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Abstract: The conflict between Israel and Palestine has important roots in the events which took place before the end of the Mandate period. These events fostered nationalism within both the Palestinian and Jewish communities. However, while the effect of Jewish education on nationalism has become an important area of scholarship, too little attention has been paid to Palestinian education during the same period. Lack of material is a major problem for scholars, however this paper is able to delve into the issue though the use of first-hand accounts and education data collected during the period in question. This paper argues that the education Arab school children received in Palestine during the Mandate was an important part of the formation of an imagined Palestinian community. Schools for Arabs proliferated during the Mandate period, tended to include only Arab students, and taught in Arabic beginning in this period. These factors contributed to the gulf between the Jewish and Arab communities and created a climate conducive to conflict between two groups which had very little contact during their formative years.

Learning PatriotismArab Education, Unity, and Political Efficacy in Mandate Palestine

The years of the British Mandate were an important period of growth for the Palestinian

community and the changes the polity underwent during this time were important formative

experiences for people of Palestine. Many factors were at work during this period; however,

education played a defining role in forming a unified Palestinian identity and increasing

Palestinian political efficacy. While pan-Arab nationalism became popular during the Ottoman

period, education played a major role in focusing nationalism in Palestine on the Palestinian state

rather than the Arab nation. Greater access to learning and education, brought on by new British

policies, helped to unite the separate groups within the Arab community into a single, distinctly

Palestinian polity with a growing sense of nationalism. The community’s unity and national

sentiments were later strengthened and tempered the Palestinians’ experiences during the 1948

war and in the refugee camps. While the trials of the war and the camps were important aspects

of unity and nationalism, education was a major factor in starting the process.

The late Ottoman and Mandate periods were important times of social and political

change for Palestine. The events that occurred during these years changed the face of the Middle

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East and the futures of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples irrevocably. Although the Ottoman

Empire was once one of the major power centers of the world and had acted as a leading power

in the region for many years, by the mid to late 19th century, its influence had waned and it had

become the “Sick Man of Europe”. Major Western powers, taking advantage of the Empire’s

weakened position, began to consolidate their positions within the Middle East, primarily

through the medium of capitulations. These capitulations, which were basically agreements with

the Sultanate, allowed Westerners special privileges, such as exemptions from Ottoman taxes

and laws, and gave the West a foothold in the Empire.

World War I was an extremely important period for the Middle East, primarily because

the great Western powers exerted such control over the region after the fall of the Ottoman

Empire. During the war, the European powers crafted a multitude of secret agreements and

treaties, such as the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, which

arranged the parceling out of the Middle East after the war. Unfortunately “decisions were…

made primarily with a view toward the European, rather than toward local actors and interests”1

and the secret agreements the powers made, more often than not, contradicted each other.

The most important document pertaining to the Middle East written during the Great

War, however, was the 1917 Balfour declaration. This short letter, sent from British Foreign

Secretary Balfour to Baron Rothschild, declared Great Britain’s support for national Jewish

home in Palestine. The document, which many scholars agree was purposefully written to be

ambiguous, did not specify whether this “national home” was to be an independent state or a

homeland and it did not give any indication as to how much of Palestine was to be dedicated to

this national home. Even Chaim Weizmann, future President of Israel, was perturbed by the, as

1Krämer, Gudrun, A History of Palestine (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008), 141.

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Norman Rose puts it, “misty phraseology of the Declaration”2. The declaration, once discovered

by the Arabs, was not well received and most of the Arab leadership rejected it outright. The

document does not even refer to the Palestinians as a people; rather they are described as the

“non-Jewish communities”. The Balfour declaration continued to influence British policy until

1948 when Britain left Palestine and the state of Israel was founded.

After the war ended, the Middle East was divvied up among the victorious European

power and in 1922 Great Britain, which had already set up a civil administration in the Holy

Land, was granted the Mandate for Palestine. The Arab and Jewish communities, which had

generally existed peacefully together for years, were already experiencing strained relations by

the time the British took over. The Jewish community, which had always had a small presence

in Palestine, had been growing rapidly, primarily “through immigration [and] the share of Jews

doubled between 1872 and 1880 from around 13,900 to 26,000”3; by the end of the war the

number increased to approximately 65,300 and this number would more than double by the end

of the 1920s.The rapid increase in the Jewish population was an important aspect of the tension

between the two communities.

A great deal of the tension growing between the two communities originated in the rural

areas, however, as more and more peasants moved into the cities, hostility and violence began to

break out in urban areas as well. Many new immigrants, especially those who were part of the

second and third aliyas, were settlers eager to start a new life in their ancestor’s ancient

homeland. They wanted to distinguish themselves from the “anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jews

as parasites living off their “host societies”’4 and create an image of a new, strong Jew. To this

2 Rose, Norman, A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine 1890s-1948, (London, Pimlico, 2010), 16.

3 Krämer, Gudrun, A History of Palestine (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008), 137.

4 Ibid, 111.

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end, many new settlers bought land and created socialist communities which emphasized

agriculture and physical labor in order to move away from the older conceptions about the

merchant Jew. The immigrants emphasized that, rather than hiring work out, the land was to be

worked solely by Jewish labor. Despite the fact that the new Jewish residents had legally bought

the land, many Arabs, especially Arab peasants, believed that the land the settlers had purchased

had been stolen out from under them. Due to the Ottoman land reforms of 1856 and 1858, a

great number of Arab farmers, whose families had lived in the same place for centuries, were

tenement farmers who worked the land for absentee land owners. These farmers considered the

land they worked to rightfully belong to them, however, the legal owners of the land, many of

whom resided in distant cities such as Beirut, thought nothing of selling the land to eager Jewish

immigrants. These settlers, in turn, believed that, as they had paid for the land, it belonged to

them and that they had the right to do with it as wished. As a result a number of Arab peasants

were evicted from their homes. Most of these newly landless peasants were forced to migrate to

the cities where unrest grew.

The period between the 1920 and 1948 was characterized by increasing violence and

hostility between the Arabs and the Jews. During this time, there were several riots which ended

with many deaths, including the 1920 Nabi Musa riots in Jerusalem and the 1921 Jaffa riots. The

British tried to rectify the situation and formed several commissions charged with finding

stability for the struggling country; however none of these commissions were met with success.

During this period the Jewish community continued to grow through immigration. At the same

time, the yishuv was setting up governing institutions which eventually created a state within a

state. This state in waiting eventually became Israel after the 1948 war. While the Jewish

community was getting stronger and stronger, the Arab one was becoming weaker and more

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fractured. The Arab leadership, considered by many scholars, such as Rashid Khalidi, to be

ineffectual and a primary cause of Arab society’s weakness relative to the yishuv, was beset by

internecine fighting and wrapped up in bureaucracy as they attempted to negotiate with the

British. This period was crowned by the Arab Revolt (1936-1939) was primarily led by the

illiterate Arab-peasants and eventually put down harshly by the British. The Revolt probably hurt

the Arab community and weakened their ability to fight in 1948. During the revolt Jewish forces

worked together with the British and were able to get weapons while the Arabs lost both men

and weapons. The Arab community took years to recover from the harsh tactics used to quell the

revolt.

In 1948 the British gave up their mandate in Palestine and withdrew from the country.

After their withdrawal war broke out almost immediately. Although the hegemonic

interpretation of events has traditionally viewed Israel as David and the Arab juggernaut as

Goliath, recent scholarship, especially that by Israeli “new historians”, argues that Israel was

actually much better prepared for the war and that it even had more men than the Arab states

overall. The Arab states, they argue, were only looking out for themselves, even worked against

each other at some points and were not particularly interested in the Palestinians. There were

atrocities on both sides during the war, but eventually Israel came out victorious and a large

percentage of the Palestinian population had fled the country. Eventually these people ended up

in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan where they were subjected to harsh conditions.

In this paper I will investigate the role education played in the Palestinian national

consciousness during the mandate period through the use of data gathered by education scholars

and primary sources such as the memoirs of Palestinians who grew up during the mandate. I will

first track the growth of education, starting in the Ottoman era, in order to examine the

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development of education in conjunction with Palestinian identity and nationalism. I then move

on to argue that education played an important role in the early years of Palestinian nationalism

and unity. Although I recognize that the 1948 war and the hardships refugees faced in the camps

were defining experiences for the Palestinian community, I believe that the education young

Palestinians received under the British Mandate was an important step in the identity formation

process. The lessons learned in the classroom as well as the improved communication speed

brought on by increased literacy as a result of education are aspects of the identity formation

process that cannot be ignored.

In order to capture daily life under the mandate system, I used diaries and memoirs which

allowed me to explore the effects education had on regular people. Finding the translated

memoirs of people who had grown up under the British Mandate presented itself as a problem

since, unfortunately, there are precious few English language sources which deal with daily life

under the mandate and many the and diaries of many teachers and students are only available in

Arabic. However, I found two excellent sources in which the authors detail their time in school.

These memories are especially useful in conjunction with each other since the authors are so

different from each other and represent different parts of Palestinian society. I use the memoirs

of noted literary scholar and novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra extensively. Jabra, who hailed from a

poor family, was a Christian who grew up in both Bethlehem and Jerusalem and who eventually

traveled to Lebanon and England to pursue his higher education. A Mountainous Journey,

written by nationalist poet Fadwa Tuqan, also an Arab-Christian, but unlike Jabra from a notable

and wealthy family, was also very useful. She was educated in the school system up until the age

of 13, after which her family forced her to discontinue her formal education. Her brother,

Ibrahim Tuqan who was also a nationalist poet, became her tutor and had a huge influence on

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both her and her poetry. Later, after the death of her parents, Tuqan studied at both the American

University in Beirut and Oxford. Her memoir contains a great deal of useful information on both

her life and that of her brother’s. I use these primary sources extensively in order to demonstrate

the importance of school and learning to young Palestinians during this time period. These

authors dealt with a wide range of topics, as well as their school education, however, and the

manner in which they saw the changing world they were living in sheds light on the effect

education had on their lives even if education was not directly mentioned.

Education “has always been recognized as an important instrument of social and political

development,”5, however, it, unfortunately, is often forgotten by scholars examining Palestinian

history during the Mandate despite the integral role it played in Palestinian unity and

nationalism. Typical of this problem is Rosemary Sayigh’s classic book, The Palestinians: From

Peasants to Revolutionaries, in which she argues that education only played an important role in

unity and nationalism after the Diaspora and, in fact, played a divisive role during the mandate

period. However, the years spanning 1917 to 1948 were a pivotal period of social upheaval as

Palestinian society underwent a knowledge revolution and was transformed from a society which

largely relied on oral modes of communication to one with a “massive reliance on the written

word”6. The defining characteristics of this revolution played themselves out in the classroom,

which was not only a vehicle promoting literacy, but a place where children developed feelings

of unity, attachment to the Arab state, and nationalistic feelings for their homeland, forming what

Benedict Anderson would term an imagined community . The people within the imagined

community, or nation, see themselves as connected to one another even if they are separated by

5 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 18.

6 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 1.

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great distances, have never met, and have very few similarities besides their membership in the

national community. This is an important idea because the nation is more than a state; it is a

group of people who feel connected to each other by more than their residence within the same

borders. The imagined community, which was developing in Palestine, was positively influenced

by the school education which allowed Arab children to see their connections to other Arabs

beyond their local attachments. The imagined community formed in the classroom was integral

to the unification process which brought together the Arabs of Palestine.

The history of education in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine is important to understanding

the effects learning had on the Arab population. The system the Ottomans began to develop in

the 1860s and which the British continued to modify and improve upon after they received the

mandate for Palestine, shows an interesting correlation between rising discontent within the Arab

polity and the education Arab school children received under the mandate. Therefore it is

important to include a short summary of the education system in Palestine and how it developed

under the country’s various suzerains.

The British colonial government was an integral part of the development of the

Palestinian education system; however, the British did not completely rebuild the education in

Palestine, but rather relied on existing Ottoman structures. The resulting system was somewhat

of a hybrid which combined the old Turkish arrangement, itself based on the French education

scheme, and British practices7. The system the British found was largely based on the education

reform begun by the Ottomans in 1869 as a part the Ottoman Empire’s attempts to modernize

during the Tanizmat Period8. The school in the Turkish education system was meant to teach

7 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration, (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 19.

8 Ibid, 19

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Ottoman children westernized values and give them a modern education which would allow the

Turkish state to compete against its enemies in Europe. This system included all levels of

schooling from lower elementary to university, but elementary education was the only level that

was widely available since it was “gratuitous and theoretically compulsory”9 . However,

elementary schools were actually very exclusive in nature, despite the fact that they were meant

to be universal. Tibawi notes, that “although theoretically open to all Ottoman subjects… state

schools were in practice almost exclusively for Muslim children”10 and even further, most of the

students who attended these schools were members of the elite strata, primarily because the

language of instruction was Turkish (although Arabic was normally used in the lower elementary

schools). Therefore, most schools were effectively open “to Turkish speaking students only,

sons of notables or civil servants, to the practical exclusion of the children of the mass of the

population”11. Later, public schools were opened which were meant to provide a "minimum

elementary education for the masses”12, however Ayalon notes that “the [Ottoman] state’s

education endeavor… left nearly 90% of all Arab children out of the circle of school-goers”13.

Higher education in the Empire was even more scarce and exclusive than was elementary

education. In 1914, there were only three secondary schools in Palestine which were located in

major urban centers, effectively cutting off higher education for most rural children14. In fact, the

secondary school in Jerusalem, which used Arabic in addition to Turkish as the language of

9 Ibid , 20

10 Ibid, 19

11 Ibid, 133

12 Ibid, 133.

13 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 21.

14 Tabawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 20.

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instruction, was built “partly as a concession to Arab national feeling”15 and was most likely a

placating measure since Arab nationalism was very strong during the waning years of the

Empire. Palestine did not even have a university during the Ottoman period and those who

wanted to continue their education had to travel outside of Palestine.

Islamic religious schools filled the gap left in government education for poor Muslim

children. The kuttab school and its secondary institution, the madrasa, were, previous to the

Ottoman educational reforms, essentially the only institutions available to many Turkish

citizens16 and even for a long time after the reforms were implemented, as shown above,

remained the only schools available to the general Muslim population. While, in 1914, the

Ottoman state system accounted for 8,248 children, the kuttab system educated even more,

teaching 8,705 students17. These religious schools were notoriously poor and many times failed

to impart the basic skills such as writing, reading and arithmetic to their pupils. Qur’anic

memorization was the primary goal in the school; however, literacy was divorced from these

lessons as many of the students memorized without understanding the material. The low level of

education students received from these schools was almost to be expected since many of the

teachers could not read themselves and some of them had only memorized portions of the

Qur’an18. Palestinian parents knew that these schools were poor; this is reflected in some of the

popular sayings of the time such as “stupider than a kuttab teacher” and “stupidity is with

weavers, teachers, and yard spinners”19. Although some students were able to achieve literacy

15 Ibid, 20.

16 Ibid, 131

17 Ibid 20.

18 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 30.

19 Ibid, 28.

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later using what they had learned at the kuttab or madrasa, most students left school either

illiterate or with a low level of literacy which was easily lost without practice. This system did

not substantially change under the mandate. Although the Department of Education was

reforming the school system, only those schools that were absorbed by the government system

were reformed; some schools were left as they were. These schools provided an importance

service since they were able to service the more rural areas and those students who could not get

into a government school; however they also continued to leave their students illiterate or barely

literate.

Christian and Jewish students in the late Ottoman period were primarily enrolled in

foreign schools operating in Palestine under the capitulation system. The Ottoman state had

been content to leave the education of the minority religious communities to the communities

themselves since non-Muslim communities were traditionally allowed to self-govern their

internal affairs. German, French, and English missionary schools, which taught in the language

of their home countries, were the primary sources of foreign education for Christians and some

Jews, with some Muslims also attending these schools. Private schools, which taught in Hebrew,

were also opened by new Jewish settlers in Palestine. The Ottoman government did not interfere

in these schools and they were left to their own devices until WWI when many of them closed.

After the Great War many of these schools reopened with the exception of some schools whose

home countries were on the losing side of the conflict. These schools, on the whole, tended to be

better than most of the Ottoman government schools.

After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, a British civil administration for

Palestine was put into place in 1920 and the League of Nations granted Britain the mandate for

Palestine in 1922. The Government Department of Education was created almost immediately

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under the control of Director of Education Humphrey Bowman who began to formulate policy to

improve the system. The British used the formula which had been effective in many of their

other colonial holdings; rather that scrapping the existing system and starting anew, the English

superimposed their changes onto the existing Ottoman structure. These changes only affected

the former Ottoman state schools, the new schools established by the mandate and the kuttab

schools which were absorbed by the state system. The remaining kuttab schools and the foreign

schools remained private institutions and therefore were unaffected by the British run

Department of Education. The most important changes the mandate government implemented

were adoption of Arabic as the language of instruction and greater admission of Christian Arabs

to the state school system. These changes precipitated the divide between the Arab and Jewish

public school systems and were important to the development of two separate national

communities. The schools controlled by the Mandate government were taught in Arabic and

catered to Arabic children, both Muslim and Christian, while the Jewish system was controlled

by the Zionist organization and taught predominantly in Hebrew. Tibawi notes that “the future

division of public schools on racial and linguistic, or simply national groups into an Arab Public

system and a Hebrew Public System had its roots in these formative years [of the early

mandate]”20.

Throughout the period Great Britain controlled Palestine, Arab education continued to

improve and the number of people able to access public education drastically increased. For

example, in the last years of the Ottoman Empire during the 1914-1915 school year, there were a

total of 8,248 students out of a school age population of 71,933 which is approximately 11

percent. However, during the 1943-44 school year, the percentage of children in school had

20 Ibid, 28.

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increased to approximately 21 percent (64,790 students out of 300,000)21. Although this increase

may not look impressive, it was actually astounding since the definition of the school age

population is not consistent. While 1914-15 statistic defines school age population as between

seven years and eleven years*, a total of four years, the 1943-44 statistic increases the number of

children included in the school age population since it covers nine years (between the ages of

five and fourteen)22. The improvements the British implemented were aimed at eliminating

functional illiteracy, which was the primary goal of the mandatory ruler’s education system23.

To this end, the Education Department worked to increase the number of teachers trained and

provide elementary education to all school age children. The elementary education, which

consisted of four years of school in the rural areas and five years in urban areas, was thought to

be enough to provide students with a basic level of education and permanent literacy*. This

would fulfill the terms of the mandate which stipulated that the government had to work to

improve the native people of Palestine in order that they might achieve independence in the

future.

One of the biggest problems with the education system under the Mandate was that it was

not able to provide education to all of the Arab children within Palestine or even all of those

children who desired education since“… government and non-government schools together,

could most of the time satisfy no more than half the demand for places [of learning]”24.

Palestinian parents were actually very interested in their children’s education and even peasants

21 Ibid, 270.

*The ages at which school was theoretically compulsory under Ottoman Law

22 Ibid, 270.

23 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900-1948, (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 23.

24 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 57.

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in small villages worked to get their children a school, as Ami Ayalon notes,” the post-Ottoman

Palestinian community demanded education and was prepared to shoulder some of the cost”25.

One village, as Ayalon quotes, wrote to the government stating that “[they had] put together 150

pounds out of [their] meager resources… [so that their] children [did] not have to remain in dark

ignorance in the epoch of light, when the entire world from end to end is striving to eliminate

illiteracy”26. However, the Mandate government was still not able to meet the demand for

schooling so “many parents, therefore, who were able to pay the small fee, found no alternative

but to send their children to kuttabs if there were any in their quarter or village”27. Rashid

Khalidi also notes that in 1931, when the last complete census was taken before the end of the

mandate “only about 22 percent of Palestinian Arabs were literate, as against 86 percent of the

country’s Jewish population”28.

In her book The Palestinians: from Peasants to Revolutionaries, Rosemary Sayigh

argues that the Palestinian national consciousness grew in the face of oppression and the

hardships the community endured. She emphasizes the importance of the camp experience in

unifying the Palestinian people since “painful as it was, the refugee phase of the Palestinian

struggle was full of political lessons that perhaps could not have been learnt any other way”29 .

Sayigh also identifies British oppression played a role in uniting the community in the face of a

common enemy. Sayigh actually does recognizes that education plays an important role in

25 Ibid, 23-5.

26 Ibid, 25.

27 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company Ltd, 1956), 57.

28 Khalidi, Rashid, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston, Beacon Press, 2007), 14.

29 Sayigh, Rosemary, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London, Zed Books, 2007), 147.

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Palestinian society, however, she does not see it as an important factor in the growth of political

efficacy during the mandate period, rather, for her, it became a unifying force only after the

Diaspora. She explains that Palestinian peasants recognized the importance of education since

they believed that it was the key to improving their lives and that “their oppression as a class

were tied to their exclusion from knowledge”30. This emphasis on education, she argues, would

later create a connection between the land of Palestine and the Palestinians in exile since the

hunger for knowledge created continuity between Palestine and the Diaspora31. However, she

argues that, during the mandate period, “the majority of the educated classes [were] non-militant

and ‘moderate’ in their stance towards the British” and that their moderation “deprived [the

resistance] of organizational and ideological development”32. For Sayigh, education was more of

a divisive factor before the 1948 as she sees it as a wall between the classes, while after the

dispersion Palestinians were united through their common desire for knowledge.

Roderic Matthews and M. Akrawi, who studied and collected data on education in the

Middle East for the American Council on Education during the late 40s, note that “Education

makes the person, and persons make the nation”33; Palestine was no exception and education

played a defining role in forming and growing Palestinian nationalism. The classroom was a

bastion of nationalist activity in mandate Palestine despite the Mandate government’s control

over the system. Education played an important role in increasing fostering the Palestinian sense

30 Ibid, 33.

31 Ibid, 34.

32 Ibid, 61.

33 Roderic, Matthews and Akrawi M., Education in Arab Countries of the Near East: Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon (Washington, American Council on Education, 1949), v.

*Permanent Literacy denotes a literacy which is retained even after long periods of disuse

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of nationhood though the increased literacy and communication as well as increasing a sense of

unity between Muslim and Christian school children.

The education system formed under Ottoman suzerainty was important first step,

however, the British changes to the system were integral in uniting the Palestinian people. As

discussed above, the British expanded the education system to include a greater percentage of

school age children and “it is one of the remarkable aspects of the British administration of

education in Palestine that Muslim and Christian pupils, hitherto educated as a rule in separate

schools, were for the first time in modern history educated together under a national system”34

which used Arabic, as opposed to Turkish, as the language of instruction. This was an important

change since Arabic has an important and exalted place in Arab cultural heritage and because the

use of the vernacular as the language of instruction allowed students from the poorer segments of

society, who did not speak Turkish, to enter the government education system.

The Arabic language plays an important role in Arab culture and history and its use in the

classroom recalls the language’s storied history and importance to the Arab nation. The language

unites the people of the Arab world and defines that world’s very boundaries. Although the

people of Palestine were developing a Palestinian nationalism separate from the Arab

nationalism that had been especially popular during the Ottoman period, the use of Arabic would

have emphasize Arab culture as a whole. Arabic’s literary heritage is also unique as well as

extensive and the Arab people regard the spoken and written word as a high art. Arabic poetry

has always played an important role in Arab society and has been a major part of daily life for

centuries. Fadwa Tuqan, one of the most famous poets of the modern Arab world, notes in her

memoirs that “there was always a strong tie between the Palestinian poet and the movement of

34 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London, Luzac & Company Ltd, 1956), 73.

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the struggle. The Palestinian poet was the direct product of the current struggle in Palestinian and

at the same time an effective force influencing that struggle”35. Arabic poetry and literature was

not just a pastime of the wealthy, rather it was a motivating force for the entirety of the

Palestinian people. The use of Arabic in Islam is also an important aspect of the language. The

Qur’an is only the true Qur’an when it is in Arabic, and even those Muslims who do not speak

Arabic, are required to pray and recite the Qur’an in the language. The switch from Turkish

would have emphasized break from the Ottoman state as well as the importance of Arab culture

and history.

The British decision to use Arabic as the language of instruction within the Mandate run

state school system created a sense of unity within the polity and strengthened Palestinian

nationalism immeasurably. Just as Hebrew was the nationalist language of the Jews, Arabic was

the nationalist language within the Arab community. During the Ottoman period, most schools

taught in Turkish, except the very lowest elementary schools; this left education open to the elite

strata, since the poorer members of society could only speak Arabic. Once the British took over,

they switched the language of instruction over to Arabic, which allowed a greater number of

children from poorer families to enter school. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who came from one such

poor family and who attended a state school, recalls that his classes included students from all

walks of life, writing that there were those who “wore shoes and socks; some wore shoes without

socks; and others were barefoot and had dusty feet and soiled legs. [And] there were those who

wore fezzes, caps, head kerchiefs with black rope, or casquettes”36. His description of his

classmates demonstrates the economic diversity within his class. Jabra’s account validates

35 Tuqan, Fadwa, A Mountainous Journey, (London, The Women’s Press, 1990), 92.

36 Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood, (Fayetteville, The University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 107.

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Tibawi when he says that “during the last years of the mandate, pupils in the Government school

system represented fairly accurately the social structure of Arab society”37. No longer was

education available only to the sons of elite, Muslim families as was largely the case under

Ottoman rule, rather, there were children from all levels of Palestinian society and both

Christianity and Islam enrolled in the government schools. The use of Arabic as the language of

instruction was an important aspect of this change since it aided nationalist goals by making

education more widely available to everyone, from the poorest family to the richest one.

The use of Arabic was an important aspect of the nationalism which arose in the schools.

Although Muslims and Christians sometimes clashed, they were generally united as Arabs

against what they perceived as an imperialist Zionist threat. The school curriculum was designed

to ensure that these two religious groupings viewed themselves more as Arabs than they did in

terms of their religious communities since “Every effort was made by Arab national leaders to

brush aside religious prejudices and to consolidate the national solidarity of the young generation

in the schools”38 and Ayalon is quick to point out that under the mandate, “only a sixth of class

time was allocated to the study of religion”39.

As the relationship between Arab Muslim and Christians became closer, the divide

between the Arabs and the growing Jewish community only widened. There were almost no

Jewish children in state schools and many Jewish children went to schools run by the Zionist

organization and taught in Hebrew. These factors ensured that the children from the two

communities had almost no contact with each other and knew next to nothing about the people

with whom they shared Palestine. Noted literary scholar, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra recounts in his 37 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 70.

38 Ibid, 72.

39 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy1900-1948, (Austin, University of Texas, 2004), 34.

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autobiography his impressions of the Jewish community as a child living in Bethlehem. He

remembers that he was afraid of the Orthodox Jews living in his town and that his mother

“continually warned [him] against those Jews, saying they kidnapped children in Jewish festivals

in order to slay them and mix their blood in the dough of unleavened bread”40. In fact, none of

the memoires examined in this paper, make anything more than a passing reference to the Jewish

community in Palestine. Jabra’s reference to the warnings his mother gave him is certainly the

most personal of any of the other references made about the Jewish community.

The growing linguistic divide between the communities also made communication

between Arabic speaking Muslims and Christians and Hebrew speaking Jews increasingly

difficult. Many of the early Jewish settlers created educational institutions which taught solely in

Hebrew and “by 1910 the first graduates of these schools, who were fluent and natural in

Hebrew, had begun to marry each other [and create] the first generation of children who spoke

nothing but Hebrew in the home”41. Bernard Spolsky and Robert Cooper, who studied the

languages of Jerusalem and the revitalization of Hebrew as a modern language, argue that the

Hebrew became the predominate language within the yishuv through school instruction. Children

learned the language in school and then brought it home to the rest of their family and, later,

many married and raised children in Hebrew speaking households. Although many native-

Hebrew speakers in Mandate Palestine probably were also able to speak Arabic, the fact that two

languages were growing side-by-side within Palestine created barriers between the Arab and

Jewish communities. There was no national newspaper in Palestine; there were Arabic

newspapers, Hebrew newspaper and English newspapers. This trend was realized throughout the

40 Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood, (Fayetteville, The University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 70.

41 Spolsky, Bernard and Cooper Robert, The Languages of Jerusalem, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), 66.

Clark 20

mass communication media and it was probably manifested itself in daily life as well since

linguistic barriers breed other barriers since people cannot or do not communicate with one

another. In fact, Zionists leadership made an effort to promote the use of Hebrew because

Hebrew was thought to be an important part of the nationalist endeavor since it would serve as

“their national language, an all-purpose vernacular that would…mark the distinction from life in

the Diaspora”42.

Assaf Likhovski notes that “education is a project of identity formation… [and] Colonial

rulers sought to use primary, secondary and higher education to transform native students into

willing collaborators.”43The British government, like the Palestinian nationalists, realized that

education was important to control and they did not hesitate in their attempts to dominate the

schools, teachers and curriculum. However, “In general, the teachers – even those with modest

cultural attainments – were so fired by the claims of nationalism that they found no difficulty in

circumventing the restrictions in the classroom”44. The British attempted to exercise their control

by limiting the associations teachers were allowed to join. The Young Men’s Muslim

Association, for example, was a religious group with a national orientation that the British

prohibited government employees from joining. However, the Young Men’s Christian

Association was a group which the government actually looked favorably upon. In fact, teachers

were actively involved in nationalist movement and in resisting the mandate government. During

the 1936 Arab Revolt, “it was an open secret… [that] many teachers, specially (sic) those whose

42 Ibid, 58.

43 Likhovski, Assaf. Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 106.

44 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration, (London, Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 197.

Clark 21

schools were closed, acted as clerks and organizers of supply behind the lines”45. The school

was a recognized ideological battleground between the British and the nationalists, and neither

side was willing to cede ground to the other.

Nationalists in the mandate did not leave education purely in British hands and they

attempted to influence the government schools’ curriculum, teachers and students. Some

nationalists even went so far as to open their own schools which emphasized Arab history and

culture and which were “neither Muslim nor Christian in the usual sense [and whose] general

tone was distinctly national”46. Foreign schools were especially criticized by Arab nationalists

because the nationalists believed that the schools “consciously or unconsciously promoting

respect and allegiance, not to an Arab culture and Arab nationalism, but to a welter of cultures

and national ideologies”47. State schools also did not escape the nationalist’s ire and they were

also criticized for their scanty treatment of Arab-Muslim culture. The nationalists wanted to

change the curriculum to one which was “more balanced… [but] with a definite national bias”48.

However, for the most part, the nationalist endeavor to alter school curriculums through official

channels failed, forcing them to turn to alternative methods.

Once nationalists realized that they were unsuccessful in altering state schools from the

top, they attempted to alter schools from the bottom and the inside by reaching out to teachers

and students49; this tactic was fairly successful in inciting nationalist fervor within the schools.

The teachers were sometimes put into a difficult position since they were employees of the

45 Ibid, 198.

46 Ibid, 65.

47 Ibid, 65.

48 Ibid, 91.

49Ibid, 196.

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mandate government and therefore had to follow its directives or risk dismissal. However, as

Tibawi notes, “the balance between the two loyalties [the government and the nation] was not

always even [and] in times of crisis [the teachers’ loyalty] sharply swung in favor of the national

side”50. Many teachers were actively involved with the nationalist movement, such as Jabra

Ibrahim Jabra’s teacher in Jerusalem, Ibrahim Tuqan who may have been nationalist poet Fadwa

Tuqan’s brother and teacher and an important nationalist poet in his own right*. Jabra

remembers that his teacher “used to transform the Arabic class into an hour of magic with his

poetic sensibility… [and that he] did not abide by the prescribed materials or books”51. Jabra

particularly recalls the Tuqan teaching the class about Ahmad Shawqi’s Majnun Layla (Layla’s

Mad Lover), which was a play based off a classic Arab love story. This emphasis on classic Arab

literature was an important part of encouraging nationalist thinking. Arab nationalists, as noted

earlier, had criticized the school system for what the nationalists considered an incomplete

coverage of Arab history and culture, recognizing that these subjects are important because of

their ability to incite nationalist fervor in students who learn of the glory of their past.

Students were also heavily involved with the nationalist movement and worked in their

own way towards furthering the movement’s goals. “[Students] participated in the strikes that

took place in 1929, 1933, and 1936, and they took part in the movement of civil disobedience

that was called for by the Arab higher Committee as an answer to the British insistence on

opposing Arab national demands, forcing the authorities to close schools all over Palestine for

50 Ibid, 196.

*Although I was not able to positively confirm the identity of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s teacher. Ibrahim Tuqan was in Jerusalem in 1932, which is the year Jabra is describing and had been a teacher at different schools around the Middle East. He was also a graduate of the al-Rashidiyya school which Jabra is describing here.

51 Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood, (Fayetteville, The University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 182

Clark 23

six months”52. The schools were alive with nationalism and “even without national control of

education, nationalism thrived in the schools”53 since, “amidst such turmoil no school system

could be conducted in complete isolation from its environment. The people genuinely wanted

their children to be educated according to their new ideals, and persistently strove to influence

the Department of Education in that direction”54.

The school system played an important role in turning out nationalist thinkers and leaders

during the late Ottoman period and mandate. Students, such as Ibrahim Tuqan, who was

educated during the late Ottoman period, became important thinkers and led a rallying cry which

other Palestinians followed. Tuqan was a nationalist poet, widely known as the “Poet of

Palestine”. His poetry reflected the turmoil in which his country was embroiled. As his sister,

Fadwa, remarks in her memoirs “Nothing is born from a vacuum. What about our nationalistic

poets? Ibrahim grew up in a land whose depths were seething with events, and among a society

in which the seeds of revolt were always present”55. Ibrahim attended the al-Rashadiyya school

in Nablus, a public school as well as St. George’s School in Jerusalem which was a private

Christian school. His education, which he received in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire,

played an extremely important role in his upbringing since he was exposed to new modes of

thinking, especially in the Christian school. Ibrahim, in turn, was able to influence and teach his

sister Fadwa Tuqan who also became a nationalist poet despite her family’s traditional values.

Fadwa rose to become and extremely an extremely important poet under the tutelage of her older

52 Abu-Ghazaleh, Adnan, “Arab Cultural Nationalism in Palestine During the British Mandate” Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring, 1972, Vo1, No 3), 41.

53 Tibawi, A.L., Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (Luzac & Company, Ltd, 1956), 195.

54 Ibid, 195.

55 Tuqan, Fadwa, A Mountainous Journey, (London, Women’s Press, 1990), 71.

Clark 24

brother and her poems have inspired generations of Palestinians. In her memoirs she notes that

“poetry… was an activity which, together with journalism and various other literary genres,

contributed to the awakening of the people’s patriotic and political consciousness in cities and

villages alike. All this led to the outbreak of the 1936 Palestinian rebellion”56. Through her

writings, which were strongly influenced by her education with her brother, she was able to

instill nationalism in her people.

The increasing literacy rates in Palestine were largely due to the increase in education,

however, despite the fact that more people were becoming literate; a large proportion of

Palestinian society remained unable to read or write. Many scholars argue that the illiterate

peasants, who were the primary fighters during the 1936 Rebellion, had no education and

remained unaffected by education. However, education actually had far reaching effects and was

able to touch most members of Palestinian society. Ami Ayalon studied literacy and reading

trends in Palestine in his book Reading Palestine and he notes that “It was in the open public

domain that the largest number of people accessed the contents of written messages”57.

Education, which was generally available only to children, had the greatest impact on the

younger members of society who were taught to read and write and were affected by the

nationalism popular in the schools of the time. However, the effects of education also filtered

through adult society as children brought what they learned in the classroom back into the home.

School children were able to read to their families, and many people learned of the news by

listening to one literate person read a newspaper out loud to a group. Therefore, despite the fact

that many people were illiterate and had no opportunity to get an education, school helped to

spread nationalism among every facet of Palestinian society. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, corroborates

56 Ibid, 92.

57 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948, (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 103.

Clark 25

these claims when recalls one of his neighbors, Musa al-Khuri, in his memoirs. Jabra writes that

“although [Musa] was illiterate, he was fond of political discussion and followed events as

reported by others, especially those who read newspapers,”58 and that “he used to buy a

newspaper every Sunday morning [and] he would give it to any young man… who appeared to

him to be literate and ask him to read the headlines aloud”59. Most people, even those in rural

areas, would have had access to a public place where news could be read or heard by the people

of the village. While Ayalon states that cities would have had a more dynamic flow of

information, he goes on to say that most villages “had one central public institution, the

madafah… [which] served as a gathering spot where news was reported and public issues

deliberated”60. Therefore, even those peasants who participated in the 1936 Arab Revolt would

have been affected by the knowledge revolution sweeping the Arab community in Palestine.

Education during mandate Palestine played an integral role in the unity and nationalism

growing within the Arab polity at the time. Although the British were not able to make education

universally available, what they did provide made it possible for Arabs in Palestine, even the

illiterate peasants, to learn about the turmoil in their country from sources such as newspapers.

Palestinian society today, which is bonded together in an extremely strong imagined community,

would not have been possible without the experiences of war and life in the refugee camps,

however, education played a defining role in the creation and the undeniable strength of that

imagined community and its importance should not be forgotten by scholars of the period.

58 Jabra, Ibrahim Jaba, The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 167.

59 Ibid, 168.

60 Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), 106.

Clark 26

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