The Tightrope of Belonging: Palestinian Graduates and the Process of Identity Negotiation in Jewish State Schools

• In Event: Identity, Belonging, and Marginalization in Educational Spaces

Proposal

Introduction
The interaction between indigenous minority and majority groups within educational systems often reveals deep-seated social dynamics and power imbalances. This area is complex, with significant challenges regarding who has the authority to discuss these issues, in which contexts, and for what purposes (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016; Hollinsworth et al., 2021). Unfortunately, many lifelong inequalities are perpetuated within the very education systems that should address and rectify these disparities (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2013). In the context of Palestinian minority students attending Jewish state schools in Israel, these interactions are particularly charged due to the ongoing conflict with the majority group. Palestinian students in these schools navigate an environment that predominantly reflects and promotes Jewish-Israeli identity and values, quite often at the expense of their own cultural and national identity.
Objectives
This study explores the complex identities of Palestinian graduates in the Israeli education system and how dominant misrepresentations of their identity can negatively impact academic success and retention (Hollinsworth et al., 2021). Indigenous students in majority schools face tensions between maintaining traditional cultural identities and adapting to the dominant educational culture. They reformulate their identities while navigating pressures of assimilation and cultural preservation (Sánchez, 2020). For instance, Bishop (2020) illustrates the deep connection Indigenous people have with their land, which is integral to their identity and learning processes, and the intergenerational reciprocity that ensures the continuity and preservation of cultural knowledge.
In Israel, the Palestinian Arab minority seeks recognition and influence in various social and political spaces while wishing to retain its distinctive cultural and social characteristics (Ghanem & Mustafa, 2011; Arar & Haj-Yehia, 2016). The Israeli establishment, perceived as settler-colonial, has denied Palestinians many self-determination rights, systematically removing Palestinian culture from the public sphere. This constant conflict with the dominant Israeli identity (Shihade, 2016) is reflected in educational policies. Nasser and Abu-Nimer (2022) highlight strategies such as segregation, economic dependency, and surveillance, which have led to underfunded and mismanaged education systems for Palestinians.
The interaction of the Palestinian Arab minority with the hegemonic Israeli society through education while preserving their identity is underexplored. An exception is a study by Ben-Asher, Ben-Yehoshua, and Elbedour (2020), which examined representations of personal and social identities, revealing differences between the traditional Arab society and the Western Jewish society in which participants were raised. Their findings highlighted the empowerment, security, and autonomy gained by individuals, but at a significant social cost within their traditional society. Understanding this issue is crucial given the ongoing conflict.
Research Questions
This study explores the experiences of Palestinian Arab graduates from public Jewish schools:
How do Palestinian Arab graduates describe their experiences in Jewish state schools?
How do they navigate the tensions created between their identities?
Theoretical Framework
This study mobilizes a synthesized theoretical framework that integrates three complementary perspectives to capture the complexity of the students' experiences. It begins with Critical Race Theory (CRT) to analyze the systemic nature of power and racialization within the Israeli education system, revealing the school not as a neutral space but as a site where color-blind ideologies perpetuate marginalization (Gillborn, 2019). This lens is enriched by postcolonial and decolonial thought, which connects these systemic issues to the historical context of settler-colonialism. This allows us to frame curricular erasure as a form of epistemic violence (Phillips, 2019) that positions indigenous students as the "Other." Finally, to add a crucial layer of nuance to student agency, the framework incorporates the sociology of meaning. This perspective, drawing from Abutbul-Selinger (2022), allows us to understand identity negotiation not just as resistance, but as a strategic practice where ethnicity is leveraged as a cultural resource, providing a more holistic view of the students' sophisticated and agentic responses.
Methodology
This qualitative study utilizes a narrative research approach, drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 Palestinian graduates of the Israeli state school system. The interviews focused on the participants' memories and experiences related to the curriculum, school culture, and their sense of identity during their K-12 education. Thematic analysis was used to identify recurrent patterns and to construct a narrative that honors the complexity of their lived experiences.
Key Findings
Curricular Erasure as Epistemic Violence The most consistent theme was the profound impact of an education that rendered Palestinian history and identity invisible. This was not a passive oversight but an active erasure, a form of epistemic violence (Phillips, 2019) that functions as a tool of colonial disenfranchisement. As one student noted, "It's not just that they don't teach your history; it's that they teach a history where you don't exist." Participants described the deep cognitive dissonance of learning a state-sanctioned history at school that directly contradicted the lived history of their families.
The Colonial Gaze: Internalizing and Resisting Deficit Narratives Beyond erasure, students confronted the active undermining of their identity through a colonial gaze that promoted negative stereotypes. The curriculum and school culture often conflated "Palestinian" with "enemy," imposing a significant psychological burden. One participant powerfully recalled this struggle: "How can you focus on math when in history class you learn that your people are the bad guys? You start to ask yourself, am I a terrorist?" Their experiences reveal a constant battle between internalizing these harmful "deficit narratives" and actively resisting them.
The Tightrope of Belonging: Identity Negotiation as Labor and Strategy The core of the students' experience was the continuous, mentally exhausting "labor" of negotiation—a constant "tightrope walk." While this process was a source of pain and "emotional suffering," it was also a site of profound agency. In line with Abutbul-Selinger (2022), this negotiation can be seen as a strategic practice where students learned to manage their identity as a cultural resource. This refusal to accept the binary imposed upon them is, in itself, a decolonial practice—a sophisticated assertion of a complex self in a system designed to subordinate it.

Author

• Orwa Sedawi, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev