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Rome International Careers Festival 2017
“By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes”
Presentation by Dr Carolina Zincone, Communication Officer, on behalf of H.E. Mai Alkaila, Ambassador of the State of Palestine in Italy, Permanent Representative to the United Nations, FAO, IFAD and WFP
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear students,
I would like to thank the organizers of this important Festival for giving me the opportunity to share with you all, in a spirit of dialogue and exchange of experiences, how crucial it is for the Palestinians to have access to equitable education, and how important it is, in this respect, the role of the United Nations.
The Palestinian people have always been famous for and proud of their culture and education. Moreover, in Palestine, where children are forced to witness to and undergo all sorts of physical and psychological violence deriving from the Israeli occupation, schools can be a shelter, a safe haven.
This is what Hanan Al-Hroub, the Palestinian teacher winner of the 2016 Global Teacher Prize, explained upon receiving the award:
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she grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp, Bethlehem, where she was regularly exposed to acts of violence. She started teaching after her children were left deeply traumatized by a shooting incident they witnessed to on their way home from school. While helping them overcome their trauma, Hanan decided to try and help the other children too, considering that they also required special handling at school. At the Samiha Khalil School in Al-Bireh, just outside Ramallah, Al-Hroub’s pupils – aged between six and 10 – live in an environment where violence is endemic, she said. They are often disruptive and unstable; some engage in violent acts themselves: “The environment outside the classroom is violent. Inside I provide peace, harmony and security”. Often wearing a clown’s wig and a red nose, Al-Hroub uses games to get children to work cooperatively in teams, building trust and respect, and rewarding positive non-violent behaviour. She has written a book about her teaching philosophy, called We Play We Learn. Her approach has led to a decline in violent behaviour in schools where this is usually a frequent occurrence; and she has inspired her colleagues to review the way they teach, their classroom management strategies and the sanctions they use. This is the main reason why she won the Nobel Prize for teaching, this explains the special task of Palestinian schools, and it is not by coincidence that Palestinian schools represent one of Israel’s favourite target.
Let me then start telling you what are the difficulties that Palestinian girls and boys have to face and try to overcome on a daily basis in their attempt to reach a satisfactory education.
There are many ways in which the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land affects the education of Palestinian youth and prevents effective learning outcomes. I will focus on 1) the obstacles posed by the Wall of Apartheid, settlers and occupation army to Palestinian students and teachers on their way to education premises, 2) Israeli military assaults to schools and Universities, and 3) the closure or demolition of schools.
The Wall, settlers and the occupation army
As you may know, a real land grab has been and is being carried out in Palestine by Israel through its occupation forces and settlements, and through the Wall of Apartheid. As a matter of fact, the land of Palestine never stopped shrinking since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
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In 1967, Israel colonized the Occupied Palestinian Territories by systematically transferring parts of its Jewish civilian population into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in violation of international law. Today, 620,000 Israeli settlers, including over 260,000 in and around East Jerusalem, live in settlements established on land illegally seized from our territories in the West Bank. These settlements range in size from “outposts,” consisting of a few houses, to entire towns inhabited by tens of thousands of settlers. You have recently witnessed on the one hand to the approval by UN Security Council of Resolution 2334, which condemns the Israeli settlements (23 December 2016); and on the other hand to the approval by the Knesset of the “Regularization Law”, which legalizes around 6,000 settlers’ houses built on Palestinians’ private land, previously considered illegal even by Israeli standards..301
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The aim and effect of Israel’s settlement enterprise, which includes gigantic infrastructures, has been to alter the status of the Palestinian Territories, both physically and demographically, so as to prevent their return to the Palestinian people. The construction of Israeli settlements is designed to illegally confiscate our land and natural resources while confining our population to unsustainable, ever-shrinking enclaves and severing East Jerusalem from the rest of the Occupied Territories. As a result, Palestinians are now living on 50% of the land which belongs to the State of Palestine, as accepted by the historical compromise made in 1988, whereby we relinquished our claim to 78% of the territory encompassed by historic Palestine. As you can see, this reduces our actual territory to 12% of our historical land. By limiting the portion of land, territorial contiguity and economic viability of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israeli settlements pose the single greatest threat to the establishment of an independent Palestinian State, and hence, to a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
If you combine this with the Palestinian land directly confiscated by the Israeli State for so-called “security reason” you obtain, in practical, daily life terms, our deprivation of the possibility to use our land for whatsoever purpose, including education.
This is evident when it comes to reaching by foot or other means of transportation the nearest school or University. The Wall of Apartheid
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built on Palestinian land often separates Palestinian schoolchildren from their schools, forcing them to endless exhausting detours whereby it takes them ten times as long to arrive and return from school. Moreover, on their way to school these boys and girls need to go through endless military checkpoints and are regularly pray to aggressive settlers who assault them with the aim to make their life impossible. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, settlers near Qortoba School, in Hebron, West Bank, attended by children from 7 to 16, want this institute to be closed, and for this reason attack students every day. In theory, the Israeli army is there to protect children and even accompany them to school; in practice, soldiers don’t do anything to avoid violence and in fact in many cases support settlers’ aggressive actions.
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At the same time, while young students struggle to arrive to school, their teachers are also stopped at the checkpoints which they need to pass to reach school and carry out their work.
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As a result, when lessons are supposed to start in the morning, you never know who managed to be there. According to a Report published by the Palestinian Ministry of Education on 28 February, crackdowns at Israeli-run checkpoints led to the suspension of 4,878 classes in 2016.
Israeli assaults on schools and Universities
The Palestinian Ministry of Education also documented Israeli attacks against 162 Palestinian schools in 2016. The attacks were carried out using live ammunition, teargas canisters or/and rubber bullets. As a result, several schools have been partially or totally put out of operation.
For this reason, the Ministry called upon all humanitarian organization so that they put pressure on Israel to stop violations. The right to study in a safe place, ratified by the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), is continuously trampled on in Palestine.
But University students are also victims of the Israeli army aggressions. In particular, Palestine Technical University – Kadoorie, an agricultural college located in Tulkarem, in the Northern West Bank, where students have been protesting against occupation, has been object of military attacks which caused several victims.
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Not only is the University campus crossed by the Apartheid Wall which was built on its land, Israel has confiscated further land in order to conduct military drills within the campus and placed a checkpoint right at the entrance of the University. This meant real terror for students and real violation of 1993 Oslo Accords, according to which Area A of the West Bank should be under total Palestinian control. That is why students decided to react and protest, and that is why, nowadays, there is always an ambulance parked in the campus, waiting for next student to be taken to the hospital.
School closure or demolition
One particular aspect of Israeli war on Palestinian education is its policy of closing schools over alleged incitement in study materials
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or demolishing schools, particularly in the Jordan Valley, where the Palestinians can use just 6% of the land, while Israeli settlers, who account for just 13% of the Valley’s people, have control over 86% of it. The problem here is that we are in Area C, the part of the West Bank that is under complete Israeli control: the Israeli authorities do not release permits to build and consider illegal whatever is built by the Palestinians. As a result, even schools built with funding from the Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection of the European Commission or other international aid are destroyed. According to the Report by the Ministry of Education, nine demolition or stop construction orders were handed out to a number of Palestinian schools across the occupied territories in 2016.
A clear example of this struggle for education is represented by the famous School of Mud and Tyres – 2,200 recycled tires to be precise – built in the Bedouin encampment of Khan Al-Ahmar, between Jerusalem and Jerico, with the help of the Italian Ngo Vento di Terra, the Italian Cooperation and several Italian municipalities.
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Their main goal was to guarantee the right to education to Bedouin Palestinians children and support the process of self-determination of local communities. It serves 160 students, grades 1 – 9 from five communities in the surrounding area, but has become the focus of a legal battle between residents of the nearby settlement of Kfar Adumim and the Palestinian Authority.
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The school, which is a destination of many international delegations, is under demolition order and under the pressure of the neighboring colonies. In defense of the right to education the Ngo Vento di Terra launched the campaign: “Whoever demolishes a school is destroying the future”. Among others, Amnesty International, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) joined the appeal.
Should this demolition occur, it would not be the first one.
Demolitions have been particularly serious in Gaza, of course. Here, again, they hit the work of international aid agencies.
A recent Report on “The humanitarian crisis in Gaza”, approved on 24 January 2017 by the Council of Europe, reminds us that the destruction from three main Israeli aggressions over the past nine years caused damage to the enclave’s water, sanitation, energy, medical, and also education infrastructures.
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During Israel’s July-August 2014 assault, so-called ‘Operation Protective Edge’, six government and private schools, eleven kindergartens and three higher education institutions were completely destroyed. In addition, a further 450 education facilities – more than half of them kindergartens – sustained minor, partial, major or severe damage. 83 UNRWA-run schools were also damaged.
Mostly due to the nine-year blockade, which amounts to “collective punishment”, in many cases reconstruction has not even started.
What is really amazing is the resilience shown by teachers and students, who are happy to deliver and attend classes in the streets or in a bombed classroom, if necessary.
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The importance of Israeli education and the rights of Israeli pupils
If this is the situation of the right to education in Palestine, equally worrying is the education environment to which Israeli schoolchildren are subject. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a 2001 co-laureate of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded by the European Parliament, has studied the content of Israeli school books and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, has been published for the first time in the United Kingdom in 2012.
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She describes what she found not only as racism, but as a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service: (and I quote) “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how schoolbooks represent Palestinians” (unquote). In “hundreds and hundreds” of books, she claims, Palestinians are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism. They are called Arabs. “The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop,” she says. “The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.”
Children, she says, grow up to serve in the army and internalize the message that Palestinians are “people whose life is dispensable with impunity. And not only that, but people whose number has to be diminished.”
Asked if Palestinian schoolbooks also reflect a certain dogma, Peled-Elhanan claims that they distinguish between Zionists and Jews. “They make this distinction all the time. They are against Zionists, not against Jews.”
Speaking about education and the right to education, this is something everybody should know and should be able to distinguish.
Conclusions
What really needs to be done to ensure the right of a proper education in Palestine is to end the Israeli occupation. This is something that the international community can and must help to achieve, by taking concrete actions against the Israeli settlements and by recognizing Palestine as a sovereign State.
Thank you very much
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