Dan Bitan: In this discussion we set out to describe the Palestinian and Israeli educational systems and explore obstacles towards education for peace on both sides. Because there is a basic asymmetry between the sys¬tems, we should not look for parallels, but try to examine what is happening on each side within the particular terms of each system.
We thought we would begin with a personal statement about what made us pro-peace or tolerant toward the other, the other people; if this is the case, what made us educators for peace.

Alice Shalvi: I think my very strong religious Jewish background educat¬ed me personally in terms of justice, the very basic Jewish principle of "Love your fellow as yourself."
But what really got me involved in direct dialogue was my first direct encounter with Palestinian women of a background and a level of educa¬tion similar to myself. It convinced me that the only, or the best, way of establishing understanding for the other - and with understanding, com¬passion and a desire for coexistence - is by direct encounters.

Nabil Kassis: To start with, I don't know that I can describe myself as an educator. I do have some ideas about the direction in which education should be pursued on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. This, of course, has nothing to do with the kind of education I got as a kid. I didn't get an education for peace. I grew up during the time of conflict, and it was this which shaped me.
I believe in peace in Palestine, as we call it - Israelis call it Eretz Yisrael, but this is one geographic entity - and certainly, now at least, there is a place for two peoples to live in this entity.
They have to live together and they have to educate their children for peace. There is no alternative but to prepare the next generation to try to understand what led to the conflict in the past, and to avoid it in the future.

Manuel Hassassian: The Palestinians have invested tremendously in edu¬cation because they have always believed that this would be a primary means of social mobility and of improving one's conditions, of getting out of the ghetto.
Under Israeli domination, our total educational system has been, and still is, affected by wars and by dismemberment. The Palestinians did not really get any kind of formal education that was geared towards peace, conflict resolution, human values and human rights.
Our education, imposed on us by military authorities, has passed through three phases, to my knowledge. One is the phase that started in the early 1970s all the way to the early 1980s. This period, which we call steadfastness, sumud, was characterized by youth mobilization towards resisting and defying the Occupation.
The second stage would be the Intifada, when we ingeniously started to form new strategies to mobilize our youth, through an educational process that totally challenged the dictates of the Israeli authorities and fostered self-reliance.
Thirdly, with the inception of the Madrid peace process, education can become a very powerful socialization mechanism for concepts of peace, justice, human rights and coexistence.
Dan Bitan: Jewish education in pre-1948 Palestine - and that's where I began - had a double mes¬sage. One was very patriotic. It was a nation trying to establish a state. On the other hand, I was very lucky to go to socialist kindergartens, primary schools and high schools. The socialist schools, by definition, had to emphasize solidarity with other nations, other peoples, other working classes. With patriotic education you could become nationalistic and chauvinistic, but the socialist message at home and in school helped to balance it out.
Now, perhaps, we could direct our discussion to the obstacles. What makes it so difficult to educate the youngsters in both nations for peace?

Manuel Hassassian: We have to make the distinction in our education between the knowledge and skills that we give to our students, and the attitudes.
For the Palestinians, for the last 30 years being under occupation, the emphasis had always been on the process of self-identity and national identity. This was not a situation where we could look for peace and coexistence.
Can one try, overnight, to change and say, for example, that you are going to shift gears from the striving for national aspirations to getting rid of stereotypical images and to trying to overcome the former perceptions of your enemy? This is something that is very challenging for us at this stage, when we are still negotiating a peace process and where our nation¬al aspirations are not yet fulfilled; it is very difficult at this period of time to make these shifts. But eventually, if we look at the long range, we know that we are inevitably bound to coexist with each other, to try to change those stereotypical images. First, this involves concentrating on the history books or textbooks that have been taught by both Israelis and Palestinians.
Today we are in a transitional period. We don't know exactly what type of political system we are aspiring for, but any democratic system should be enhanced by formal public education geared towards tolerance, diversity and so on.

Alice Shalvi: It seems to me that one of the very important factors for Jews - and certainly for Israeli Jews, but not only Israeli Jews - is Jewish his¬tory and the degree to which we ourselves have undergone persecution in the past, culminating of course with the Holocaust.
From my own encounters with Palestinians, I found that they, who have themselves suffered so much - and parenthetically, having them¬selves become refugees and seeing, as so many of us do, their own plight first and foremost - I found that Palestinians have great difficulty in understanding the degree of paranoia from which Jews themselves suffer.
The notion of Israel "being driven into the sea" seems to very many Jews still to be predominant on the other side. We have also, since 1948, been intermittently - or perhaps even permanently - at war, in a state of armed conflict. That again has aroused or created a whole series of pre¬conceptions and biases which very readily become hardened into stereo¬types.
One of the great challenges for education now, for both peoples, is to create a human version of each other to replace those stereotypes. This brings me back to the need for direct encounter, because there is no other way to break down stereotypes.
I've been very profoundly impressed by the number of times I have heard Palestinians ask how we, this great powerful nation-state of Israel with its army and so on, how we could possibly be afraid of you, of them. But one has to understand that such fear is extremely strong among very many people within Israel, and has been reinforced by all sorts of inci¬dents, most recently perhaps by the attacks on us in the Gulf War. That has so permeated our textbooks, our curriculum, everything that is taught, that we need to work very hard at eliminating these stereotypes.

Nabil Kassis: : When I speak of the education that is needed to make coex¬istence a prospect in the future, I'm not talking only about formal educa¬tion in the schools, but about life experiences of people through contacts and exposure with the other party. People who trade with Israelis, people who see Israeli television, people who are exposed to Israeli music or Israeli musicians are all educated in their own way. Certain elements in their personalities may be touched and this may make them think differ¬ently about the other person.
I do not believe in stereotypes. I think most people are intelligent enough to realize the other side is not monolithic.

Alice Shalvi: You are optimistic.

Nabil Kassis: Each side has to see the obstacles to its own program of reeducating its own public, its own people. One can also presume to make suggestions as to what the other party can do.
In the past, I have put forth the opinion that a lot of reeducation has to take place on the Israeli side. From my knowledge of what we have been
teaching our children, I believe that if there are stereotypes, they must have occurred more on the other side. Israelis have stereotyped Arabs more than Palestinians have stereotyped Israelis.
For us, Israelis were aggressors, not as individuals, but as a nation that has displaced Palestinians. We were wronged and that wrong had to be corrected one way or another.
But I don't recall stereotyping of Israelis. You mentioned Israeli para¬noia. I do not want to use the word myself, but the fact that there is that deep emotion among Israelis means that a lot needs to be done on the Israeli side, as well as on the Palestinian side.
I remember once talking to a young Israeli who told a story about someone who survived the flood of San Francisco and who kept talking about it. When he went to heaven and was asked what he wanted, it was just to talk about the tidal wave in San Francisco.
This young Jewish Israeli man insisted that he was Noah. I said no. Your father might have been. You are not. You always dreamed of having a state. You have a state. You have it good. There are many things that you can do that are denied to Palestinians, and you come tell me you are Noah. Now, what kind of education would make a 20-year-old claim he is Noah, that he has suffered like Noah? Why do Israelis pass that suf¬fering on to the next generation? There is a lot to be done there, in that kind of reeducation.
On our part it's much easier. If we look into coexistence with Israel and accept a two-state solution on the land we have always claimed to be sole¬ly ours, then this is about all that we need to do in terms of reeducation within the political conflict.

Dan Bitan: On the political level, in day-to-day life, I think you're right. If the peace process becomes a real peace, if there is peace on the economic level, the political level, in day-to-day life, comings and goings, buying and selling and these kinds of things, there won't be many problems. Life will really take care of this.
The question is whether on a deeper level there will be a real reconcil¬iation. Here I see several obstacles. I can imagine, and here I agree with Manuel, that a nation-building moment can be 10 or 15 or 20 years, rather than two years. This is a bad moment for reconciliation in many cases, and could be an obstacle on the Palestinian side.
On the Israeli side, I very much agree with Alice. Zionist nation¬building started a hundred years ago consciously looking inward to try to build this kind of Jew different than the Diaspora Jew. The world was against us, or at least a very important part of it, as we saw in the Second
World War. So we developed a kind of siege society which was conscious, as a small minority, of being afraid, maybe not of the Palestinians, but of the Arab world, the multitude of Arabs. And it was a very long moment of nation-building that continued until just recently. For us, the image of the past is present. Two thousand years ago something took place, and it is as if it occurred yesterday. And there are lots of other examples. It's very difficult to free oneself from this kind of grasp of the past.

Alice Shalvi: In fact, this is almost a principle of Judaism. We say every Passover that in every gen¬eration a person must feel as if they themselves were in the Exodus from Egypt.
Also the enormity of the Holocaust, when such a tremendous proportion of our people were anni¬hilated simply because they were Jews, is not some¬thing about which you can lightly say that perhaps your parents suffered, particularly when anti-Semitism continues to be a very strong factor in Diaspora life.
It's going to take even more than a generation, I think. You can't isolate - which is what at the moment we are doing. We are isolating the Israel-Palestinian issue from the total picture.
I believe that between us there will be coexistence if both sides want it strongly enough, but I would want a little more understanding on your part of why this young man feels that he is Noah. It's going to be very hard to shake off that sense of being oneself the persecuted or potentially persecuted.

Nabil Kassis: This only underscores what I have just said, that a lot of reeducation is needed, and how difficult it is. I agree, with all due respect, that if one wants to make out of one's past experiences a religion for the present, then asking one to reeducate oneself is tantamount to changing one's religion, and I do not want to do that. But if that's the case, it presents a very difficult case, almost hopeless. If you have to relive past suffering as part of your religious practices, then there is very little I can do to help you.

Alice Shalvi: This wasn't suffering. This was emergence from suffering.

Nabil Kassis: This young man was oblivious to the suffering of the Palestinians; he was only concerned with his own suffering. We are talk¬ing about degrees of suffering.
One has to accept that one Jew who was killed in Babi Yar, who was oblivious to what happened to the scores of people who were killed after that, most probably had similar feelings to the Palestinian who was killed in Sabra and Shatilla.
I'm not saying the monstrosities are equal. I'm saying the individual-level experiences of people are very similar, and one has to accept that individu¬als suffer similarly. I am not talking about peoples, but individuals.
As far as we Palestinians are concerned, we are not about to negate our presence for peace to those who are paranoid. The most we can do is what we have done, and a little bit more in terms of educating our people about coexistence and peace and ending the conflict. But there's a limit to what one can do.

Alice Shalvi: May I just recall what was for me a turning point in my life, my first meeting with the Palestinian women. A Palestinian educator had very angrily said to us Israeli Jews - because there were some Diaspora Jews as well - "Don't corner to us with your Holocaust stories. We have our own Holocaust." Then a prominent Palestinian woman turned to her and said - and I thought this was a remarkable piece of compassion and understanding - "We have to understand the centrality of the Holocaust in the Jewish experience, not only because it is what gives the Jews a justification for demanding their own state, but because it is precisely what should make the Jews realize why we Palestinians also need a state of our own."
Insofar as one's own experience of suffering alerts one to similar suffering on the other side, it can be a very valuable mode of education. What you have undergone serves not only as self-pity but also as a method of sensitization to the plight of other people - and that's what I would hope that our experience of persecution would ultimately do to us.

Nabil Kassis: Can one not use experiences elsewhere to learn from? Of course I have my own suffering, but I'm not alone. Look at the Cambodians, at the Afghans, at the thousands and thousands of tribesmen killed in Africa, at the Biafrans. Look at the Jews of course.
I have an understanding of the feelings of people who suffered and the conclusions they drew out of their suffering. But I have my own suffering.

Manuel Hassassian: I want to comment on attitudes, and on overcoming our psychological apprehensions and barriers in the process of coexis¬tence. Israelis and the Jewish people have definitely been haunted by the Holocaust to the point where it is still a part of daily life for them. This has produced a siege mentality among the Israelis. They had to constantly demonize their enemies to justify the rationale of their aggression towards Palestinians or others because of this psychological phobia.
We have never witnessed in history any kind of discrimination coming from the minority towards the majority. It is always the majority that discrimi¬nates against the minority.
I would agree with Nabil that Palestinians have never adopted a psychology of obsession or paranoia, that we are not haunted by traumas of a Holocaust, but developed a culture of resistance under Occupation in order to transform our psychology and our attitudes towards more accommodation.
A good case is how we Palestinians have courageously transformed our attitude, from supporting the total dismantlement of Israel to a two-state solution, where we accept Israel on a level of parity with Palestinians and as a legitimate nation-state in the Arab world.
At least 65 percent are for the peace process in general. Among the intelligentsia, there is a certain kind of skepticism. I'm not saying they are against the peace process, but they are against, for example, the conduct of our negotiating team in Oslo. There is a basic difference here between being anti-peace and not being satisfied with the methods of the peace process.

Dan Bitan: I want to make a transition from this question of obstacles to what should be done. I'm now speaking about the formal Israeli school curriculum, textbooks, perhaps children's literature too.
Alice used the example of the Exodus from Egypt. You can say, okay, we, the Jewish nation, came out of Egypt, and you see it as a national event. You can also look at it, as many Christians have done, as a human phenomenon: coming out of slavery into freedom. Then you can use it to educate your chil¬dren about the importance of freedom for human beings, not for Jews.
About the Holocaust, I was a secondary school teacher. Every year ynu have to say something on Holocaust Day. The question is what do you say. Do you say "We Jews" or do you talk about racism? You can say the lesson is that human beings can do these kinds of things to human beings, and you can go the other particularistic way.
The question is how do you use your past, how do you teach your past and what kinds of lessons do you draw from your past. This is the basic challenge.
I would reevaluate the whole Israeli curriculum, the whole mass of textbooks and the ways we teach the Bible and history and geography. When you teach geography in Israel, you don't see that there were Palestinian villages and cities, but dwell mostly on Israeli settlements or cities or villages. Try to begin to see the others on the map.
This also means reeducation of teachers. This is my answer to the ques¬tion as to what actions should be taken on both sides in order to meet this challenge of education towards reconciliation, tolerance, coexistence and education for peace.

Alice Shalvi: On the assumption that formal education is firstly about enabling the student to develop attitudes and opinions on the basis of greater knowledge and greater understanding, I would agree with you that we need to reexamine the curriculum.
We must try, as far as humanly possible, to reach a frank and objective coverage of the historical issues, since history is all too easily distorted by a nationally subjective view. We need to revise textbooks. I understand from a dialogue I participated in under the auspices of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation a few weeks ago that, on the Jordanian side, the textbooks are also rather distorted as far as maps and so on are concerned. Teacher training is essential, and that teacher training must, again, include meetings between the two sides.
The issue of language is very import3.nt. I am always very disturbed by the fact that, whereas many Palestinians speak fluent Hebrew, very few Israelis speak fluent Arabic.
I would like to see a lot of meetings between people at similar levels ¬in other words, pupils meeting pupils, teachers meeting teachers, inspec¬tors at every of the educational system, media people, members of youth movements, meetings between counterparts.

Manuel Hassassian: We cannot talk about such joint ventures and coexis¬tence when Palestinians face an unsettled problem like the refugees. We can try to speculate about future perceptions so as to overcome these prob¬lems of mutual distrust and so on, but it will be very difficult under the present circumstances.
The second point is that, because we have a challenge to our culture emanating from Islam, we cannot try to become liberalized overnight.
To a certain degree we have to accommodate both these new trends of Westernization and the intrinsic values of Islam in our society. These will create a certain kind of imbalance in the future when we talk about coex¬istence and cooperation with Israel.
One major element towards liberalization is the question of economic development. Talk of education and ideology in the absence of the eco¬nomic development of our shattered Palestinian society is meaningless.

Dan Bitan: You do not believe dialogues and contact between youngsters could be fruitful or could be helpful now?

Manuel Hassassian: It could be fruitful, but not to the point where it would reach our ultimate aim of mutuality.

Alice Shalvi: I wouldn't start with youngsters. I would start with oldsters.

Nabil Kassis: I was wondering about the relevance of the experience that Israel has had with its Arab community. I am talking about interaction and breaking down stereotypes and bringing harmonization.
When we talk of meeting these challenges and finding ways to over¬come them, I agree with Manuel. But the assumption is that once we have reached agreement on final-status issues, then we will have at least an agenda for how to end these disagreements of the conflict. After that, you still need a kind of reeducation, of course.

Dan Bitan: And now work, each of us, in his/her own community?

Nabil Kassis: Yes. Still, what we are doing now will leave an im¬pact. Whatever we are now doing permeates to some small degree the societies - both societies. But at least you sow some change now and there will be a time when this can flourish and we can think about bigger changes. There is nothing wrong with sowing this now. We should all decide to do so. But we should not expect that it will blossom right away. We need fertile soil and the right setting for that.

Dan Bitan: That means that you are moderately optimistic, but you cau¬tion us on cooperation and dialogues now.

Nabil Kassis: I caution both sides, us and you, about this. I have been doing something of this nature since 1980, and I know from first-hand experience what a slow process it is.
Recently there has been some faster movement, but then again, it's staggered. But there is nothing of this avalanche of change we dream of seeing in our lifetime. Not yet.

Manuel Hassassian: No great leaps.

Dan Bitan: Because I think the peace process is a process. It has already taken about three years, and it will take another two or three years before anything final is signed, unfortunately.
I would like to thank you on behalf of all of us at the Journal.