Education as spaces of community engagement and a ‘capacity to aspire’

Abstract

Jaffa, where I was born and where I lived for over four decades before moving to Canada, remains for me a formative experience in engaging what it means to be a Palestinian Arab living in Israel, in a neglected and impoverished neighbourhood, subject to intense ‘Judaizing’ (yihoud, in Hebrew) urban zoning master plan policies, and in which my community and its future are left out. In Jaffa, public institutions—whether municipal or governmental—were distant, belligerent, hostile, exercising power in a discriminatory fashion that left little leveraging for a notion of citizenship to emerge in any meaningful way. This configuration of a contested space and place offered the most immediate and powerful introduction to ongoing aspects of the 1948 nakba experienced by Palestinians with the creation of the State of Israel. In Jaffa, the nakba has not abated, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. The generalised neglect and discriminatory discourses and policies against what is often described as ‘non-Jewish’ residents on the part of Tel-Aviv’s municipality epitomises the larger experience of Palestinians in Israel, and their construction as an alien national minority. The latter is left with little space—social, political, economic, and geographic—being thus actively prevented by the state from building a shared public space in which right and law would prevail among all citizens equally. My schooling and, later on, my university education, as formative as they were, present a second front of struggle. I have been educated in a French Catholic school, which runs a fully-fledged French curriculum. The history and geography of my homeland were either totally absent or contained in Israeli-produced textbooks for Hebrew schools. Upon graduation, I found myself much more knowledgeable about the specificities of French history and Zionist narratives than I was when it came to the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and Palestinian and Arab cultural and political life and history. My Tel-Aviv University undergraduate education (French Language and Literature, and Education), as formative as it was, offered little curricular contents that would facilitate a meaningful and critical understanding of those aspects of Palestinian society I was observing and experiencing on a daily basis. I did not have the opportunity to attend a course that would focus on the Arab or Palestinian society, not to speak of Arab education, either that within Israel, the Occupied Territories, or in the Arab region. At Tel-Aviv University, there was no course from among the courses I could chose from that was offered by a Palestinian/ Arab instructor, either during the course of my undergraduate studies or during my graduate and doctoral studies in sociology of education. The university library, and later on, graduate courses in critical sociological and literary theories, coupled with my subsequent engagement with social activists of an older generation who founded the League for the Arabs of Jaffa in 1979, offered me the first capacity to engage the tensions, challenges and contradictions of a world that slowly emerged out of the opacity of my consciousness, and took shape in the form of a more informed, and critical perspectives on the human and political condition context. In no small measure, this shift was triggered—in a cascade shape of sorts that has never really abated since then—by my fortuitous reading of a short piece in Hebrew written by Israeli historian Yigal ‘Ilem as a response to the second chapter of Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine. Published in 1981 in the literary review Siman Kri’a, number 14, Said’s second chapter, entitled ‘Zionism from the standpoint of its victims’ was immediately followed by ‘Ilem’s response, titled ‘Zionism, its Palestinian victim and the Western world’. It was not so much ‘Ilem’s attempt to salvage a Zionist historical narrative in the light of Said’s relentless analysis that drew my curiosity, as it did. It was rather my discovery that there is a Palestinian narrative, and a critical and articulate scholarly one at that, to start with. For me, I should admit, Said’s oblique entry into my intellectual life, through ‘Ilem’s Hebrew response, was one of these powerfully formative storm-like moments. It reconfigured my approach to and understanding of the question of discourse and its intersections with politics, power, and the representation of the Palestinians in literature and history. That Said’s The Question of Palestine was first published in English in 1979 and that I read it in its 1981 Hebrew translation, is indicative of the multifaceted flows of culture, identity, and politics. Yet, it is also indicative of the powerful ways in which intellectual encounters and ideas travel and engage consciousness and thought in very unpredictable—yet so formative—ways. Reflecting on these lived experiences, I am now in a position to name the power of schooling and higher education as a potent social instrument, as a carrier of political agendas and forms of consciousness that cannot be left un-problematised; nor can they be left un-questioned in terms of their relations with broader political configurations of power that shape biographies, classroom practices, as much as they seal the status of ethno-cultural groups, ultimately. The intersection between education and hegemony—as I would later on discover that concept in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Michael Apple—sheds light on many personal moments and experiences that would otherwise have remained opaque. In hindsight, I realise the multifaceted role of state institutions, their exclusionary policies, as well as the broader contexts of power they mediate. In hindsight, too, I realise the necessity of being intellectually vigilant—as an educator, a researcher, and a citizen—in terms of reflecting how, within my contexts of action, I mediate power and contribute to the consolidation of hegemony, despite intentions to the contrary. In hindsight, still, I can claim to un-cover the rather fragmented and fragmentary nature of citizenship in deeply divided societies, its fragility and precariousness as a civic project, and its idealised invocation in textbooks and the media compared with the more subtle legal and political exclusionary practices that underpin its actual enactment. Here, the work of Chantal Mouffe has come to inform my thinking on the wider challenges involved in articulating a viable, inclusive, and vibrant public sphere in relation to which citizenship could be contemplated as a viable political project. Over time, these concerns have come to gradually occupy the centre front of my thinking about education, schooling, citizenship, culture, and politics; shaping my understanding of the tremendous impact the political has on the articulations of the educational. By virtue of my French education, from an early stage I was powerfully exposed to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault (through Edward Said’s work), and many others. Bourdieu’s work remains for me a reference point in terms of the conceptual arsenal it provides to understand the dynamics of the field of education in relation to the larger field of power. His early work, and particularly Esquisses Algériennes, offers important insights into those aspects of social, cultural, and political struggles that perhaps are less visible in his later work.