We begin froman ethical/political position, that children in marginal groups have a right to know their history. In the case of children growing up in Palestinian refugee camps, history books should tell themthat it was rural Palestinianswho played the strongest role in resistance to the British mandate and Zionist colonialism. And it was the rural population that was the prime targetof Zionist expulsion.
Nur Masalha has shown in his study of Zionist transfer plans that the expulsions of 1947/1948 targeted villages specifically. Theseplans began as early as1885 whenHerzl wrote: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country”. Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestineshows that villages were the primary target of Zionist attack through a section ofthe Jewish National Fund that built ‘Village files’ that included mapping, photography, reconnaissance,and lists offamilies involved in the 1936 Revolt.
Expulsion greatly widened the class gap between village and city dwellers. City people carried into exile crucial resources such as education, professional training, business contacts, and sometimes capital transfers. These enabled their economic survival without[dependence on] humanitarian aid. Rural expulseesarrived with little more than their clothes. Thus the populations of refugee camps in all five of UNRWA operation as well as the internally displaced in Israelare predominantly rural in origin. The political importance of the camps lies not onlyin the existence of the camps themselves as concrete markers of the Nakba, but, more importantly, in their inhabitants whose hardships, reorientations, and resistances are part of Palestinian history.
As of 2011, 25.6% of Palestinians registered with UNRWA lived in 58 official camps but that there were also around 200,000 who lived in unofficial camps between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Occupied Palestine. But though those actually living in camps today are not a large proportion of the whole they have a political importance beyond their demographic weight. For example,connection to camps continues even after the better off move out to rented accommodation or emigrate. There is a pattern of emigrants returning to camps of origin on periodic visits. Much of the social and cultural activism that Palestinian NGOs carry out is designed for, and carried out, in the camps. And camps continue to express a large part of the meaning of the Nakba in Palestinian collective memory.
The differences in educational curricula between the countries where Palestinians are scattered poses a growing threat to collective memory and connections. For example in Jordan, where the largest segment of Palestinians live -- some forty percent of registered refugees - Palestinian history, whether taught in UNRWA or in Jordanian public and private schools, is ‘Jordanized’ as part of a Hashemite narrative in which Jordan is both savior and ‘guardian’ of Palestine. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories a confusing situation prevails: in the West Bank, until recently it was the Jordanian curriculum, and in Gaza the Egyptian. The history text books produced by the Palestinian National Authority have been censored by Israeli and US pressure —West Bankers say it does not differ much from the former Jordanian program. In East Jerusalem ‘Israel’ is pressuring Palestinian schools to Israelize their curricula. In schools in ‘Israel’, where around 14.5 percent of Palestinians live,history is taught in units, and there is no unit on Palestinian history after the British occupation of Palestine. In UNRWA schools in Lebanon only Lebanese history is taught as part of the curriculum. The only Arab country to include an element on Palestine in its history syllabus is Syria.
Then there are the children of Palestinians who live outside the Arab world, around eleven percent of the total, in dozens of different countries, where school-books are unlikely to contain even the word Palestine. Though these scattered communities share a common dispossession, yet differences in curricula in the regions where they live can only deepen cultural and political fragmentation.
Though NGOs such as Al-Tamer, Al-Jana and BADIL have produced books for children in Arabic that contain some elements of national history, their dissemination is very uneven, and there are obstacles to their transport across borders.
Children used to learn about their origins and history from parents and grandparents, but this cannot still be said today when the generation that grew up in Palestine has passed away. And while children may pick up sufficient Palestinian history from family and camp environment to feel clear about their identity, is this enough to carry on arguments in the wider diaspora, say with university teachers and fellow students?
While the refugee camps as marker of Palestinian national losshas beenwell recognized,the element of class oppression in their reproduction is less so. Camp populations have offered an exploitable workforce to capital, including Palestinian capital, in all the host areas, since barred from joining local workers’ unions. They have also offered ready demonstrators to political parties and recruits to non-state militias. The hardships camp dwellers suffer from -- overcrowding, flimsy habitat, inadequate water and electricity supplies, infestations of vermin -- are not shared by Palestinians living outside the camps. Camps have frequently been targets of military attack and authoritarian repression.
Within the sphere of class oppression we need to recognize and include the dependence of the majority of camp dwellers on UNRWA schooling, which was designed by the UN --led by the US and UK -- to integrate the expulseesintothe host economies.We also know that the history of Palestine is missing from UNRWA’s educational programme due to a decision taken soon after its establishment to adopt the curricula and text books of each host country. While there is a long story of popular protest against UNRWA education, Palestinian political and cultural institutions have been slow to fill this gap by way of producing books about Palestine designed for children.
Given that education is a basis for finding one’s place and purpose in the world, the work of a South African intellectual, Harold Wolpe, has an exceptional relevance for Palestinians. Wolpe believed that educational reform should accompany the struggle against apartheid rather than being postponed until the achievement of black majority rule. Thus he advocated “a schooling that would eliminate ignorance and illiteracy, cultivate an understanding of apartheid in all its oppressions and inequalities, that would counter competitive individualism with collectiveorganization, and that would equip people with the capacity to realize their potential”. Wolpe’s formulation is progressive and potentially unifying. In the current crisis of geographical, political and educational fragmentation it has a forceful message for scattered Palestinians.
By alerting the community to the defects of current educational programmesand the differences in history teaching between shatat regions, our project has the potential to replace resignation with public discussion, and a search for meansto create a unified syllabi.This could be done through campaigns to press UNRWA to include more Palestinian history in its curricula; through extra-school programmes that local NGOs can administer; or though producing history books and making them widely available.
As a problem of concern to a wide swathe of teachers, parents, students, cultural activists, and children themselves, education also has a capacity to transcend geo-political borders. In terms of their class subjection, a reformed educational programme would aid the transformation of camps into cultural centers-- as CampusInCamps is doing in the West Bank.In Lebanon, too, activists are aiming to set up libraries near camps as sites for learning, exhibitions, and debate.
