Political Conflict and Exclusion in Jerusalem

The Provision of Education and Social Services

Rawan Nuseibeh, Rawan Asali Nuseibeh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780815348849
• eBook ISBN: 9781317535768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The political conflict over the city of Jerusalem has resulted in the breach of Palestinian Jerusalemites' civil, political and social rights. While Israel claims sovereignty over East Jerusalem, it neglects to provide adequate services to the Palestinian residents of the city. The Israeli Jerusalem Municipality provides insufficient and highly politicised educational services to the Palestinians residents of the city, at the same time discriminating against the other Palestinian systems that provide educational services.

Political Conflict and Exclusion in Jerusalem offers a detailed description of the structure of the education sector in East Jerusalem with its four main providers; the Palestinian Authority through Awqaf schools, the Israeli Authority through municipal schools, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and private schools. Its study reveals that there is no single body that oversees the provision of educational services in the city to ensure that the services provided are sufficient and of quality. Employing a qualitative research strategy with semi-structured interviews and focus groups in Palestinian and Israeli schools, this book offers a comprehensive and revealing comparison of the educational services provided to both their students. It explores how Palestinian and Israeli students routinely receive vastly different learning opportunities, in terms of school funding, qualified staff, school facilities and school programmes, which as a result disempowers Palestinians and ensures an Israeli Jewish hegemony over the city.

One of the few academic books on a highly pertinent topic, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, and a key resource for those studying the social impacts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

1 Education, society and the state

DOI: 10.4324/9781315726038-2

This chapter starts by discussing the methodology used in this study, followed by a general review of the importance of education in society, and of its recognition as a human right and an integral part of social rights to which citizens and residents are entitled. However, the distribution of a state's resources is informed by its political ideologies, and in the case of ethnocratic exclusionist regimes, the state favours a certain ethnic group or religion and produces policies to ensure the dominance of this ethnic group over other ethnic minorities and indigenous populations residing within the state. Policies in such a regime systematically discriminate against those minorities by providing them with only inferior social rights and by infringing on their civil and political rights. Through this engineered system of discrimination, these subordinate groups become socially excluded and lack the capacity and the opportunity to penetrate the political institutions of the state, so that they remain disempowered and disenfranchised.

Methodology

The research strategy adopted for this book is an interpretivist research strategy with a phenomenological approach, which is concerned with how people view the world around them. This research strategy tries to capture the consequence of educational exclusion on people's lives, interpreted in their own perception and presented in their own words. Qualitative research methods were used, such as face-to-face interviewing, focus groups and routine informal contacts with local people. Participants were allowed to express their thoughts and experiences freely, without being constrained with structured surveys or a limited set of answers. The researcher has then used the grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) in analysing the data, which meant discovering theories from the analysis of the data collected. The themes extracted from the data are presented in Chapters 4 to 9. These themes are the main deficiencies in the East Jerusalem education sector, according to the research participants. Each theme is supported with quotations generated during the interviews and the focus groups. To determine the contributions of the findings to research done in this area, the findings are given alongside information relating to previous research.

The suitability of qualitative methods for this research lies in their ability to collect a breadth of information on what goes on at the micro level and to capture the social reality of the research participants in its totality. Semi-structured interviews were used as the main research method because through this method participants can tell their stories in ways which are meaningful to them with minimal researcher interference. With this method research participants can talk freely without being limited with a set of questions. However, this type of interview is not completely unstructured because an interview guide is available. The interview guide ensures good use of limited interview time and the homogeneity of the topic amongst all interviewees. The interview guide can be formulated in a way to answer questions appertaining to this research, which makes the data analysis easier. Respondents can also be encouraged to raise issues the interview guide does not contain.

Another advantage for semi-structured interviews is that they are more personal than the other methods, as they give the researcher the opportunity to ask follow-up questions for a better understanding and have respondents explain their taken-for-granted norms. They are easy, and less time-consuming, than the other qualitative methods and less intrusive on people's lives. They are also efficient in gathering data that cannot be gathered through observation, such as feelings, emotions and past experiences (Bryman, 2004; Rubin and Rubin, 1995).

The researcher conducted sixty-one individual interviews. Interviewees for this study were recruited using purposive (non-probability) sampling. This sampling strategy is widely employed in qualitative research because through this strategy the researcher can seek out groups and individuals where the process being studied is most likely to occur (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). By this approach the researcher can elicit in-depth information on the phenomenon being studied, instead of focusing on statistical representativeness and generalisation of the findings to apply to the greater population. Because this study is qualitative, it is not concerned with achieving representativeness, but with creating a sample of people who possess certain characteristics, or live in circumstances relevant to the phenomenon under examination (Bryman, 2004).

The four systems which provide education in East Jerusalem were included in the study. The first system studied was that of the Israeli municipal schools, serving education to Palestinian students aged five to eighteen. Ten schools were chosen randomly. All the interviews took place at the schools and they lasted between thirty and ninety minutes. The language of the interviews was Arabic and an interview guide was used for all the interviews with principals. After that, focus groups were held with parent committees, and later focus groups were held with teachers. After gathering all the information from principals, parents and teachers, an interview guide was developed and an interview was arranged with an official from the Palestinian education office at Manchi¹ (the municipal system). To enable the researcher to draw a comparison with the municipal system serving Israeli Jewish students, another seven interviews were held with the Israeli school principals, chosen randomly from the list of Israeli municipal schools in Jerusalem. The same interview guide used with Palestinian schools was used with Israeli schools in order to draw comparisons. The interviews lasted between thirty and fifty minutes and the interview language was Hebrew and English. After gathering data from Israeli school principals, an interview guide was developed in order to arrange an interview with an Israeli official working in the Israeli secondary schools system in the municipality.

Further individual interviews were held with people involved in the fight for children's rights at municipal schools: a lawyer at the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, who had written several papers on state discriminations against the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem; the head of the parents’ union in East Jerusalem; and the head of the parents’ committee in Silwan. Individual interviews were also held with three teachers and the counsellor responsible for truant students.

The second system studied was the Awqaf system (public Palestinian schools governed by the Jerusalem Directorate of Education, in collaboration with the Palestinian Ministry of Education). Ten schools were chosen randomly and their principals were contacted. The interviews were held in the schools and they lasted between thirty and ninety minutes. The interviews were conducted in Arabic and then transcribed and translated to English. After that, an interview guide was developed to interview the head of the Jerusalem Directorate. Another interview was held with the head of the counselling department of the Awqaf system. In addition, informal interviews were held with different consultants working at the Faisal Husseini Foundation. After holding all the interviews and the focus groups with participants involved in the Awqaf system, an interview guide was developed and an interview was held with the Palestinian minister of education at the time, Lamees Alami.

The third system studied was that of private schools in East Jerusalem. Seven schools were chosen, randomly, from the private system.

The fourth system studied was the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Seven interviews were conducted with principals of UNRWA schools, five with schoolteachers and one with the Jerusalem education officer of UNRWA. The schools were not chosen randomly. There are eight UNRWA schools in Jerusalem; seven principals accepted to be interviewed. As for the teachers interviewed, they were chosen based on availability. After interviewing the teachers and the principals, an interview guide was developed to interview the head of the education office at UNRWA schools in Jerusalem.

Focus groups were also conducted with teachers and parents. The idea was to explore what influences parents to choose a particular type of education for their children, to understand if parents were satisfied with their children's education and to understand their views on the East Jerusalem education sector. The focus groups held with the teachers were meant to capture their experiences, both as people living in Jerusalem and as professionals working in the education system. It was necessary to explore what problems they faced and how they dealt with them.

Fifteen focus groups were conducted with parents and teachers from the four different education systems in East Jerusalem (Awqaf, private, UNRWA, municipal). Focus groups were chosen for this research because they help the researcher capture people's thoughts and perspectives in a way similar to their natural environment. People in a focus group tend to influence each other, just as in real life people are influenced by their friends, neighbours and family members (Krueger, 1994). They usually listen to other people's advice before making their decisions, as proved the case when they were choosing which school to send their children to. The interaction between research participants in a focus group is important because it involves participants learning from each other and considering or re-evaluating their own understanding and experiences, just as in other situations in life. Bryman (2004) explains that the use of a focus group gives the researcher the opportunity to study the ways individuals collectively make sense of a phenomenon and construct meanings around it. He explains that the process of coming to terms with social phenomena is not undertaken by individuals in isolation from each other. Therefore, in this sense, focus groups reflect the process through which meaning is constructed in everyday life and to that extent can be regarded as more naturalistic, rather than a structured individual interview.

Another reason for using this method is that it has flexibility, which allows the researcher to explore unanticipated issues, which is not possible within structured questioning sequences (Krueger, 1994). The researcher is also in a better position to know if the respondents understood the questions being asked and then she can probe and ask more questions to explore the topic further. She can also explain the questions to participants, and this increases the validity of the answers. Focus groups are known to have high face validity, meaning the technique is easily understood and the data is easily presented with quotes from the participants, obtained when they give their views on the topic. Compared to other research methods, focus groups provide rich, in-depth data in a shorter period of time; the researcher can also increase the sample size without any dramatic increase in the research time.

Some of the key issues for ensuring the success of focus groups are: the selection of the participants, the number of participants in each group and the number of focus groups needed to obtain satisfactory results (Krueger, 1994). Ideally, each group should consist of six to eight participants, as this number ensures a flowing discussion and allows the researcher to witness a diversity of perspectives (Krueger, 1994). As Bryman (2004) explains, a focus group must be small enough for everyone to have an opportunity to share insights and yet large enough to provide a diversity of perceptions. If the group is too large, that is, consisting of ten or more participants, the moderator may have trouble controlling the session and the participants may feel unable to express themselves within the time limit; also, some members of the group may end up just talking to the people sitting next to them and the session then becomes fragmented. On the other hand, small groups consisting of four or fewer participants have a smaller pool of opinions (Krueger, 1994). However, it is not always possible to have the ideal number in a focus group. In the research for this study, the numbers of participants in a particular focus group varied between ten and three per group. The reason was that school gatekeepers, such as principals and heads of parents’ committees, were the ones responsible for gathering the groups of teachers or parents together, and therefore the researcher was restricted in the number of participants.

Each one of the four educational systems in East Jerusalem was studied alone with a set of interviews and focus groups. The choice of including parents of students studying under the same education system was made to ensure that each focus group is composed of homogeneous, like-minded individuals from the same economic and cultural background and knowledge and experience with the given topic. Krueger explains that when participants perceive each other as fundamentally similar, they can spend less time explaining themselves to each other and more time discussing the issue (1994: 59). The researcher's choice of working with homogenous groups also stems from the fact that several social researchers have mentioned that people tend to disclose more to those whom they perceive as more similar to them than to those who differ from them (Krueger, 1994; Litosseliti, 2003).

From each school system, several schools were chosen randomly and from each of these randomly chosen schools the principal assigned teachers to join the group (usually the ones available and willing to join). As for parents’ focus groups, the parents chosen for the focus groups were members of the parents’ committees. The reason for choosing members of parents’ committees was that they are active members in the school who are involved and are aware of the school affairs.

The findings of the focus groups and the interviews are presented in Chapters 4 to 9. Following is a review of the right to education and the results of systematic social and educational exclusion on communities in the context of ethnic conflicts.

The right to education

The definition of the right to education in society is complex, as it cannot be analysed separately from the social structure of the society being studied, nor the social contract existing between the citizens/residents and the state. States’ ideology has always influenced education. Aristotle believed education should be regulated by law and the citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives (Politics of Aristotle). The Athenians viewed the human being as an individual as well as a citizen, and therefore their education was directed towards the study of art and literature, as well as of war, unlike the Spartan system of education, which was under the complete control of the state and was aimed at creating soldiers (Garforth, 1962). Spartan boys were taken from their families at the age of seven and handed to the Ministry of Education, which educated them to serve their city as brutal, invincible soldiers (Garforth, 1962). A parallel can be seen in Nazi Germany, where students at school had physical training of a quasi-military nature. The Hitler salute was given at the beginning and end of every lesson and children were taught racial pride, obedience to the Nazi regime and loyalty to Nazi ideals (Garforth, 1962). These are examples where the state has used education to fulfil its military aspirations and where education was considered both a duty...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Education, society and the state
• 2 The case of Israel
• 3 Educational policies in the State of Israel
• 4 The structure of educational provisions in East Jerusalem
• 5 The infrastructure of the education sector in East Jerusalem
• 6 Human resources in the education sector
• 7 Educational programmes and parental support
• 8 The taught curriculums
• 9 The consequences of educational inequality
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index