by James M Dorsey
Intellectual honesty is a rare commodity in the divide between Israelis and Palestinians.
It is even rarer with the rise of Jewish ultra-nationalism and a generation of Israelis and Palestinians nurtured on prejudiced, biased, and often supremacist perceptions of the other.
The irony is that historically, it was far-right militants, and currently, it is fringe left-wing intellectuals who displayed intellectual honesty, even if their conclusions differ radically.
With few exceptions, intellectual honesty has long been lost on the Israeli right and left. What intellectual honesty survives is posited in fringe pockets of the left that propagate a paradigm cultural change on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide that goes against the grain of mainstream Israeli and Palestinian thinking and, in today’s fog of war, has a pie-in-the-sky quality.
Even so, these pockets put forward ideas that offer a pathway towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has the potential to bridge the traumas shaping generations, contribute to preventing a one- or two-state solution from producing future wars, and ensure that peace agreements with Israel have street credibility on both sides of the divide rather than amount to arrangements among elites with little popular support beyond Israel’s borders.
Education sits at the core of contrasting views of the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations and diametrically opposite historical narratives.
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Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reiterated in an address to the US Congress his prioritization of “deradicalisation” of Gaza through religiously-guided educational reform as a prerequisite for the reconstruction of the war-ravaged Strip.
Mr. Netanyahu first insisted on deradicalisation when, in February, he offered a vague outline of his post-war Gaza plan.
Since then, Mr. Netanyahu has drawn on a 32-page proposal drafted by four Israeli academics that calls for “the creation of a positive horizon for the defeated nation,” deradicalisation through “education for peace,” defined as “eradicating jihadist ambitions,” and the nurturing of a popular repudiation of violence and embrace of effective governance.
“The day after we defeat Hamas, a new Gaza can emerge. My vision for that day is of a demilitarized and deradicalised Gaza… A new generation of Palestinians must no longer be taught to hate Jews but rather to live in peace with us,” Mr. Netanyahu told the Congress.
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Accompanied by Hamas fighters, children play with weapons. Credit: IDF Spokesman
What Mr. Netanyahu means by ‘deradicalisation’ is an educational system that refrains from promoting Palestinian national aspirations and the right to resist Israeli occupation, even non-violently, and teaches history and social sciences in line with Israel’s version of the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Mr. Netanyahu has already taken a first step by targeting educational institutions in Gaza, including all of the Strip’s universities and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). UNRWA operated 288 schools, or 40 per cent of all schools, in Gaza before the war.
Serving as shelters for Palestinians displaced by the war and, according to Israel, as bases for Hamas, most of the schools have been severely damaged or destroyed in the Israeli military campaign.
Earlier this year, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that “in UNRWA schools, they’ve been teaching the doctrines of extermination of Israel — the doctrines of terrorism, lauding terrorism, glorifying terrorism.”
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Israeli soldiers at UNRWA headquarters in Gaza. Credit: Al Jazeera
Israeli textbook watchdog Impact-se reported in November that “at least”14 of UNWRA’s 9,367 teachers in Gaza, or 0.15 per cent, had supported Hamas violence in social media postings, including the group’s October 7 attack on Israel.
The report added that “at least 100 Hamas members committing the terror attacks are graduates of UNRWA’s education system.”
Before the war, UNRWA operated 709 schools catering to 530,000 students across the Middle East. Almost 300,000 of the students attended UNRWA schools in Gaza.
The report highlighted “select” examples from UNRWA school materials that legitimately should be questioned, including describing the firebombing of an Israeli bus as “a barbecue party.”
The report does not indicate how representative the examples are.
Even so, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is debating three bills that would curtail UNRWA’s operations, including one that would designate the UN group as a terrorist organisation.
Countering mainstream ethnocentric Israeli and Palestinian identity politics that shape education systems is a revival in Israel of a Levantine identity based on the notion of a pluralist, multicultural society.
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Idan Zivoni’s latest book. Credit Resling
“On the one hand, Israelis feel unwanted in our region; it’s rejecting us as an occupying, Jewish country. And, of course, nobody is exactly waiting for us in Europe to move back. That in-between space is a very Israeli experience. I’m not sure an Egyptian from Cairo feels unwelcome in their surroundings. I don’t think Palestinians feel that this region rejects them; rather, it’s that they’re being repressed by us,” said Idan Zivoni, the author of a recent book on Levantinism.
Levantinism’s revival on the fringe of Israeli society precedes the Gaza war]. It appears to have survived the ultra-nationalist onslaught sparked by Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s war on Gaza.
In 2019, Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, home to some of the country’s most important archaeology, ethnography, photography, folklore, and local history collections, staged an exhibition focused on the late Egyptian-born novelist and essayist Jacqueline Kahanoff, one of the most influential writers on Levantinism.
This month saw the publication in Hebrew of two books on Levantinism, two years after two earlier books were published.
A product of pre-revolution cosmopolitan Cairo who emigrated to Israel in 1954, Ms. Kahanoff developed a social model of coexistence drawn from her childhood experiences in the period between the 20th century’s two world wars.
She believed that for Israel to be recognized and accepted by its Arab neighbours, it would have to empower its Mizrahi citizens with roots in the Arab and Muslim world as cultural ambassadors, who historically were looked down on by their Ashkenazi brethren of European descent.
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Ms. Kahanoff’s thinking is relevant at a time when Israelis and Jews debate the nature of the Jewish identity, relations between Jews and non-Jews, the role of religion, and the future of the West Bank and Gaza, conquered by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, even though it goes against the grain of mainstream Israeli and Palestinian thinking and challenges the two peoples’ nationalistic framework.
Levantinism leaves open the options of a one- or two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but is particularly relevant for a unified state that risks erupting in civil war even if Israeli Jews and Palestinians would have equal rights.
Ms. Kahanoff understood what our “prime ministers, generals, and ministers still fail to see. We need to teach Arabic from a young age, we need to completely change our attitude toward the Arab world, we need to understand that we’re now part of it, to maintain a discourse that isn’t so insanely racist but rather loving and connecting, that knows the intellectual treasures that Islam has to offer us,” said Ketzia Alon, co-editor of a recent volume on Levantinism.
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Binyamin Netanyahu and his ideological mentor, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Credit: Pool
Ms. Kahanoff and her disciples would likely recoil from being mentioned in the same breath as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the early 20th century intellectual godfather of far-right Jewish nationalism and Mr. Netanyahu’s ideological cradle, who propagated a Jewish State in all of Palestine and storied Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan.
Yet, what Ms. Kahanoff and Messrs. Jabotinsky and Dayan have in common is the intellectual honesty to recognise Palestinians as human beings with legitimate aspirations, even if that leads them to radically different visions of the future.
It is the kind of honesty absent in the supremacist and racist pronouncements of Messrs. Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Mr. Jabotinsky’s ideological heirs.
Messrs. Jabotinsky and Dayan recognised Palestinian aspirations but argued that there was no room in Palestine for two competing claims. While intellectually honest, their us-or-them approach provided the recipe for permanent conflict and violence in which only one party could win by defeating and subjugating the other.
“To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our ‘Arabo-philes’ comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed to sell out their homeland for a railroad network,” Mr. Jabotinsky argued, deriding Zionist factions that sought compromise with the Palestinians.
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Then-defense minister Moshe Dayan makes a speech during the 1973 Yom Kippur War in an undated photograph. Photo: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit/Defense Ministry Archive
Speaking at the 1956 funeral of an Israeli farmer brutally murdered by Palestinian militants, Mr. Dayan acknowledged the plight of the Palestinians, insisting that Israel would have to live by the sword.
“Let us not cast blame on the murderers. For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes, we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate,” Mr. Dayan said.
“Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs living around us. This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong, and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down,” he added.
For now, Messrs. Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich’s exclusivist ultra-nationalism drown out Ms. Kahanoff and Ms. Alon’s calls for an inclusive approach that recognizes the legitimacy of rival claims and advocates greater cross-cultural engagement.
Nevertheless, major Israeli cultural institutions focusing on alternative approaches coupled with the publication of books and newspaper articles and public gatherings in which forward-looking ideas are discussed offer a ray of hope, particularly at a time of war and hardened divides when supremacist intellectual dishonesty trumps intellectual honesty.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.