"Knowledge In The Strongest Weapon": Palestinian Teachers of the Revolution in Lebanon

• In Event: Education and Palestine: Resisting and Reproducing Imperial/Colonial Epistemologies

Abstract

Ustaaz Ibrahim begins weeping. Aya has asked him about his early years in Palestine. “I was born in 1941. The school wanted you to apply when you were seven.” He was about to be entered into school when the Nakba forced his family into exile. At this recollection, he trails off and starts to cry. He soon composes himself; but all he says about his years in Palestine is, “The memories are hard.’ For the next two hours, Ustaaz Ibrahim narrates a life filled with myriad hardships, but also dedication to the role he would take on as a Palestinian teacher in the early decades of exile in Lebanon. As a child, he walked forty-five minutes, even during the harsh winter weather, to reach school—one that had been hastily constructed to serve the large number of Palestinian refugees. There he excelled, gaining a reputation as a formidable debater. As a young man, already a husband and a father, he tried to secure his family’s economic future by pursuing an accounting degree, but the 1967 war spelled an end to his university education in Egypt. Returning to Lebanon, he entered the vocational school that educated generations of Palestinian teachers who formed the backbone of UNRWA schools. He taught for three decades. He spoke of teachers and families as mutually engaged in the project of raising the next generation of Palestinians. A writer and poet, he kept alive the stories of many Palestinian people and their lost towns and villages. Throughout the interview, Ustaaz Ibrahim reflected on the centrality of education to the lives of Palestinians, summing up by saying, “knowledge is the strongest weapon.” 76 years after he and his family were expelled from Palestine, he and his children and his children’s children, remain stateless without the right of return, and yet, his faith in the power of knowledge and education is unshakeable.
This vignette was developed from one of forty oral histories narrated by Palestinian teachers in Lebanon, children of the Nakba who became teachers in the thawra (the revolutionary period that began in the 1960s) and taught through the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) into the early 2000s. Paying close attention to the work of teachers as key civic and political actors in the Palestine liberation movement, this article explores the complexity of engaging education as a tool of an anti-colonial movement, within contexts of oppression and exile. For many Palestinians, education has led to further dispersal into the diaspora: to become educated is to gain the skills that lead to emigration, but also to live lives in new languages, communities, politics and so forth. For others, education has led nowhere: for stateless Palestinians, especially those who remain in refugee camps in and outside of historic Palestine, education is no guarantee of a stable future. Listening to the voices of these Palestinian teachers in Lebanon, we analyze how they navigated their complex roles as civic actors across time and the changing political and policy environments that shaped their work.

Authors

• Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Barnard College

• Jo Kelcey, Lebanese American University

• Maria Abunnasr, Independent Scholar