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At the boundaries of citizenship: Palestinian Israeli
citizens and the civic education curriculum
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Israeli citizens and the civic education curriculum', Oxford Review of Education,
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Oxford Review of Education
Vol. 33, No. 3, July 2007, pp. 331–348
At the boundaries of citizenship:
Palestinian Israeli citizens and the
civic education curriculum
Halleli Pinson*
Haifa University, Israel
00
Taylor
2007
Oxford
10.1080/03054980701366256
CORE_A_236517.sgm
0305-4985
0Original
halleli@research.haifa.ac.il
HalleliPinson
000002007
&
and
Review
Article
Francis
(print)/1465-3915
Francis
of Education
Ltd
(online)
Education in Israel is often described as caught between two ends: state-formation and nationbuilding. 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.
Introduction
Democracy is not just to write in citizenship textbooks that democracy is the rule of the
people and that people should be free to express their feelings […] democracy is [judged]
in action. Then the democracy really reveals itself. If the state allows and the law allows
the people to express their feelings then it is really a democracy. (Rabiaa, a Palestinian
Israeli high school student, April 2001)
Like many other countries (Derricott, 1998), Israel has relatively recently revised its
civic curriculum. Against the backdrop of growing conflicts and expressions of
*Faculty of Education, Haifa University, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel.
Email: halleli@research.haifa.ac.il
ISSN 0305-4985 (print)/ISSN 1465-3915 (online)/07/030331–18
© 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03054980701366256
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332 H. Pinson
political intolerance in Israeli society and concerns about its democratic character, the
Ministry of Education published in 1994 revised curriculum guidance for civic education (Ministry of Education, 1994). This guidance was set to offer a more inclusive
citizenship education curriculum that would stress ideas such as pluralistic and
democratic citizenship and balance between universalistic and particularistic values
(Ichilov, 1999). Six years later the official textbook To be citizens in Israel: A Jewish and
democratic state (Ministry of Education, 2000b)—henceforth To Be Citizens—was
published, and the curriculum was implemented first in September 2000 in Jewish
schools (Ministry of Education, 2000a) and then in September 2001 in Arab schools
(Ministry of Education, 2001).1 The main innovation of this guidance was the recommendation to create, for the first time, one unified curriculum for all state high
schools2 with the aim of using civic education to promote a common Israeli civil
identity.
Schools and education systems in general play a significant role in shaping and reshaping collective identities. In particular the designing and implementation of
curriculum guidance and teaching materials is often where processes of constructing
and reconstructing collective identities and narratives take place. In this sense, the
Israeli citizenship curriculum, and especially the changes it has undergone in recent
years, should be seen as an attempt to define the notion of Israeli citizenship and the
meanings of ‘being Israeli’ that should underpin civic education in Israel. Popkewitz
and Brennan (1998, p. 13) also argue that ‘curriculum changes were a part of
visioning/re-visioning of social commitment’. Indeed what we should ask ourselves is:
does the unification of the civic curriculum and its new aims, as defined by the 1994
curriculum guidance, present a ‘re-visioning’ of social commitment—does it constitute a re-visioning of the notion of Israeli civic identity?
This paper sets out to explore the extent to which contemporary official discourses
of civic education in Israel present a re-envisioning of Israeli citizenship and membership in the collective it denotes. The purpose of this paper is to capture the politics of
citizenship: ‘The issue around membership—who does and who does not belong’
(Hall & Held, 1990, p. 175) as it is translated into civic education. In particular, this
paper focuses on the tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary practices,
between universal and particular definitions of Israeli citizenship as they emerge from
the ways in which the official civic education curriculum in Israel construct the
belonging to the Israeli collective and the position of the Palestinian minority in
relation to it.
The study
This paper draws on the analysis of the Hebrew version of the official textbook, and
interviews with 13 officials in the Ministry of Education.3 The officials interviewed
for this study were involved in various aspects of designing and implementing the
current civic curriculum and included: the three supervisors for civic education (in
the general schools, religious and Arab state schools) who together with the head of
the curriculum division for civic education, acting also as chief editor of the
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 333
textbook, hold the main responsibility for implementing the Ministry of Education’s
policy of civic education; a member of the civic education curriculum committee;
eight consultants—experienced teachers who were chosen to guide teachers in
implementing the new curriculum4 (two of whom were also involved in the process
of producing the official textbook). Out of the 13 officials six were secular Jews, four
were national-religious and three were Arab-Palestinians. Criterion and snowball
(chain) sampling methods (Patton, 2002) were implemented in obtaining the
interviews, using the supervisor for the general sector as a key informant. The
purpose behind the sample of interviewees was to gain as wide a perspective as
possible on the making and implementation of the current curriculum from the
different stakeholders involved in the process. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews
were conducted with all 13 officials between April and August 2001 and lasted
between 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours. The interviews were set to explore how the officials
perceive the meaning of Israeli citizenship as underpinning the current curriculum
and the challenges emerging from it. The following themes were addressed: the
priorities and aims of the civic curriculum; the challenges emerging from it; the definition of Israeli citizenship; the ways in which universalistic and particularistic
values are played out; the difference between the old and the new curriculum; and
the pedagogical approach underpinning the curriculum.
In order to capture the ‘politics of citizenship’ as it emerges from the official civic
curriculum, both the interviews and the textbook were discursively analysed taking
into account different layers of the text—content, form, language, processes of
communication, and context (Gee et al., 1992; Fairclough, 1995). The analysis was
conducted in three phases:
1) The textbook and the interviews transcriptions were read ascertaining the central
themes that emerged: definitions of Israeli citizenship and Israeli society; links
between citizenship and nationality; status and representation of minorities; and
universalistic and particularistic values.
2) The texts were re-read marking the themes in the text. At this stage the interviews
were analysed using the Atlas.ti computer package for analysing qualitative data.
The software was used as a facilitating tool to manage a large amount of data
rather than as an analytical tool.
3) Analysis of content, form, usage of language, context and relationship between
themes was conducted.
A complementary simple content analysis of the textbook was then carried out. The
textbook was systematically read for the occurrence of different types of external
sources integrated into the textbook. Excluding sources where the author/speaker was
not Israeli or sources drawn from official state documents, the frequency of Jewish
and Arab authorship of the external sources was recorded, as well as the number of
times the textbook uses Muslim, Christian and Jewish religious sources.
Finally, some of the arguments set out in this paper are also supported using quotations taken from in-depth interviews and focus groups with 11th-grade high school
students in an Arab school case study, conducted as part of a wider project into the
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334 H. Pinson
formation of political identities by young people in Israel that took place during 2001
(Pinson, 2004).5
The paper is divided into four parts. The first two sections critically examine the
status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and the Arab education system, respectively.
The third section introduces the central argument of this paper by exploring tensions
between practices of inclusion and exclusion as they emerge from the analysis of the
position of the Palestinian citizens in civic education in Israel. The concluding section
of this paper raises some questions and doubts about the project of unifying the civic
curriculum and the messages emerging from it.
Israeli citizenship, the Palestinian minority and their identities
Israel is a deeply divided and conflict-ridden society. These characteristics make
the task of educating its future citizens a very challenging one (Tatar, 2004;
Ichilov, 2005). The definition of Israel as both a Jewish nation-state and a democracy poses yet another challenge to the development of an inclusive democratic
citizenship education. This definition means that boundaries of the Israeli collective are determined first and foremost in terms of membership in an ethnonational group rather than according to universal civil criteria. Shafir and Peled
(2002) suggest that the political culture in Israel in relation to citizenship is made
up of a struggle between three different, and sometimes interrelated, political
discourses: liberal-democratic, republican, and ethno-national. This struggle
creates a hierarchical structure of membership in the polity. Whereas the liberaldemocratic discourse is used to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, the
republican discourse is used to determine the position of different Jewish groups in
the hierarchical structure of membership in the Israeli collective, based on their
alleged contribution to the Zionist project. Finally, the ethno-national discourse is
employed to create a distinction between Jewish citizens who belong to Israeli society as a collective, and Palestinian citizens who are included merely as individuals
but excluded as a group.
Adopting a slightly different terminology, Jabareen (2003) argues that the
‘language of rights’, the democratic-liberal discourse of citizenship, perpetuates the
supremacy of the Jewish majority. This approach constitutes Palestinian Israelis as a
‘migrant minority’, which is only entitled to equal civil-political rights, whereas they
are in fact a ‘homeland minority’ with claims over the land and for self-definition. The
Palestinian minority’s aspiration that the land of Israel/Palestine would be recognised
as a common homeland is seen by most of the Jewish majority as a threat, as a rejection of the Zionist ideal, and therefore as illegitimate (Peled, 1993; Rouhana, 1993).
Yet, the word citizenship, Mowateneh, in Arabic derives from the word watan which
means homeland; hence it denotes a sense of belonging to a specific territory
(Rouhana, 1988). Therefore, the dominant political discourse in Israel which sees the
Palestinian citizens merely as ‘migrant minority’ while rejecting their claims over the
land, not only excludes their national narrative, but also deprives them of one possible
meaning of their civic belonging.
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 335
The Palestinian citizens in Israel are therefore caught between the illusion of the
inclusionary nature of Israel democratic regime and its exclusionary and discriminative characteristics which are derived from its definition as a Jewish state. Caught in
this tension they are expected to accept their inferior status as a ‘migrant minority’ in
their own homeland (Jabareen, 2003), and to adopt a civic identity which rejects them
and their collective memory. An example of the possible implications these tensions
have on young Palestinian citizens is illustrated through a study into citizenship orientation of young Israelis (Ichilov, 2005) which suggests that young Israeli Palestinian
Arabs are more politicised than their Jewish counterparts and express alienation
towards the state.
Palestinian citizens in Israel often feel excluded not once but twice (Rabinowitz,
2001; Pinson, 2004). Rabinowitz (2001) uses the term ‘trapped minority’ to describe
their double marginalisation: once by the Jewish majority in Israel and once by the
majority of Palestinians who are not Israelis. A study into the formation of political
identities amongst Palestinian Israeli young people suggests (Pinson, 2004) that when
seeking to make sense of their very unsatisfactory position, some adopted supranational identities such as belonging to the Arab world or to the Muslim world, while
others emphasised their belonging to the land. Within this context of double
exclusion the question I now turn to is how their identities and narratives are
presented in the education system and in particular in the civic curriculum and
textbook.
The status of the Arab education6 system in Israel
The tension between the commitment of the State of Israel both to democratic principles and to the Zionist ethos and the exclusionary mechanism it entails has left its
mark on the Israeli education system. The State Education Act (1953) was perhaps
the most important landmark in the formation of the Israeli state education system.
The act stressed values such as freedom and equality, alongside the commitment to
uphold the Jewishness of the state, seeing education as a vehicle for strengthening
Jewish collective memory and myths (Kretzmer, 1987; Naveh & Yogev, 2002).
Yonah (2005) suggests that state education in Israel has developed as the main bearer
of the Zionist historiography.
Although the majority of schoolchildren in Israel are enrolled in the state education
system, it is far from providing any form of common education. It is divided into
different education sectors which cater for the various social groups in Israeli society,7
whereas Jewish and Arab schoolchildren, as well as secular and religious Jews, attend
different schools. The hierarchical structure of citizenship has a direct bearing on the
level of resources and educational autonomy that different groups enjoy. The separation of the Arab education system from its Jewish counterpart could be seen as a
response to the demands of the Arab minority and as serving its needs. However, as
Mar’i (1978) argues, it is first and foremost a discriminatory segregation, which leaves
the Arab education system outside the consensus, suffering from perpetual neglect
(Swirski, 1990, p. 61).
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336 H. Pinson
Indeed, since its establishment, the Arab education system in Israel has suffered
from a disproportionate level of state investments (Geraby & Levy, 2000). Even today
there is still inequality8 in ‘remedial’ hours,9 teaching hours and student–teacher ratio
(Swirski et al., 1996, 1997). The Arab school system also suffers from a lack of
appropriate buildings, classrooms and other school facilities, such as libraries, sports
facilities and laboratories (Human Rights Watch, 2001).
Despite being a separate system, the Arab education sector also does not enjoy the
same autonomy—especially with regard to its curricula—that other separate education systems, such as the religious Jewish schools, do (Al-Haj, 1994; Abu-Asba,
1997).10 The question of the degree of autonomy which Arab education in Israel
should enjoy can be traced back to the first days of the State of Israel. The proposed
solutions regarding the desirable arrangements of the education of the Palestinian
minority in the newly established Jewish state ranged from complete assimilation to a
complete separation. Yet, based on the belief that the Palestinian minority and their
national identity poses a threat to security and to the Zionist historiography, both
those who advocated integration/assimilation and those who suggested the separation
of Arab schools from the Jewish ones agreed that the state should exercise strict
control over the curriculum and the aims of education in Arab schools in order to
prevent it from becoming involved in developing national Palestinian identity (AlHaj, 1995; Levy, 2005).
Al-Haj (1995, p. 121) argues that one of the main ways in which the State of Israel
used and is still using the Arab education system as a means of controlling the
Palestinian minority in Israel is by emptying it of any national content. Indeed, while
the Israeli education system makes significant efforts to instil in its Jewish graduates
a sense of belonging to the Jewish national collective and the Jewish State of Israel,
there is no equivalent under the law or in education policies for the development of a
sense of national belonging amongst Arab students. The 1953 Act, for example, omitted almost any mentioning of educational aims for non-Jewish schoolchildren.11
Mar’i (1978, p. 51) argues that ‘the law has in effect, deprived Arab students of the
possibility of obtaining culturally and nationally relevant course content’.
When looking at curricula and textbooks designed for the Arab education system a
uniform pattern emerges. The curricula and textbooks designed for Arab schools fail
to balance between developing Arab/Palestinian national identity and promoting a
sense of belonging to the state. Al-Haj (1994) displays this asymmetry by comparing
the objectives of the history curriculum in Jewish and Arab schools. While the aim of
the history curriculum in the Arab sector is ‘To understand the history of the national
Arab movement and the National Zionist movement’, the aim of history education in
the Jewish sector is ‘To deepen the student’s feeling and understanding of the just
struggle of the Jewish people for a national renewal in their homeland’ (quoted in
Al-Haj, 1994, p. 13). Even today, despite a growing awareness of the need to give
representation to Palestinian national narratives, for example, in the history curriculum, the Israeli state education system still does not provide its students, Jews or
Palestinians, with the opportunity to learn about the Palestinian national narrative and
culture. By and large the Zionist historiography remains unchallenged (Yonah, 2005).
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 337
To a significant extent, the nationally, ethnically and religiously segregated
education system in Israel and its segregated curriculum (Al-Haj, 2005)
reproduces the social positions of groups in Israeli society. In this context of deep
social divisions which impinge on the education system, offering an inclusive civic
education that strives to create a common civic identity is no easy task. Ichilov
(2005) claims that the current civic curriculum has the potential of building such
bridges between diverse groups in Israel. This paper suggests that while the
current curriculum indeed represents a shift from both pre-state Zionist civic
education and from the emphasis on political procedures that characterised Israeli
civic education until recently (Ichilov, 1999), it still embodies tensions and
contradictions, especially in the representations of the Palestinian minority and its
narratives, and hence it is still far from offering such a bridge. The aim of the
remainder of this article is to explore these tensions through an analysis of the
ways in which the Palestinian citizens and their national identity are positioned in
the civic curriculum and textbook.
Civic education and the Palestinian citizens of Israel
To a great extent, the 1994 citizenship curriculum and its official textbook, To Be
Citizens, signalled a shift from a monolithic Jewish-Zionist interpretation of Israeli
citizenship that characterised the old generation of textbooks (Pinson, 2004). In
terms of its explicated aims and the decision to unify the curriculum across all
education sectors, it was designed, as indicated by the following quote, to use civic
education for building civic culture, rather than as a nation-building project:
The new curriculum offers a broad common citizenship notion to all students … Thus
there is no justification for maintaining separate curricula for the different school sectors.
(Ministry of Education, 1994, pp. 4–5)
Or, as suggested by one of the curriculum committee’s members:
… if there is something that should be common to all of us … [it] is that we share the same
citizenship, Israeli citizenship. I would almost say that this was a symbolic aspiration (of
the committee) to say something about the Israeli citizenship which is actually the only
thing that we all have in common.
However, despite this progressive language and the discourse of inclusivity it implies,
the link between citizenship and nationhood and the Jewishness of the state, which
entails an exclusive concept of membership in the Israeli state, are still salient ideas
in the official discourses of civic education (Pinson, 2005). Alongside the aim quoted
above, the curriculum guidance also determines that:
Students should also acknowledge the existence of the Israeli state as the state of the Jewish
people and understand its commitment to the Jewish people in the diasporas. (Ministry of
Education, 1994, p. 7)
The following comments by Palestinian Israeli high school students provide insights
into the ways in which they experience the tensions inherent in this aim:
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338 H. Pinson
Hisham: It is true that this is a Jewish state […]. But I was born here too […] I think it
is a big mistake that it doesn’t [the textbook] make you understand that there
are another people here, the Palestinian people.
Othman: Why just for the Jewish people? So I’m not a citizen now? I can’t get an Israeli
ID?
Asad:
I think that this sentence shouldn’t be part of the curriculum. Simply the State
of Israel doesn’t have only Jewish citizens […] Everyone should be accepted, we
belong to this state too.
This civic curriculum is caught between the aspiration to create an inclusive citizenship education that would draw upon democratic-liberal discourses, and the desire of
the State of Israel and its education system to maintain its Jewish nature and its
commitment to the Jewish people. Thus, it simultaneously creates an inclusive space
while reproducing exclusionary practices that reinforce the hierarchal citizenship
structure and make, as clearly stated in the quotes above, Palestinian Israeli students
feel as if they do not belong.
Civic education and the marginality of Palestinian Israelis
One Arab official who was interviewed for this study suggested that:
the old curriculum ignored almost completely the national identity, the national belonging
of the Arab student in Israel […] the [curriculum] committee for the first time designed a
curriculum that referred to the Arab population as a national minority that has its own
uniqueness […] In my opinion this textbook is a giant leap, I don’t want to use the word
revolutionary, but a real significant leap in comparison to what the Jewish student studied
before.
Does the textbook really represent a giant leap? Is it a major departure from previous
trends in Israeli school curriculum which ignored the national identity and narratives
of the Palestinian minority? The analysis presented in this section aims at shedding
light on these questions.
The tension between the inclusionary aspiration and the exclusion practices
underlying the curriculum can be traced first to the ways in which the textbook was
produced. Arab officials were marginalised in the process of designing the teaching
materials, in which they acted merely as consultants. Despite the intention to
develop an inclusive curriculum which will act as a platform for creating shared
civic culture, Arab officials in the Ministry of Education were still not given the
opportunity to take an active part in its formation. The following quotes from interviews with Ministry officials illustrate this form of exclusion of the Palestinian
narrative. One of the officials that took part in producing the official textbook
commented:
First of all in the team [that wrote the textbook] there were seculars […] and religious officials, I mean even in the team there was representation of different worldviews, each came
with their own perspective […]
When explicitly asked about the inclusion of Arab or Druze officials, the official
commented:
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 339
There was, I mean I was less involved here. But of course there was. I think that one official
even worked and met a couple of times with the team co-ordinator, and read a lot and was
involved in the process of translating […] yes this official was also a bit involved in bringing
Christian and Muslim sources […] there was also a Druze guy that saw the materials.
Yet even then, this official failed to see the marginal position given to Arab officials in
this process, as outsider consultants and commentators, rather than an integral part
of the process of putting together the official textbook. An Arab official who
commented on the role of Arab officials in preparing the textbook noted:
I was involved here and there, few remarks that they’ve included […] they also wanted
some reference to human rights in Islam and Christianity, we prepared the material for
them. But it was mainly them who wrote the textbook. We are still far from writing curricula. […] It is not like simply an Arab official sits with them in the room. The team sits in
one room, works together all the time, writing drafts and from time to time they send us a
copy, we make some comments […] Now if you ask me if there is enough representation
in the textbook for the views of Arabs, so the answer is no […] After all those who wrote
the textbook only read Hebrew, they don’t know Arabic, so they kept looking for Hebrew
sources.
Indeed, a simple content analysis of the official textbook (Hebrew version that was
later translated to Arabic) reveals systematic under-representation of Palestinian
citizens.
Throughout the textbook, external sources drawn from academic articles, newspaper articles, politicians’ speeches and prose are combined. Of all the sources, 95%
were written by Jewish-Israelis and only 5% by Palestinian citizens.12 The subchapter dedicated to Arab–Jewish relations begins with an account of contemporary
Arab society in Israel written by a Palestinian Israeli academic. However, the subchapter includes four more external sources, only one of which is written by a
Palestinian citizen. The textbook also combines religious sources that are designed to
illustrate that democratic ideas are rooted in the thought of Israel’s three monotheistic
religions. Table 1 presents the representation each of the religions received in the
textbook. Moreover, the Muslim and Christian sources were substantially shorter
then those drawn from Jewish sources. For example, pages 124–128 are dedicated to
the discussion about the principle of the rule of the majority in monotheistic religions.
Four and a half pages are dedicated to a discussion of the idea in Judaism while Islam
and Christianity are represented in only one paragraph each.
This is not only a case of unbalanced representation, but also a missed opportunity.
It is a missed opportunity, first in the sense that the use of sources from the three
Table 1.
Source
Jewish religious sources
Islam
Christianity
Total
Representation of religions in the textbook
Number of sources used
Percentage
41
8
4
53
77.5
15
7.5
100
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340 H. Pinson
religions to support the importance of basic democratic ideas could be employed as a
method for creating a civic common dominator. It could also be used to stress the
similarities between the different religions in order to promote a common civic identity. Second, while young Muslim Palestinian-Israelis tend to find it difficult to relate
to their civic identity and feel excluded, they often see their religious identity as
providing them with a sense of belonging and inclusion (Pinson, 2004). Therefore, a
greater representation of Islam in the textbook might have provided them with a
possible route to redefining their sense of civic belonging.
While the content analysis above can be seen as exemplifying the ongoing marginality of Palestinian citizens in Israeli textbooks, the following in-depth discursive analysis reveals the tension between practices of inclusion and exclusion in civic education.
Civic education and the Palestinian national identity
As we have seen, educational objectives and curricula in Israel were often emptied of
any reference to the Palestinian narrative, which was viewed as a potential threat to
Zionist historiography. Indeed, in the old generation of civics textbooks the Palestinian minority was referred to as a mere cultural or religious minority, or simply as the
‘non-Jewish’ groups (Pinson, 2004), while their national-identity was constituted as
non-existing. In contrast, To Be Citizens recognises that Palestinian Israelis constitute
a national minority. This representation can be seen as a radical departure both from
the previous generation of textbooks and also from established trends in education
policy and school curriculum in Israel. Yet, a more careful reading of the ways in
which To Be Citizens refers to the national identity of the Palestinian minority reveals
that it is at best ambivalent and at worst reinforces the Zionist narrative.
The majority of references in the textbook to the Palestinian minority as a national
minority can be found in the sub-chapter dedicated to the conflict between Jewish
and Palestinian citizens. For example, in the following quotation the textbook
presents a rather complex picture of the marginalisation of Palestinian-Israelis within
Israeli society:
Another reason for the cleavage between Jews and Arabs in Israel is the definition of the
State of Israel as a Jewish nation-state […]. A Jewish nation-state means that the State is
the state of the Jewish collective. The Arabs are not part of this collective because they do
not belong to the Jewish majority […]. On the one hand, the Jewish Israeli society demands
the Arabs to be loyal to the state, identify with it and see themselves as Israelis, all this without allowing them to join the ruling collective. On the other hand the Jewish Israeli society
does not permit or accept steps which are taken by the Arabs that are aimed at changing
the national identity of the state in a way that will include them too and it forbids any organized activity that is aimed to change the Jewish nature of the state. For this reason, some
of the Arab citizens feel that the state is not theirs as it is the state of the Jewish citizens and
they feel that they are not equal to the Jewish citizens of the state. (Ministry of Education,
2000b, pp. 290–291)
It is interesting to notice that even though the textbook in this example does not
ignore the difficulties faced by the Palestinian minority in Israel, these are presented
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 341
as challenges faced by Palestinian citizens or as one of the causes for the rift between
Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, but not as challenges to Israeli democracy. On the one
hand, the textbook recognises that Palestinians constitute a national minority and
acknowledges their marginal position within Israeli society. On the other, it does this
without challenging the dominant discourses which constitute the State of Israel as
first and foremost the state of the Jewish people and not of all its citizens.
An even more prominent example of this ambivalence can be found below:
The origin of the national rift can be traced to the beginning of the Jewish-Zionist
settlement in Eretz Yisrael [land of Israel] at the end of the 19th century. This signifies the
beginning of a territorial struggle over the control of Eretz Yisrael. A struggle between what
was then an Arab majority and a Jewish minority which attempted to return to and inhabit
Eretz Yisrael. (Ministry of Education, 2000b, p. 289, emphasis added)
At first glance, it seems as if the narrative presented here acknowledges the Palestinian
as ‘homeland minority’. In so doing it appears to offer a different reading of the
Jewish–Arab conflict than that of the Zionist historiography, which primarily
imagined the ‘land of Israel’ (Eretz Yisrael) as an empty land waiting for the ‘return’
of the Jewish people (Golan, 1995). The textbook acknowledges, to some extent, the
‘other’ national narrative and challenges one of the constitutive myths of Zionism by
defining the Jewish–Arab conflict as rooted in a dispute over land. However, as the
emphases above show, the Zionist rhetoric is still being reinforced by the textbook
through uses of terms such as the Eretz Yisrael and the return of the Jewish people.
Therefore eventually it constructs this dispute as a conflict that is not over a shared
homeland, but about Eretz Yisrael—the land which belongs to the Jewish people.
With the exception of the example above, the image of the Palestinian minority as
a homeland minority, and their linkage to the land of Israel/Palestine is largely downplayed by the textbook. This should be read also in the context of other parts of the
textbook that were designed to strengthen the Zionist narrative and the legitimacy of
the Jewish-Zionist settlement in Israel/Palestine. For example, part one of the Hebrew
civics textbook focuses on Israel as a Jewish state and includes a discussion about the
special relationship between the Jewish people, the State of Israel and the land of
Israel. However there is no equivalent reference to the special relationship, or the
meaning of the ‘land’ and ‘homeland’ to the Palestinian citizen.
This discourse threatens to exclude the Palestinian-Israeli readers and their understandings of self and place. As noted above, one of the meanings of the word citizenship in Arabic refers to belonging to a homeland, and young Palestinian-Israelis often
use their special relationship to the land when making sense of their political identities
(Pinson, 2004). Thus, it can be argued that the textbook here has missed yet another
opportunity to offer forms of civic inclusion to its Palestinian Israeli readers.
Reproducing the hierarchal structure of Israeli citizenship
The tension between inclusion and exclusion also emerges when the Israeli citizenry
is discussed.
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342 H. Pinson
How should we define the term ‘people’ in the modern democratic state? It does not refer
to one homogenous unit, but rather refers to the total of all the citizens who live in the
state, who are different in their sex, opinion, beliefs and religion. The concept people also
includes the various social groups in a certain state which are different with respect to their
opinions, cultures and interests. A ‘people’ includes majority and minority groups. What
is common to all of them is that they are the citizens of the same state. (Ministry of Education, 2000b, p. 100)
This inclusive language which draws on liberal-democratic, universal discourses of
citizenship characterises the section of the textbook which discusses the democratic
regime in Israel.13 Similarly To Be Citizens describes Israeli society as a multicultural
society while stressing the importance of including the various groups which comprise
it and their differences:
As a result mainly of the waves of Jewish immigration to Israel, Israeli society became a
heterogeneous society. The diverse groups that comprise the society are different from
each other in their national, religious, ethnic, political and class origin and belonging.
Thus, Israeli society is defined as a multiethnic and multicultural society with a national
minority. (Ministry of Education, 2000b, p. 276)
It is important to notice, however, that even though Israeli society is portrayed here
as a pluralistic society, the textbook still draws clear boundaries between the Jewish
and non-Jewish groups of which it is comprised. First, the diversity that characterises
Israeli society is presented, primarily as a result of waves of Jewish immigration.
Secondly, the text differentiates between Israel as a multicultural or multiethnic
society and the existence of a national minority. This distinction implies that the
multicultural character of Israeli society refers to the diversity within the Jewish
majority while the Palestinian national minority—which is defined as a separate category—is left outside the boundaries of the multicultural/multiethnic Israeli collective.
This tension, between the existence of inclusionary tendencies and reinforcement
of exclusionary principles that derive from the link between Israeli citizenship and
belonging to the Jewish collective, is even more prominent in the following examples:
Certain groups in the Jewish population mistrust the Arab population because of their
identification with the Palestinian struggle for a Palestinian state alongside the State of
Israel. One expression of this feeling of mistrust is the call made by parts of the Jewish
majority to deprive the Arab citizens of their right to participate in some of the crucial
political and public decisions, such as the decision regarding the future of Judah and
Samaria […] It is important to state that these views contradict the democratic nature of
the State of Israel. (Ministry of Education, 2000b, pp. 289–290)
The ideological-political cleavage in Israel expresses the dispute in Jewish Israeli society
about the solution for the Israeli-Arab and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, since the implementation of such a solution is a resolution with regard to the boundaries of the State of
Israel. (Ministry of Education, 2000b, p. 332)
The comparison between these two quotations reveals the ambivalent stance to
membership in the Israeli society expressed by To Be Citizens. On the one hand the
exclusion of the Palestinian citizens from the decision-making in Israel (which is
discussed in the section dedicated to the conflict between Jewish and Palestinian
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 343
citizens) is described as un-democratic. However, when the ‘cleavage’ between the
political right and left wings in Israel14 is discussed, it is presented as a dispute that
exists solely within the Jewish Israeli community. According to the textbook,
Palestinian citizens remain outside this discussion and therefore again at the margins
of Israeli society. This has major implications, especially when considering the
current political discourse in Israel. In the years since the Oslo Agreement, many
members of the Israeli public and parliament have argued that the peace deal is illegitimate since it did not receive the support of a Jewish majority, relying on the
support of Palestinian-Israeli citizens and parties for passage. The idea that any
decision about the future of Israel should rely on a Jewish majority, rather than a
democratic majority, has gained wider currency in recent years. Here we can see that,
despite the language of inclusion expressed in other parts of the textbook, To Be
Citizens reproduces—through implication—the hierarchical structure of Israeli
citizenship and reconfirms the exclusion of the Palestinian citizens from participation
in determining the common good.
The idea that Palestinians should be included as individual citizens, but excluded
from participation in determining the common good, was also expressed by some of
the officials:
They can fight for rights they think they don’t get. But this is a state, also by law. And I
think they should study and understand that this is a Jewish and democratic state and they
are a minority here. A large minority, a minority that should have rights, but a minority. It
is not a very pleasant situation, I’m really sympathetic to the fact that this is unpleasant
situation […] It is not the same like being Jewish here.
If he [the Arab] wishes that the State of Israel will become the state of all its citizens, that
it will give up its Jewish symbols, change its flag, it anthem, I can understand him. I don’t
have to accept it, I don’t have to change it. On the other side I expect him to understand
his status as a minority.
Thus Palestinian citizens are included as long as they accept the framework of the
Jewish democratic state and their position within it as a ‘migrant minority’. They are
asked not to challenge the Zionist narrative by seeking recognition as a ‘homeland
minority’.
In order to create an inclusive curriculum there is a need not merely to recognise
the existence of different groups but also to acknowledge their alternative narratives
and discourses of citizenship. Although the official discourses of citizenship education—as represented by To Be Citizens and the statements of officials—recognised the
diversity of Israeli society, they still marginalised those who do not fall within the
boundaries of the Zionist hegemonic discourse and the Israeli collective it constructs.
To a significant extent the discourse of inclusivity in the curriculum guidelines was
not maintained when the textbook, or the officials, dealt with the desirable definition
of Israeli citizenship, the modes of belonging it is supposed to generate and, in particular, the ways in which it constructs the ‘Other’.
An example of this ambivalent stance can be found in the way in which some of the
Jewish officials discussed the aims of citizenship education. When negotiating the
meanings of membership in Israeli society that should be offered to Israeli students,
344 H. Pinson
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some of the officials seemed to be torn between the notion of citizenship identity as
common to all and what belonging to the Israeli collective meant to them:
I think that citizenship is the common thing to all of us and we need to educate people to
accept the other, and to understand that he is also a citizen. The other, I mean, the one that
is not part of the Jewish collective, he is an equal citizen […] Look, what a Jewish state is, is
something that also the Arab and Druze sectors should understand, to be familiar with the
reality because the state is theirs […] But there isn’t any aspiration to educate them according to the Jewish values. They need to be educated according to universal values […] On the
other hand, the Jewish student, it is obvious that the emphasis is different. It is very important that they will be exposed to, and will know what the disputes are in the public sphere.
(Emphases added)
The official argues here that everyone should be educated for common citizenship,
but at the same time the official distinguishes between two different aims of citizenship education: one for Jewish students, which is based on developing a sense of
belonging to the Jewish collectivity; and the other for non-Jewish students, that would
derive from a liberal-democratic approach. By drawing upon these distinctions, the
official effectively defines two types of citizenship education. The first is for all
students, and is based on a liberal notion of citizenship that emphasises the legal
status and the rights a citizen holds. The second objective of citizenship education,
which is only applicable to Jewish students, is based on the ethno-national discourse
and is aimed at enhancing their sense of national belonging. This distinction, to a
great extent, corresponds with the hierarchical structure of Israeli citizenship (Shafir
& Peled, 2002).
One curriculum many challenges—some concluding remarks
Despite the stated intention of creating an inclusive curriculum and introducing a
unified civic curriculum for all state education high schools, contemporary civic
education in Israel at best represents an ambivalent stance caught in the tension
between inclusion and exclusion, nation-building and state formation. As the analysis
presented here reveals, while civic education now offers a more complex account of
the definition of Israeli citizenship and membership in the collective it denotes, it still
often marginalises the Palestinian citizens. In so doing, civic education acts to reproduce the hierarchal structure of Israeli citizenship with its concept of differential
membership in the collective. This discussion raises serious questions concerning the
unification of the civics curriculum, especially in the context of Arab schools in Israel.
In a focus group in an Arab school, which was conducted in 2001, Jamil, a 17-yearold Palestinian Israeli student stated that:
Sometimes even the civic education classes give you the feeling … opposite to belonging.
You study about the rights you have and then the reality comes in, and it is not like they
said it will be, you don’t get what you were taught you should get, like the textbook said.
So why? There is a contradiction.
As Jamil so eloquently puts it, civic education does not operate in a vacuum. His
experience of civic education begs the question what is the meaning of developing an
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 345
inclusive curriculum, which draws on democratic-liberal discourse and ideas such as
equality of rights, in the context of the ongoing discrimination against the Palestinian
citizens outside schools, and within the education system?15
Aside from the conflict between the text and the context, it is the ambivalent
messages within the official discourse of civic education which make the task of creating a common civic identity ever so challenging. As the study demonstrates, the
tension between the search for a universal language of citizenship, as part of the
unification project, and the commitment to the Jewish-Zionist national narrative
leads to the articulation of two aims for civic education that echo the hierarchical
structure of Israel citizenship. This observation brings me to ask whether the unification of the curriculum and the search for some sort of inclusive definition of civic
membership does not, paradoxically, turn inclusive intentions into exclusionary
practice. As with the hierarchical structure of Israeli citizenship, the position which
civic education offers to the Palestinian student is that which is based on a democratic-liberal discourse. It hence denotes a ‘thin’ sense of belonging, while excluding
them from other forms of participation.
Levy (2005, p. 287), in analysing the processes of inclusion/exclusion in Arab
education in major educational reforms, observes that these reforms created a new
category of ‘Israeli-Arabs’ which is an example of how ‘the extension of citizenship
rights only implied the replacement of one form of exclusion by another. It allowed
the Arabs to fight for equal rights, but it has also re-delineated the boundaries of the
Israeli ethnospace’. The case of civic education is similar. While in the last decade it
moved away from a complete omission of the Palestinian minority, the inclusion it
offers often leaves the Palestinian-Israeli students even more frustrated about their
position and possibilities—as Jamil pointed out above.
The civics textbook falls into the trap of re-stating the inclusion-exclusion of the
Palestinian minority from the Israeli collective through employing a democraticliberal discourse. However, there are other concerns. Feminists have illustrated
how the abstract model of ‘the citizen’ acts as an exclusionary mechanism for
women. Following a similar logic, my concern here, is the extent to which the
introduction of a democratic-liberal language of citizenship and inclusion efforts
resulted in the exclusion of different meanings of civic belongings articulated by
Palestinian students. This denies the Palestinian students, for example, the possibility of developing a local citizenship identity emphasising belonging to the land
and locality, or the use of Muslim identity in formulating a trans-national political
identity.
We tend to think about the unification of the civic curriculum as a positive change;
as progress. What I hope to have succeeded in doing here is to suggest that perhaps
before celebrating this symbolic act we need to question it and to examine its underlying messages and its possible implications. Perhaps, at least until Israeli society and
its education system will be able to include the Palestinian minority not merely as
individuals, but as a ‘homeland minority’, Palestinian students will benefit more and
be empowered by a separate curriculum which will be built on their alternative definition of political belonging.
346 H. Pinson
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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 Zionistreligious population; the Arab state education system; and the independent Jewish ultraOrthodox 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).
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Palestinian Israeli citizens and the education curriculum 347
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.
Notes on contributor
Halleli Pinson is a research and a teaching fellow at the Faculty of Education, Haifa
University. She is also a research fellow at the Van-Leer Jerusalem Institute
where she co-chairs the research group on citizenship and political education in
Israel.
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