Education and the Struggle for Palestinian Liberation: Palestinian Teachers in Lebanon

• In Event: Why Gaza Matters: Toward a Politics of Educational Repair

Abstract

This paper addresses the questions of this symposium by employing a historical lens to examine the central (and contradictory) role that education has played and continues to play in the ongoing anti-colonial struggle for a free Palestine. Specifically, I draw on an oral history project with forty Palestinian teachers in Lebanon, children of the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”) who became teachers in the thawra (the revolutionary period that began in the late 60s), and lived and taught through the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and beyond. This paper argues: 1) that the current assault on the education system in Gaza must be understood within its historical context as part of the ongoing project of Nakba that shares a legal anatomy across different spatial geographies of Palestinian existence (Eghrabariah, 2024); and 2) that the deep knowledge of these Palestinian elders has much to teach us about possibilities for repair and renewal.

This paper addresses three key issues. First, I argue that Palestinian teachers’ resistance work was multifaceted. On the one hand, it entailed explicitly political pedagogies; for example, through unauthorized teaching of Palestinian history and geography. On the other hand, resistance work took the form of the more seemingly mundane tasks of care that teachers do in their everyday work—acts of radical care (Hobart & Kneese, 2020) through which they continually helped weave together a Palestinian community in exile. Second, I explore how teachers theorized and navigated the contradictory role that education plays as a resistance tool. Holding firmly to the belief that “knowledge is the most powerful weapon”, they live with the realities that as stateless Palestinians in Lebanon who have lived for 76 years without citizenship or the rights to work, education offers little to no economic or political benefits to the community. Despite these circumstances, Palestinian teachers argue that education is the key to a future Palestinian state, and that even if educational success primarily leads to out-migration, it is a worthwhile endeavor. Finally, I examine teachers’ critique of the role of UNRWA (as the most visible representative of the international community) plays in thwarting Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. Palestinian teachers’ narratives draw on indigenous knowledge and pedagogies to offer a sharp analysis of the colonial frameworks that shape international educational policy and practice in ways that deny and degrade the realities of Palestinian children’s lives.

This paper draws on theoretical scholarship on settler-colonialism in Palestine (Eghrabariah, 2024; Said, 1979), and an understanding of decolonization in relation to education (Tuck & Wang, 2012), to think historically about the relationship between Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggle and education as it was shaped across time and across the different geographies of the Palestinian Nakba. Centering the narratives of Palestinian teachers who were part of the first expulsion from Palestine, offers a long view through which to understand the social contexts that shape the contemporary landscape of Palestinian struggles for education and self-determination.

Author

• Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Barnard College