not sure that we are at the implementation as of now, even if we thought we might be today. But this is a question that we wrestled with a lot. And one should say first that this is a moving target or issue, if you will, and one has to tread carefully. And I think we could offer a few guidelines. So, first guideline is that it’s very important not to reach this state of cultural discordance. In successful transformative processes that peoples and institutions have gone through in the past, there was always a thread of cultural continuity that was weaved through the transformation. So people have to be able to have roots and anchors to their identity and narrative. Even if the situation requires of them a momentous change, there still has to be some kind of tether that connects them to their culture, to their narrative, that they can connect to. And when we go through historical examples - for example, we talk about the momentous transformative process of reeducation and de-radicalization that Germans, for example, and Japanese had to go through in the aftermath of WW2. Still, in each one of those countries, the occupying forces that were forcing and coercing this transformation were wise enough to connect the new education that Germans and Japanese got with some narrative inversion of their past, that wasn't as harmful and authoritarian and militaristic and murderous as what the very last German regimes and Japan regimes had become. So when were discussing this in our paper, we’re talking about the importance of preserving both the Islamic Sunni cultural thread of Gaza, which is, by the way, sociologically much more religious and Islamic than, for example, the West Bank. So we’re talking about the need to preserve that, and of course, there is the layer of the unique Palestinian identity, which by no means anybody should try to erase, but you should try to shift the vector of that identity away from annihilation - education to annihilation Israel and demonize the existence of Israel. So we’re not looking - and I don't think anyone should look into transforming Gazans, for example, to Zionists who would swear on the right of Jews to have a homeland in the land of their ancestors. Simply acknowledging and reconciling with the fact of Israel would be enough. That is not how Gazan children and even Palestinian children in the West Bank are taught today - no acknowledgment or reconcilement with this reality. There is a denial of this reality. So just beginning with that would be enough, and of course we were talking about other elements as well. I would only focus on one additional - in addition to the one I already mentioned - which is this is a process that - in order to be successful - must be led by moderate Arab leaders hopefully, and it would be most successful if it would be locally brewed by Palestinian leaders themselves. Because if Israel would try to force it on the Palestinians, it would not work. Even if it did work for the Americans and the French and the British in Germany post WW2 - for Americans in Japan - the magnitude of historical hostility, the length of the conflict, is really such that it’s not like the parties to the conflict are newcomers. The depth of the hostilies is such that it’s not something the Palestinians can take from Israelis - but they can definitely come to terms and run this process with themselves, with moderate Arab supporters, etc. Idan: So clearly education is a factor in Palestinian radicalization. I want to ask - do you see Israel’s war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank as other significant factors in this radicalism? Professor Barak-Corren: So, I think that this is a very long standing debate about the weight of the different factors, and some people try to solve it through history, and so they would go far back into the 20s and the 30s before there was a State of Israel, when everybody was still living under Ottoman rule and then under the British Mandate - and they would say, “Here, we find those strong examples of hostility already back then, so it predates 1948, it predates the establishment of Israel, it predates the Nakba, and it predate 67 - it predates the occupation”, and certainly, this is true. You see a lot of that also in the pre-48 period, including the collaboration of then the leadership of Palestinians with the Nazi regime, that were having plans about how the Nazis would come to Israel - to then British Mandate - and would help the Palestinians to wipe the Jews so that they will have a country. At the same time, certainly 100 years of conflict didn’t help, and those 100 years of conflict do include also the trauma of the Nakba that is very much real trauma in the collective memory of Palestinians, and the years of living under first Egyptian rule and Jordanian rule and in Lebanese rule and Syrian rule, so Palestinians were never embraced anywhere - except in Jordan, by and only those who passed the Jordan river - were never embraced by any of the Arab countries and were always left to feel unlike any other refugee of the era - like they are outsiders, that they do not belong here. That became part of the identity and then came 67-93 years. So all that crystallized into Palestinian identity. Of course, post 1993 when the Palestinian Authority was established and gained control over 90% of the Palestinians, it emerged to be a corrupt and inadequate government. So all these factors are weaved into it, and I think you can’t really answer these questions as though we were having a controlled experiment and we could really untangle and point to specific factors and weigh their relative significance - one cannot do that. I think the only thing we can say is that this hostility and, in fact, very strong narratives of Palestinian identity are linked back to before the establishment of the State of Israel, and they are very strong narratives within Palestinian society that are really against every sovereign identity of Jews in the land. At the same time, it does seem to me that we also have strong indications that at least much of this is still continuously fueled by the continuous state of conflict. And we are left to wonder is it possible that with a transition in education, a transition in nation-building, a government that would really be able to curb terror and then finally give Palestinians the ability to live quietly without the need to continuously try to hammer terror out - which is very costly to Palestinian quality of living because it’s so infused, and so constant anti-terror operations going in their cities, etc. - so what would reality look like if we have this future? It’s very hard to tell, but I do think that if those starting conditions are met, then we do have a chance to see a future where the two peoples are not hostile to each other. Idan: Ok, I don’t want to take up too much of your time so I’ll just ask one more question. Do you see any systemic issues in the Israeli education system like you do in the Palestinian one? Professor Barak-Corren: I’m glad you asked that because many times people say, “Oh, but it's the same with Israeli education”, and I want to say the unequivocal answer to this question is no. I mean sure, there are many issues where the Israeli education system - like any education system - could improve. But, if you really want to see what the Israeli education looks like, you can actually go on Youtube and look at the civic studies programing, which part of it is available online, because - so, they took the program of civic studies and they created a digital version of it, such that the educational program will be infused with videos and things that students can go online - and you can take a look for yourself how Islam, how the Arabs, how coexistence, how peace and human rights are treated in Israel. You would see circles of students - Palestinians and Israelis - sitting around and talking about discrimination and human rights. You would see Arab speakers explaining to the audience - which is composed of all students in Israel - about Islam, about its schedule and calendar, about the culture, about the language, and all of this will be from a perspective of, not just respect, but this is something you need to learn, this is a culture of the land, this is something that is part of what it means to be Israeli. You would find none of this even in the positive examples that I gave you before about modification in the programming and textbooks of moderate Arab countries. You would not see this level of respect to Judaism there as you see to Islam in Israel. Now, I don't want to say that this is necessarily the situation in every school, and, of course, some do it better and some might do less of it. But the systemic education in Israel is an education for peace, for respect for Islam, and it does educate children about the history of the Arab-Israeli wars in much later ages. You will not see math books infused with implicit education for violence. You would not see texts infused with implicit education for terror. None of these phenomena are part of Israeli textbooks in any grade level. And I would say one last sentence. I’m a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I think if you take a look across Israel university campuses, you will just see for yourself. You don't need to actually veer into the classes to see how comfortable Palestinian students are on campus, speaking Arabic all around you, you will hear, walking with hijabs, laughing out loud. This is an environment that clearly does not punish somebody or deter somebody from expressing their identity or religion. This is an environment where people can thrive being who they are. You understand a lot about what everybody around were taught by just observing the culture of self-expression. And you would see that both in public spaces in Jerusalem, where Palestinians and Israelis constantly interact and you can hear the blur of languages, and you could see that on campuses, and you’d just understand for yourself that an education system that produces that - you would find that nowhere in Palestinian territories or even in moderate Arab countries, it would be hard to find. *Conversation has been modified for clarity