Palestine History Project: Teaching a Collective Narrative
Until recently, with some rare exceptions, writings about
Palestine and the Palestinians tended to fall into the general
category of the “grand narrative.” Absent are Palestinians as human
beings. Instead, when they are murdered they simply become numbers;
when they are driven from their homes they simply become refugees;
and when they resist the occupation of their land and the theft of
their patrimony they are labeled terrorists.
Some notable exceptions include Rosemary
Sayigh who gives Palestinian women a voice in chronicling what
happened in the 1948 Nakba. She argues that the absence of
Palestinian voices parallels at the textual level the discounting
of the indigenous Palestinian population by settler-colonists and
imperialists. In the oft-cited Zionist slogan, Palestinians were
non-existent on their “land without a people,” in the infamous
Balfour Declaration, they become the “existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine.” In presenting women’s narratives, Sayigh
challenges such narrative exclusions and proposes a live portrait
of the Palestinian people as important actors in the shaping of
their history and identity.1
In Homeland, the Oral Histories of
Palestine and Palestinians, Sam Bahour and his colleagues
interview ordinary people who talk about major historical events
they had witnessed.2
Palestinian historian Adel Manna calls for opening a new window to
Palestinian social history beginning with the lives of ordinary
peasants and other marginalized groups instead of simply focusing
on political leaders and social elites.3
We are beginning to see the emergence of a new
framework for the Palestinian narrative. Instead of the old
binaries that focused on erasure versus affirmation or occupation
versus resistance, we now witness a trend toward narration that
takes the Palestinian individual as a point of departure. In the
process, we rediscover what it is about this collectivity that
binds it together.
The late Edward Said captured the need for
this new focus in the following manner:
...the fate of Palestinian history has been a sad one, since not only was independence not gained, but there was little collective understanding of the importance of constructing a collective history as a part of trying to gain independence. To become a nation in the formal sense of the word, people must turn their selves into more than a collection of tribes, or political organizations of the kind that existed since 1967 which Palestinians have created and supported.4
Said then argues that the Palestinians never
clearly understood the “power of a narrative history to mobilize
people around a common goal.”5
How can we understand this new trend of a
Palestinian-centered history? History overlaps and is intertwined
with other fields of knowledge. Anthropology, law, psychology,
sociology and philosophy are interwoven with history and therefore,
historical research increasingly relies on a combination of these
various fields. Furthermore, the renewed interest in the study of
indigenous societies and cultures comes as a reaction to the
homogenizing trends forwarded and perpetuated by the all-engulfing
global capitalist system. These indigenous cultures were once
viewed as the “other,” partly human or savage people, in the
framework of settler colonialism and imperialism.
We have asked a number of Palestinian history
teachers to convene in a focus group discussion on the modalities
of teaching Palestinian history.6 We
wanted to know how they teach Palestinian history to their students
in the eleventh and twelve grades. We wanted to know how they teach
the Nakba for instance. What we discovered is not reassuring: they
mostly focus on major political events and rarely talk about the
social and political context; they rely mostly on official and key
documents. No additional materials are used to supplement the
textbook. And only one out of the five teachers said that she
incorporates oral history techniques in her classroom. The teachers
stay focused on the textbook, feeling pressured to finish it during
the academic year.
Memorizing dates and events and numbers appear
to be the only fundamental skills that the teachers try to achieve.
We noticed during the focus group discussion with the teachers that
they teach the Nakba in a very classical and frustrating way; for
them, Nakba (as with their general approach to history) is just a
main event, specifically a political event that created the state
of Israel and, at the same time, the Palestinian Diaspora.
The structure of the grading system, exams,
activities, and the nature of these methods turn Palestinian
students away from living the continuing reality of the Nakba. They
are taught to see it as simply another historical event that they
should memorize by recalling the numbers of refugees, and showing
how different countries stand on this or that issue, whether they
are with or against. Students can earn an extra mark for being able
to recall these supposedly important facts. The destruction of
society, the environment and human beings is totally missing from
the texts of the Palestinian official education system. There is no
critical thinking, no teaching how to think historically and no
attempt to question established facts.
The new framework for the Palestinian
narrative, live portrait, voice of the marginalized, human and
social context, apparently has not yet penetrated teachers’
discourse and context. Therefore a lot of work needs to be done
with the teachers at the level of both the high schools and
universities by training them to become more familiar with modern
methodologies in order to be able to teach Palestinian history and,
at the same time, to begin the process of writing and telling their
own history of Palestine, along with their students and their
families.
New research methodologies which are sensitive
to the needs of indigenous societies urge us to begin “centering
our concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand
theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own
purpose”7 This is more likely to help
us re-orient our issues and our concerns.
Future plans should proceed in two ways: to
encourage the emergence of a new and more effective framework for
the Palestinian narrative. Secondly, to reinforce and circulate
this trend by communicating it through teachers and students,
instead of simply having it limited to English-speaking academic
elites. To achieve these aspirations, we are preparing to launch a
cooperative project that would include both The Qattan Center for
Educational Research and Development (Ramallah) and Mada al-Carmel
(Haifa), under the name “The Palestine History Project.” The
project will be supervised by Professors Fouad Moughrabi and Nadim
Rouhana, and will include training twenty Palestinian history
teachers, ten from the West Bank and ten from among Palestinian
citizens of Israel at both high school and university levels. The
main goal of the project is to train these educators on the use of
modern pedagogical methodologies in order to develop their
abilities to teach Palestinian history, and at the same time, begin
the process of writing and telling their own history of Palestine,
along with their students and their families.
The project will involve the participation of
Palestinian and Non-Palestinians historians in conducting the
workshops for this group. So far our list includes well known
historians like May Seikaly, Bishara Doumani, Adel Manaa, Issam
Nassar, Salim Tamari, Ahmed Saadi, Rashid Khalidi, Mohammed Bamya,
Partha Chatterjee, Homi Bahba, Frederick Hoxie, Steven Friedmann,
and Patrick Wolfe, among others. These workshops will hopefully
produce alternative resource materials which may even include
lesson plans, translations, articles...etc which will be useful not
just for the group but also for all Palestinian teachers. These
materials will be placed on our website, and can be downloaded by
any educator anywhere in the world. Eventually, and armed with a
group of highly skilled teachers, we can conduct workshops for
Palestinian teachers outside of Palestine.
One would think that now that Palestinians are
producing their own history textbooks, Palestinian students will
become more knowledgeable about their own history. Unfortunately,
what we have discovered is that the emerging generation of
Palestinian students lacks basic and fundamental knowledge of their
own history. This reality begs the question: is this deliberate or
is it an oversight?
After more than a century, the process of
Zionist colonization has failed to erase Palestinian identity.
However, the current fragmentation and dispersal of Palestinian
society poses a new existential question and for us a challenge:
without a renewed effort to understand our history in a critical
and intelligent manner, we risk marginalization and possible
disappearance as a people from the world map. The irony is that
while our Zionist enemies have failed to subdue us, our own
historical ignorance may end up doing their job for them.
Endnotes
1 Rosemary Sayigh. “Women’s Nakba Stories:
Between Being and Knowing”. In: Ahamd H. Sa’adi and Laila
Abu-Lughod. Nakba, Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of
Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. pp. 135 –
158. See the “Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement”
archive at:
http://almashriq.hiof.no/palestine/300/301/voices/index.html
2 Staughtoun Lynd and Sam Bahour and Alice
Lynd. Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and
Palestinians. New York: Olive Branch press, 1994
3Adel Manaa’. “From Seferberlik to the Nakba:
A Personal Account of the life of Zahra al-Ja’umiyaa”. in:
Jerusalem Quarterly, Vol. 30 ( Spring, 2007), pp. 59 –
76
4Edward W. Said. “Invention, Memory, and
Place” in: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 2000),
p. 184
5ibid, pp. 184
6 Focus Group Discussion with a number of
Palestinian History Teachers, held by Malik Rimawi and Rami
Salameh. Qattan Center of Educational Research and Development,
Ramallah, 17 Oct 2009.
7 Linda tuhuwau smith. Decolonizing
Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New
York: Zed Books Ltd. 1999, p. 39