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After a trip to Israel and the West Bank, teacher Michael Davies is planning to change the way students learn about the history of the conflict
Michael Davies, pictured in Nablus, is seeking sponsorship to build an immersive website. ‘We also need to give Muslim students more confidence that history is a subject that involves them’
Last year, I took a group of my history students to Israel and the West Bank. It was a terrific success. We spent three days in Israel visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, meeting a documentary maker and a senior civil servant in prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office, before crossing to the West Bank, where we walked through the disputed areas of Hebron, visited Bethlehem and played football with the boys in a Nablus refugee camp.
Shortly after our return home, a few of the students decided to attend an event at our local university as part of an “Israeli apartheid week”. Here they ran into the parent of a Jewish student who was upset to find them there. She argued that it was wrong to call Israel an apartheid state and unfair to single it out for criticism. They told her that their previously positive view of Israel had been changed by seeing the occupation in action.
It is not surprising that teachers tend to shy away from the subject of the history of conflict in Israel and Palestine. There is a fear of being accused of coming down on one side or the other, or being caught in the firing line of conflicting claims and opinions.
For several years now, I’ve been teaching this subject at a northern state school. It’s a difficult thing to do because it arouses strong emotions among students and their parents. And the history of the conflict itself is fiercely contested. Put simply, the Jewish people tell it one way and the Arab people tell it another. And yet teaching this is essential. If this generation of students doesn’t grasp how the conflict came about and why it is so difficult to resolve, how can we in the West ever hope to play any role in bringing about a workable solution?
We also need to give Muslim students more confidence that history is a subject that involves them. At present, white British students are twice as likely to pick history at A-level as students of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage.
The trouble is that history text books which cover the conflict tend to take refuge in the middle ground between the two narrative extremes and have produced a watered-down account. This neither does justice to the truth nor captures the fervour, rigidity and exclusivity of each side’s historical claims.
This summer, I went to Israel and Palestine on a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship to talk to Jewish and Palestinian academics and teachers about how they teach their respective histories. My aim was to try and find a better way of teaching about the conflict in the UK – to develop a curriculum that takes account of the competing narratives and enables students to look behind the propaganda.
For Dr Hillel Cohen, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the crucial year when these two conflicting narratives began was 1929, 12 years after the Balfour declaration promised the Jews they would have a homeland in Palestine. Until 1929, the established majority Arab community and the growing Jewish minority had lived in relative harmony. But for reasons that are hotly contested, violence erupted in several cities and in the process of mutual blame and recrimination, each side began to develop its own history – two separate narratives which, argues Cohen, have moved further apart over time.
Thus, 1948 was for the Jews a glorious year in which they fought a national war for independence. For the Arabs, it was the year of the Nakba [disaster] that led to the loss of their homes and lands.
Similarly, 1967 is noted in history for the Jews as the year they faced down the combined attacks of four Arab countries and liberated the rest of the Land of Israel. For the Arabs, 1967 marks the beginning of a hostile military occupation that has lasted for nearly half a century.
Fast forward to 1995 and the Oslo accords. Modern Jewish history teaches that this led to the creation of an independent Palestinian government in the West Bank with full responsibility for health, education and policing. The way the Arabs see it couldn’t be more different. They say that the same accords have led to a form of apartheid, that they have been left with only limited control within just 18% of the West Bank while there has been unlimited Jewish settlement in the other 82%.
Six weeks into my trip, after hours of interviews and discussions, it was clear that I could pick any date, any event, any archeological artefact and it would produce a different interpretation, depending on who I was talking to.
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A Palestinian boy and Jewish settlers face each other at a disputed home in east Jerusalem. Teaching about the competing narratives in the region is fraught with difficulty. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty
And then I made an exciting discovery – I found a book. It was a single history book, published in 2012 by a group of Israeli and Palestinian academics and teachers who had set out, with a grant from the US state department and under the auspices of Prime (Peace Research in the Middle East) to write a combined history of the Jews and Arabs in the hope of, once and for all, reconciling these two competing stories.
What happened to the book is as interesting and significant as the impulse behind it. The authors soon realised it couldn’t be done in the way they’d hoped. As Prof Eyal Naveh of Tel Aviv University, one of the Israeli project leaders, says: “This might be possible in a post-conflict situation, but it was not possible in an ‘in conflict’ situation.”
So, the authors decided to try the next best thing: to write their own separate narratives and place them side by side, in Hebrew and in Arabic, on the opposite pages of a single book.
It didn’t work out. In Israel, says Naveh, they began pilots using it in extra-curricular classes, but within three weeks parents had complained and the book was withdrawn. In Palestine, 1,000 copies are still sitting in an apartment, deemed too inflammatory to distribute and despite numerous requests, I have been unable to get any comment from Prof Sami Adwan, the Palestinian co-author, on this issue.
It is in so many ways a depressing story, that such a brave collaborative project should come to nothing. But my hope is that some good can come of it. By using the same side-by-side approach, my aim is to develop a new curriculum in the UK for teaching this seemingly intractable conflict.
By giving students extracts from the book in its English translation, supplemented by access to a wide range of web-based source evidence, news reels, oral histories, music, even recipes, we can challenge them to immerse themselves in the two cultures and two stories and look behind the propaganda to work out the most truthful narrative.
As Cohen says: “There are really two kinds of people: those who understand that history is constructed, and those who don’t.” It’s an approach, furthermore, that would offer Muslim students a sense that their voice is being listened to, that their stories are being heard and studied. It’s an approach which, I hope, could mean they will no longer be underrepresented in history A-level classes. Free and open discussion is the best way to build community cohesion.
I have found school trips to places such as Belfast and Jerusalem to talk face-to-face with opposing parties are a powerful teaching tool, but not many school governing bodies are as adventurous as mine. So, my plan is to create an immersive web-based experience for students. I want to build in a control so that if, for example, you listen to an oral testimony from a Nakba refugee, you won’t be able to continue until you’ve also listened to a Holocaust refugee.
This is early days. I’m in the process of looking for a sponsor for this effort. I really hope it works. Our voters and future leaders need to understand there are always competing narratives, and be able to pick apart the propaganda and the facts.
• Michael Davies is a teacher at Lancaster Royal grammar school. Side by Side is published by New Press NY and is available in the UK through Turnaround
The Jewish story, the Arab story … and a plan by Mr Davies | Education | The Guardian
Michael Davies, pictured in Nablus, is seeking sponsorship to build an immersive website. ‘We also need to give Muslim students more confidence that history is a subject that involves them’
Last year, I took a group of my history students to Israel and the West Bank. It was a terrific success. We spent three days in Israel visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, meeting a documentary maker and a senior civil servant in prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office, before crossing to the West Bank, where we walked through the disputed areas of Hebron, visited Bethlehem and played football with the boys in a Nablus refugee camp.
Shortly after our return home, a few of the students decided to attend an event at our local university as part of an “Israeli apartheid week”. Here they ran into the parent of a Jewish student who was upset to find them there. She argued that it was wrong to call Israel an apartheid state and unfair to single it out for criticism. They told her that their previously positive view of Israel had been changed by seeing the occupation in action.
It is not surprising that teachers tend to shy away from the subject of the history of conflict in Israel and Palestine. There is a fear of being accused of coming down on one side or the other, or being caught in the firing line of conflicting claims and opinions.
For several years now, I’ve been teaching this subject at a northern state school. It’s a difficult thing to do because it arouses strong emotions among students and their parents. And the history of the conflict itself is fiercely contested. Put simply, the Jewish people tell it one way and the Arab people tell it another. And yet teaching this is essential. If this generation of students doesn’t grasp how the conflict came about and why it is so difficult to resolve, how can we in the West ever hope to play any role in bringing about a workable solution?
We also need to give Muslim students more confidence that history is a subject that involves them. At present, white British students are twice as likely to pick history at A-level as students of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage.
The trouble is that history text books which cover the conflict tend to take refuge in the middle ground between the two narrative extremes and have produced a watered-down account. This neither does justice to the truth nor captures the fervour, rigidity and exclusivity of each side’s historical claims.
This summer, I went to Israel and Palestine on a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship to talk to Jewish and Palestinian academics and teachers about how they teach their respective histories. My aim was to try and find a better way of teaching about the conflict in the UK – to develop a curriculum that takes account of the competing narratives and enables students to look behind the propaganda.
For Dr Hillel Cohen, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the crucial year when these two conflicting narratives began was 1929, 12 years after the Balfour declaration promised the Jews they would have a homeland in Palestine. Until 1929, the established majority Arab community and the growing Jewish minority had lived in relative harmony. But for reasons that are hotly contested, violence erupted in several cities and in the process of mutual blame and recrimination, each side began to develop its own history – two separate narratives which, argues Cohen, have moved further apart over time.
Thus, 1948 was for the Jews a glorious year in which they fought a national war for independence. For the Arabs, it was the year of the Nakba [disaster] that led to the loss of their homes and lands.
Similarly, 1967 is noted in history for the Jews as the year they faced down the combined attacks of four Arab countries and liberated the rest of the Land of Israel. For the Arabs, 1967 marks the beginning of a hostile military occupation that has lasted for nearly half a century.
Fast forward to 1995 and the Oslo accords. Modern Jewish history teaches that this led to the creation of an independent Palestinian government in the West Bank with full responsibility for health, education and policing. The way the Arabs see it couldn’t be more different. They say that the same accords have led to a form of apartheid, that they have been left with only limited control within just 18% of the West Bank while there has been unlimited Jewish settlement in the other 82%.
Six weeks into my trip, after hours of interviews and discussions, it was clear that I could pick any date, any event, any archeological artefact and it would produce a different interpretation, depending on who I was talking to.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A Palestinian boy and Jewish settlers face each other at a disputed home in east Jerusalem. Teaching about the competing narratives in the region is fraught with difficulty. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty
And then I made an exciting discovery – I found a book. It was a single history book, published in 2012 by a group of Israeli and Palestinian academics and teachers who had set out, with a grant from the US state department and under the auspices of Prime (Peace Research in the Middle East) to write a combined history of the Jews and Arabs in the hope of, once and for all, reconciling these two competing stories.
What happened to the book is as interesting and significant as the impulse behind it. The authors soon realised it couldn’t be done in the way they’d hoped. As Prof Eyal Naveh of Tel Aviv University, one of the Israeli project leaders, says: “This might be possible in a post-conflict situation, but it was not possible in an ‘in conflict’ situation.”
So, the authors decided to try the next best thing: to write their own separate narratives and place them side by side, in Hebrew and in Arabic, on the opposite pages of a single book.
It didn’t work out. In Israel, says Naveh, they began pilots using it in extra-curricular classes, but within three weeks parents had complained and the book was withdrawn. In Palestine, 1,000 copies are still sitting in an apartment, deemed too inflammatory to distribute and despite numerous requests, I have been unable to get any comment from Prof Sami Adwan, the Palestinian co-author, on this issue.
It is in so many ways a depressing story, that such a brave collaborative project should come to nothing. But my hope is that some good can come of it. By using the same side-by-side approach, my aim is to develop a new curriculum in the UK for teaching this seemingly intractable conflict.
By giving students extracts from the book in its English translation, supplemented by access to a wide range of web-based source evidence, news reels, oral histories, music, even recipes, we can challenge them to immerse themselves in the two cultures and two stories and look behind the propaganda to work out the most truthful narrative.
As Cohen says: “There are really two kinds of people: those who understand that history is constructed, and those who don’t.” It’s an approach, furthermore, that would offer Muslim students a sense that their voice is being listened to, that their stories are being heard and studied. It’s an approach which, I hope, could mean they will no longer be underrepresented in history A-level classes. Free and open discussion is the best way to build community cohesion.
I have found school trips to places such as Belfast and Jerusalem to talk face-to-face with opposing parties are a powerful teaching tool, but not many school governing bodies are as adventurous as mine. So, my plan is to create an immersive web-based experience for students. I want to build in a control so that if, for example, you listen to an oral testimony from a Nakba refugee, you won’t be able to continue until you’ve also listened to a Holocaust refugee.
This is early days. I’m in the process of looking for a sponsor for this effort. I really hope it works. Our voters and future leaders need to understand there are always competing narratives, and be able to pick apart the propaganda and the facts.
• Michael Davies is a teacher at Lancaster Royal grammar school. Side by Side is published by New Press NY and is available in the UK through Turnaround
The Jewish story, the Arab story … and a plan by Mr Davies | Education | The Guardian
