At the boundaries of citizenship: Palestinian Israeli citizens and the civic education curriculum

Abstract

Education in Israel is often described as caught between two ends: state‐formation and nation‐building. In the last decade civic education in Israel has been undergoing some changes. The civic compulsory curriculum for state high schools was unified across all educational sectors in Israel with the aim of creating a more inclusive, universal civic curriculum that would be used as a platform for creating a common civic culture. The tension between state‐formation and nation‐building, between universalism and particularism, thus, has become even more prominent where civic education is concerned. To a significant extent, civic education in Israel is one place where contesting messages about the meaning of membership in the Israeli collective are negotiated and debated. This paper explores the tensions between inclusion and exclusion and between universalism and particularism as they emerge from the official civic education curriculum in Israel. It does so by examining the representations and positions of the Palestinian citizens in the official discourse of civic education. The analysis suggests that civic education in Israel at best represents an ambivalent stance that is caught in the tension between inclusion and exclusion. But more often than not, it still reproduces the marginal position of the Palestinian minority in Israeli society. In light of this, this paper concludes by discussing the possible implications these dual messages might have for Palestinian students.

Acknowledgements

This article is partly based on the author's doctoral dissertation. The author would like to thank the 13 Ministry officials and the 20 young Arab‐Palestinian Israeli students who were willing to share their time and thoughts. The author is immensely grateful to Professor Madeleine Arnot, for her supportive guidance and useful criticism. The author would also like to thank the two anonymous readers of this paper for carefully commenting on the article.

Notes

1. This curriculum is designed for state education high schools, academic route only. It is studied for one year and leads to matriculation examination in civic education.

2. Until then, the civic education curriculum, as with other curricula, was studied using different textbooks in the general, religious and Arab state schools.

3. The group of people at the Ministry of Education that are engaged in various aspects of citizenship education is relatively small and easy to identify. Since anonymity was promised to all interviewees, direct quotes are used here omitting any identifying details, including the official's position, and the generic term ‘official’ is used to refer to all interviewees regardless of their role.

4. At the time the study was conducted there were 13 consultants for the general and state religious systems, out of whom six were chosen, based on their willingness to be interviewed and geographical consideration. The only two consultants employed in the Arab sector were also interviewed.

5. Three case study schools were investigated. In each of them 20 students were selected based on criterion sampling and their willingness to be interviewed. The criteria in the Arab school were: prior experience in civic education and proficiency in Hebrew. Also an equal number of female and male students were interviewed.

6. I use here the term ‘Arab education system’ as opposed to Palestinian, since this is the official term used by the Ministry of Education. The choice to refer to the population it serves as Palestinians represents a stance which objects reductionist ‘mainstream’ identifications such as ‘Arab‐Israelis’ or non‐Jewish citizens (Rosenhenk, 1998).

7. The Israeli education system is divided into the following sectors: general state education which caters for the Jewish secular population; state religious education that serves the Zionist‐religious population; the Arab state education system; and the independent Jewish ultra‐Orthodox school system.

8. Since the late 1970s there has been a slow improvement in state investments in the Arab education system, however it still suffers from discrimination in terms of budget and other state investments.

9. Remedial hours are extra teaching hours, i.e., extra financial support, given by the Ministry of Education to strengthen schools in underdeveloped and underprivileged areas.

10. Until 1966 Arab Education was controlled by the military administration which was imposed on the Palestinian citizens of Israel between 1948 and 1966. The Ministry of Education only appointed an Arab official to chair the Department for Arab education in 1987. Yet, even today this department has limited control and responsibilities within the Arab education sector and it still does not have, for example, an independent budget (Al‐Haj, 1994).

11. During the 1970s several attempts were made to address the need to define goals for Arab schools in Israel (Yadlin Report in 1972 and Peled Committee in 1973). However these two documents were criticised for still ignoring the national identity of the Palestinian minority while trying to enforce a non‐existent category of Israeli‐Arabs (Mar'i, 1978; Levy, 2005).

12. Excluding extracts from official documents and sources where the writer/speaker is not Israeli.

13. The textbook is divided into three parts: What is a Jewish State? What is a democratic State? And Regime and Politics in the State of Israel.

14. This conflict refers to the dispute in Israel society between doves and hawks, i.e., the dispute about the peace process and the future borders of the State of Israel.

15. Similarly the difficulty in implementing a civic curriculum, which is based on liberal democratic ideas in a political context that challenges this notion, is also raised by Moughrabi (2004) when addressing the challenges faced by civic education programmes in schools under Palestinian authority.