Intellectual honesty in Israel & Palestine produces radically different outcomes
By James M. Dorsey
To
watch a video version of this story or listen to an audio podcast click here.
Thank you for your support and loyalty.
Intellectual honesty is a rare commodity in the divide
between Israelis and Palestinians.
It is even rarer with the rise of Jewish ultra-nationalism and
a generation of Israelis and Palestinians nurtured on prejudiced, biased, and
often supremacist perceptions of the other.
The irony is that historically, it was far-right militants,
and currently, it is fringe left-wing intellectuals who displayed intellectual honesty,
even if their conclusions differ radically.
With few exceptions, intellectual honesty has long been lost
on the Israeli right and left. What intellectual honesty survives is posited in
fringe pockets of the left that propagate a paradigm cultural change on both
sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide that goes against the grain of
mainstream Israeli and Palestinian thinking and, in today’s fog of war, has a
pie-in-the-sky quality.
Even so, these pockets put forward ideas that offer a pathway
towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has the potential
to bridge the traumas shaping generations, contribute to preventing a one- or
two-state solution from producing future wars, and ensure that peace agreements
with Israel have street credibility on both sides of the divide rather than
amount to arrangements among elites with little popular support beyond Israel’s
borders.
Education sits at the core of contrasting views of the
future of Israeli-Palestinian relations and diametrically opposite historical
narratives.
Source: X
Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu
reiterated in an address to the US Congress his prioritization of “deradicalisation”
of Gaza through religiously-guided educational reform as a prerequisite for
the reconstruction of the war-ravaged Strip.
Mr. Netanyahu first insisted on deradicalisation when, in
February, he offered a vague
outline of his post-war Gaza plan.
Since then, Mr. Netanyahu has drawn on a 32-page proposal
drafted by four Israeli academics that calls for “the creation of a positive
horizon for the defeated nation,” deradicalisation through “education for
peace,” defined as “eradicating jihadist ambitions,” and the nurturing of a
popular repudiation of violence and embrace of effective governance.
“The day after we defeat Hamas, a new Gaza can emerge. My
vision for that day is of a demilitarized and deradicalised Gaza… A new generation
of Palestinians must no longer be taught to hate Jews but rather to live in
peace with us,” Mr. Netanyahu told the Congress.
Accompanied
by Hamas fighters, children play with weapons. Credit: IDF Spokesman
What Mr. Netanyahu means by ‘deradicalisation’ is an
educational system that refrains from promoting Palestinian national
aspirations and the right to resist Israeli occupation, even non-violently, and
teaches history and social sciences in line with Israel’s version of the
history of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Mr. Netanyahu has already taken a first step by targeting
educational institutions in Gaza, including all of the Strip’s universities
and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). UNRWA operated 288
schools, or 40 per cent of all schools, in Gaza before the war.
Serving as shelters for Palestinians displaced by the war
and, according to Israel, as bases for Hamas,
most of the schools have been severely damaged or destroyed in the Israeli
military campaign.
Earlier this year, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that “in
UNRWA schools, they’ve been teaching the doctrines of extermination of Israel
— the doctrines of terrorism, lauding terrorism, glorifying terrorism.”
Israeli
soldiers at UNRWA headquarters in Gaza. Credit: Al Jazeera
Israeli textbook watchdog Impact-se reported in November
that “at least”14 of UNWRA’s 9,367 teachers in Gaza, or 0.15
per cent, had supported Hamas violence in social
media postings, including the group’s October 7 attack on Israel.
The report added that “at least 100 Hamas members committing
the terror attacks are graduates of UNRWA’s education system.”
Before the war, UNRWA operated 709 schools catering to
530,000 students across the Middle East. Almost 300,000
of the students attended UNRWA schools in Gaza.
The report highlighted “select” examples from UNRWA school
materials that legitimately should be questioned, including describing the
firebombing of an Israeli bus as “a barbecue party.”
The report does not indicate how representative the examples
are.
Even so, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is debating three
bills that would curtail UNRWA’s operations, including one that would designate
the UN group as a terrorist organisation.
Countering mainstream ethnocentric Israeli and Palestinian
identity politics that shape education systems is a revival in Israel of a
Levantine identity based on the notion of a pluralist, multicultural society.
Idan
Zivoni’s latest book. Credit Resling
"On the one hand, Israelis feel unwanted in our region;
it's rejecting us as an occupying, Jewish country. And, of course, nobody is
exactly waiting for us in Europe to move back. That in-between space is a very
Israeli experience. I'm not sure an Egyptian from Cairo feels unwelcome in
their surroundings. I don't think Palestinians feel that this region rejects
them; rather, it's that they're being repressed by us," said Idan Zivoni,
the author of a
recent book on Levantinism.
Levantinism’s revival on the fringe of Israeli society
precedes the Gaza war]. It appears to have survived the ultra-nationalist
onslaught sparked by Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s war on Gaza.
In 2019, Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, home to some of the
country’s most important archaeology, ethnography, photography, folklore, and
local history collections, staged an exhibition focused on the late Egyptian-born
novelist and essayist Jacqueline Kahanoff, one of the most influential writers
on Levantinism.
This month saw the publication in Hebrew of two books on
Levantinism, two years after two earlier books were published.
A product of pre-revolution cosmopolitan Cairo who emigrated
to Israel in 1954, Ms. Kahanoff developed a social model of coexistence drawn
from her childhood experiences in the period between the 20th
century’s two world wars.
She believed that for Israel to be recognized and accepted
by its Arab neighbours, it would have to empower its Mizrahi citizens with
roots in the Arab and Muslim world as cultural ambassadors, who historically
were looked down on by their Ashkenazi brethren of European descent.
Ms. Kahanoff’s thinking is relevant at a time when Israelis
and Jews debate the nature of the Jewish identity, relations between Jews and
non-Jews, the role of religion, and the future of the West Bank and Gaza, conquered
by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, even though it goes against the grain of
mainstream Israeli and Palestinian thinking and challenges the two peoples’
nationalistic framework.
Levantinism leaves open the options of a one- or two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but is particularly relevant for a
unified state that risks erupting in civil war even if Israeli Jews and Palestinians
would have equal rights.
Ms. Kahanoff understood what our "prime ministers,
generals, and ministers still fail to see. We need to teach Arabic from a young
age, we need to completely
change our attitude toward the Arab world, we need to understand that we're
now part of it, to maintain a discourse that isn't so insanely racist but
rather loving and connecting, that knows the intellectual treasures that Islam
has to offer us,” said Ketzia Alon, co-editor of a recent volume on Levantinism.
Binyamin
Netanyahu and his ideological mentor, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Credit: Pool
Ms. Kahanoff and her disciples would likely recoil from
being mentioned in the same breath as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the early 20th
century intellectual godfather of far-right Jewish nationalism and Mr.
Netanyahu’s ideological cradle, who propagated a Jewish State in all of
Palestine and storied Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.
Yet, what Ms. Kahanoff and Messrs. Jabotinsky and Dayan have
in common is the intellectual honesty to recognise Palestinians as human beings
with legitimate aspirations, even if that leads them to radically different
visions of the future.
It is the kind of honesty absent in the supremacist and
racist pronouncements of Messrs. Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar
Ben Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Mr. Jabotinsky’s ideological
heirs.
Messrs. Jabotinsky and Dayan recognised Palestinian aspirations
but argued that there was no room in Palestine for two competing claims. While
intellectually honest, their us-or-them approach provided the recipe for
permanent conflict and violence in which only one party could win by defeating
and subjugating the other.
“To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the
realisation of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can
bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our ‘Arabo-philes’ comes
from some kind
of contempt for the Arab people, some kind of unfounded view of this race
as a rabble ready to be bribed to sell out their homeland for a railroad
network,” Mr. Jabotinsky argued, deriding Zionist factions that sought
compromise with the Palestinians.
Then-defense
minister Moshe Dayan makes a speech during the 1973 Yom Kippur War in an
undated photograph. Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit/Defense Ministry Archive
Speaking at the 1956 funeral of an Israeli farmer brutally
murdered by Palestinian militants, Mr. Dayan acknowledged the plight of the
Palestinians, insisting that Israel would have to live by the sword.
“Let us not cast blame on the murderers. For eight years,
they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes, we
have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers
dwelt into our estate,” Mr. Dayan said.
“Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is
inflaming and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs living around
us. This
is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong, and determined, lest
the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down,” he added.
For now, Messrs. Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich’s
exclusivist ultra-nationalism drown out Ms. Kahanoff and Ms. Alon’s calls for
an inclusive approach that recognizes the legitimacy of rival claims and
advocates greater cross-cultural engagement.
Nevertheless, major Israeli cultural institutions focusing
on alternative approaches coupled with the publication of books and newspaper
articles and public gatherings in which forward-looking ideas are discussed
offer a ray of hope, particularly at a time of war and hardened divides when
supremacist intellectual dishonesty trumps intellectual honesty.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
\
Comments
Post a Comment