Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate

Educating Palestine, through the story of education and the teaching of history in Mandate Palestine, reframes our understanding of the Palestinian and Zionist national movements. It argues that Palestinian and Hebrew pedagogy could only be truly understood through an analysis of the conscious or unconscious dialogue between them. The conflict over Palestine, the study shows, shaped the way Arabs and Zionists thought, taught, and wrote about their past. British rule over Palestine promised the Jews a national home, but had no viable policy towards the Palestinians and established an education system that lacked a sustainable collective ethos. Nevertheless, Palestinian educators were able to produce a national pedagogy that knew how to work with the British and simultaneously promoted an ideology of progress and independence that challenged colonial rule.

Yoni Furas, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Haifa University

Yoni Furas is a scholar of modern Middle Eastern and Palestinian history, interested in the history of late Ottoman and mandate Palestine, the sociology of Arab knowledge, and cultural aspects of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict. He received his DPhil from Oxford University in 2015 and served as a Thomas Arthur Arnold Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University.