On citizenship and citizenship education: a Levantine approach and reimagining Israel/Palestine

Abstract

This article argues in favor of a Levantine approach to citizenship and citizenship education. A Levantine approach calls for some sort of Mediterranean regionalism, which accommodates and promotes overlapping and shared sovereignties and jurisdiction, multiple loyalties, and regional integration. It transcends the paradigmatic statist model of citizenship by recasting the relationship between territoriality, national identity, sovereignty, and citizenship in complex, multilayered and disaggregated constellations. As the case of Israel/Palestine demonstrates, this new approach goes beyond multicultural accommodation and territorial partition. It proposes, among other things, extending the political and territorial boundaries of citizenship to take all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as one unit of analysis belonging to a larger region.

Keywords::

• Levantine citizenship
• civic education
• accommodation
• partition
• Israel/Palestine

Acknowledgements

For constructive criticism on earlier versions of this article, my thanks go to Owen Fiss, Rachel Busbridge, Yasmine Haj, Shlomi Segall, Azar Dakwar, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Dan Avnon, Avner de-Shalit, Haifa Sabbagh, the journal's editors and two anonymous referees. They are neither responsible for the views expressed nor any error committed here.

Notes

^1. For more on different aspects of the increased Jewish and Arab territorial, demographic, economic and institutional intertwinements in Israel/Palestine (see, e.g., Yiftachel 2006; Allegra 2009; Mavroudi 2010; Benvenisti 2012).

^2. On what constitutes a divided society, see Choudhry (2008, 4–5).

^3. Scholars use different labels to refer to transformative and critical pedagogy. For example, critical pedagogy (Freire 1970; Gur-Ze'ev 2003), pedagogy of wakefulness (Said 2000), counter-education/diasporic education (Gur-Ze'ev 2003, 2004), critical citizenship education (DeJaeghere 2007), and deep citizenship (Clarke 1996).

^4. Alexander (2009) uses ‘pedagogy of difference’ and Yuval-Davis (1999) uses ‘transversal citizenship’.

^5. Westheimer (2007) makes this argument in the case of conventional and mainstream citizenship education in US schools.

^6. Scholars approach the debate on citizenship and citizenship education through different analytical frames and offer various distinctions and categorization. For example, some scholars have suggested that citizenship has three core components, namely, legal, political and identity (Carens 2000; Kymlicka and Norman 2000). Others have examined civic republicanism and comprehensive liberalism as the frame of analysis of citizenship and citizenship education (McLaughlin 1992; Gutmann 2000). To explore the tensions between liberal and republican approaches to citizenship education, scholars have proposed the maximal–minimal continuum (McLaughlin 1992) and sought to distinguish between education about citizenship and education for citizenship and through citizenship (Beck 1998; Kerr 2000).

^7. Influential statements of a more multicultural conception of citizenship and democracy include: Taylor (1994), Kymlicka (1995) and Fraser (2000). Agonistic democracy is defended by Mouffe (2000). Key accounts of deliberative democracy include Habermas (1994) and Dryzek (2000).

^8. For more on reforming curricula, see Nieto (1999). On modifying teaching strategies, see Gay (2000).

^9. For a comprehensive study of the major developments of citizenship education in Israel from the Yishuv until the late 1990's, see Ichilov, Salomon, and Inbar (2005, 29–50).

^10. Ministry of Education, Being Citizens in Israel, 2001. Jerusalem: Division of Study Programs, Ministry of education. Available at: http://www.school.kotar.co.il/KotarApp/Viewer.aspx?nBookID = 57956186#32.5716.6.fitwidth (accessed 25 July 2014).Q: Please suggest whether the details in footnote 10 can be moved to the reference list]

^11. For more on this public controversy, see http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/1.1171152 (accessed 31 December 2012); http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/education-ministry-revising-textbook-for-being-too-critical-of-israel-1.310751 (accessed 31 December 2012). Some have argued that another manifestation of this shift to more nationalistic curricula and its restrictive impacts is the dismissal of Adar Cohen, the Education Ministry's supervisor of civics instruction. Cohen was accused of promoting civic education textbooks that supposedly teach ‘post-Zionism’. For more on this case, see: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-education-ministry-fires-civics-studies-coordinator-attacked-by-right-1.456182 (accessed: 13 January 2013); http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/civics-teachers-slam-smear-campaign-against-education-ministry-supervisor-1.424690 (accessed 13 January 2013).

^12. One aspect of this controversy is a debate among Israeli Jewish scholars on the desired terminology to describe the political regime in the State of Israel (e.g. Jewish state, the state of the Jews, or the state of the Jewish people). For more on this discussion, see Gans (2008, 65–68) and Yakobson and Rubinstein (2008, 195–204).

^13. Consociational democracy has been proposed in several documents which were published by various Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Israel. See, for example, Haifa Declaration: http://madaresearch.org/en/files/2007/09/haifaenglish.pdf (accessed 7 January 2013) and the Democratic Constitution – Adalah: http://imeu.net/engine2/uploads/adalah-democratic-constitution.pdf (accessed 7 January 2013).

^14. Alexander (2011, 146) speaks about the centrality of the normalization of Jewish people in Zionist education through the creation of national culture and a Jewish state.

^15. For more on the MCA, see http://www.asambleas-ciudadanos.net/spip.php?article203 (accessed 13 October 2013).

^16. For more on the Euro-Arab Institute for Dialogue between Cultures, see http://www.euroarabinstitute.com/?Mission_%26_Vision (accessed 13 October 2014).

^17. For more on Intercultural Citizenship Handbook, see http://www.annalindhfoundation.org/citizenship-handbook (accessed 13 October 2013).

^18. For more on Trajectorya, see http://www.trajectorya.ee/ (accessed 13 October 2014).

^19. Several social psychologists have focused on the psychological dimensions of the conflict and the challenges they pose. See for example Bar-Tal (2000).