Knowledge as power

‘It had nothing, and in a very short period has built this very strong economy. We should be amazed by this,” says Azizha Noful. She is talking about Israel, which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary.

This is a classic observation of Israel’s supporters, and one that always dominates discussions at Independence Day events. What is surprising, though, is that Noful is a Palestinian whose husband is a prisoner in Israel, and she wants an end to the country’s existence.

So why is she praising Israel’s achievements?

The answer is that she is one of a growing number of Palestinians who want to study Israel. Noful is a student in the fast-growing Israel studies course at the Palestinian Al-Quds University. Between the university’s West Bank and Gaza campuses the two-year master’s degree has more than 100 students — reflecting a year-on-year growth of about 10% since 2005.

At Al-Quds, scholarship and the Palestinian struggle are closely related. For example, one of the law courses involves running human rights clinics in the hope that students will ‘play a role in the struggle for change” in ‘occupied Palestine”.

Professor Mohammed Dajani, director of Al-Quds’s Area Studies Institute, says Palestinian identity has largely been synonymous with ‘a general Arab policy to shut Israel out of Arab memory” and ignore its existence as far as possible.

However, he says, this has been changing since the start of the occupation in 1967. ‘Before the 1967 war, Palestinians, like the rest of the Arab world, knew nothing about Israel and Judaism. Then, in June 1967, Israeli occupation brought a dramatic shift and Palestinians were shocked to find out how much Israelis knew about the Arab world and how little they knew about them. Though Arab interest in Israel grew tremendously, only a few Arab institutions and publishers reflected objectivity in dealing with the topic.”

The few courses and books that did deal with Israel were polemics that viewed Israel as an aggressor.

The Al-Quds course set out to remedy this. Every student takes an in-depth course in Zionist thought and history, and Hebrew language is compulsory, as is studying the Israeli political system, the economy and the social structure. Electives and dissertations involve detailed study of niche issues in Israeli society, including women’s issues, ethnicity, divisions between Jews of eastern and western origins, the judicial system, the Israel Defence Forces and the status of Palestinian Arabs.

Given that it is covering new ground for the Arab world, the course faces a lack of Arabic-language texts and so uses Israeli scholarship in Hebrew or in English translation. Perhaps surprisingly, students haven’t objected to the use of Israeli texts, says Dajani.

Teaching Zionism presents one of the course’s biggest challenges, says Professor Mohammad Massalha, who is charged with this task. ‘We are dealing with people who, on a daily basis, face the result of Zionism. It is very difficult to teach about Zionism academically. But my job is to make as much of an artificial separation between the personal level and the academic level as possible.”

Massalha begins by studying the theory of ideologies as a general subject, and then moves on to consider how Zionism fits and breaks the mould of other ideologies. ‘This way, we have a model for trying to understand Zionism with some objectivity.”

As for why students want to reach this kind of objectivity about Zionism and Israel, motivations vary. More than half are officials in the Palestinian Authority. They range from junior officials to the top-ranking Jibril Rajoub, and they all believe that increased knowledge will help their work.

For some, like Noful, it is about acquiring knowledge as power. She says: ‘Every Palestinian has to know about them [Israelis] — it is important to know about our enemy. As my mother says, if you want to face your enemy, know his language.–