Teaching About Palestine: Changing the Pain and Fury of Ignorance to the Pleasures of Knowing

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

There is much in US history that students know little about: not because they don’t wish to understand but because there is so little discussion and engagement of certain topics in our high school and university curricula. The Japanese American internment, for example; the United States’ overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and installation of the oppressive regime of the Shah; and the US government’s encouragement of Saddam Hussein’s aggressive war with Iran. When students learn the details of these historical events, they are either bewildered or angered that they did not know of these significant moments in US history. Among the most silenced of the histories in which the US government has played no small role are the dispossession of the Palestinian peoples and the United States’ continued support of the state of Israel’s colonial Occupation of Palestinian lands and violation of Palestinian rights.

It is no easy matter to introduce this history of Palestinian struggle in educational settings. The difficulty is particularly acute in public high schools, given that there is a strict demand in that educational sector for compliance with official state positions on Israel/Palestine. University classrooms thus become crucially important sites to introduce this material. When instructors do so, however, they are invariably accused of lying, of being anti-Semitic, of being inappropriately propagandistic. Yet, there are innovative and effective ways of including the particulars of the history of US complicity in Palestinian dispossession, and of presenting this information so that students do not reject it or direct their fury toward the instructor. The presenters on this panel will speak about approaches they have used to introduce the challenges faced day to day by Palestinians living under discriminatory and oppressive Israeli policies. They discuss how they teach this material within the context of courses that address wider issues such as human rights, film studies, comparative colonialisms, and resistance movements.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Lucy Mae Burns, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)

Individual Presentations

• “The Intifada Curriculum”: on teaching the Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance - Snehal Shingavi, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

• By Comparison and In Solidarity: Hawai‘i, Ireland, and Palestine in the Cultural Studies Classroom - Laura Lyons, University of Hawaii, Manoa (HI)

• Teaching Palestine along with Diverse Multicultural topics through Film & Public Dialogue - Mary Husain, California State University, Fresno (CA)

• What I Did Not Know I Did Not Know: Palestinian Rights and Human Rights - Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA)

Comment

• Lucy Mae Burns, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)