Educational curriculums are a precarious pursuit to navigate regardless of whichever region or state undertaking the responsibility of deciding what information and knowledge must be imparted upon the next generation. The task requires the revisiting of history, its victims, its victors, and acknowledging the culprit behind past violence and conflict. Thus, curriculums are divisive by their nature of picking on wounds that may not have healed yet or that have faded over years of ignorance.
In Lebanon, history curriculums have been all but truthful in their delivery of the nation’s past; such negligence has kept the country in a vicious sectarian cycle that has allowed religious allegiance to triumph over a united and equitable society with their basic needs satisfied. In the United States, adolescents have had to grapple with the legacy that slavery––as both an economic and social institution––and segregation have imprinted on their national identity.
Their history textbooks inform them of the many wars fought by their veterans in the 20th century, but with little information on why those wars were initiated and by whom; this has placed American schoolchildren at a disadvantage to their peers abroad who have had more access to resource and tools through geographical proximity or open dialogue to contextualize their histories.
In light of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in the early months of quarantine, the United Kingdom has had to reckon with its past as well. The post-colonial theory was shared across all social media platforms and succinctly packaged into bite-size awareness campaigns that informed the elderly and the young alike about the extent of havoc wreaked by the British Empire and how this has translated into its racialized class and social structure today.
This challenged the notion that the UK stood as a bastion of free thought, speech, and expression that has been promoted and publicized around the world. Amid these discussions, Palestine and the destiny of its people had been revived in public discourse. After having successfully dodged accountability and accusation for monumental turning points such as the Balfour Declaration and the plethora of dismissed commissions and reports about the state of the Palestinian mandate under Britain’s decision to “grant” the land to leaders of the Zionist movement, younger generations unraveled the role that the Empire had played in initiating one of the most devastating and long-lasting international and regional conflicts of the modern-day.
In an ideal world, this transitionary period would translate into institutional change that would launch an educational and informative campaign that confronted the Empire’s past. But the victors and beneficiaries of colonialism cannot reckon with their pasts without surrendering one of the principal tenets used previously to subjugate an entire population: morality.
Regarding its role in Palestine, the UK has done the opposite. As of this week, two school textbooks that have been issued to students have been flagged for overwhelmingly “favor[ing] an Israeli narrative” at the expense of Palestinians. The books “Conflict in the Middle East” and “The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change” immediately present the Middle East as a war-torn region plagued by its own people and inexplicable tragedy, which is already rife with the Orientalist connotations Edward Said warned about many years ago. Now, British students are presented with the narrative that Palestinians have proven themselves to be the aggressors in the conflict, with only “10 examples of Jewish Israeli terrorist acts” included in the original work in stark contrast to the “32 references to Palestinian terrorism.” The books’ launch has been halted by a report published by two professors––Dr. John Chalcraft and Dr. James Dickins––claimed that “Arab or Palestinian violence [is] systematically added or intensified” after a revision was undergone by the Board of Deputies of British Jews the previous year.
Dr. Eugene Rogan, a professor of Modern Middle Eastern history at Oxford University, shared with UK-based news source The Independent that the revisions are a “betrayal of such objectivity to allow Israel advocates the opportunity to edit teaching material without giving Palestine an advocated equal opportunity to provide input.” Herein lies the challenges of planning out a curriculum when only the victors can share their stories. The lack of Palestinian voices included in a text reciting and explaining their history is an explicit form of erasure. It does a disservice to British students by providing a partial understanding of what is an “intensely complex and sensitive issue.”
Distributing misinformation is a public hazard that has already proven to be a dangerous game in the 21st century, but teaching misleading information only exacerbates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by not providing the next generation of world leaders and historians an impartial account. Rather than focusing on British policy or the injustice of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for instance, these textbooks point fingers at a population that is depleted of all methods to resist its occupation. Pearson, the textbooks’ publisher, has shared a public statement about its aim to teach Middle Eastern history in a “fair, neutral and balanced way,” but subsequently clarified that the reviews to the initial edition from the previous year were “independent.”
At present, the publishers are in conversation with stakeholders about the textbooks’ distribution. What comes after these discussions could, quite literally, shape how the next generation of British citizens will interpret the events of a conflict their predecessors had commenced.