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When Israel, Jewish identity and education are each in a state of profound flux, Israel education for Jews will necessarily be dynamic. In response, an orienting prism is proposed which seeks that Jews inquire appreciatively into Israel with diverse Israelis, whilst using historical thinking. The aim is that there emerge numerous ethical paths to realize patriotic dreams to participate actively in the cosmopolitan world, thus enabling Jewish flourishing.

Following the lead of Israel Education: A Philosophical Analysis, Gringras first explores the idea of complexity in Israel Education, suggesting that inconsistencies are due more to emotional complexity than to the intellectual complexity of the subject matter. Due to these ideological and emotional complexities, Israel has become a wedge issue in the Jewish community abroad. Different perspectives, and different attitudes muddy the waters where disagreement undermines a "sacred" approach. Instead Israel educators should no longer aim to "transmit a broad … commitment" to anything but to the argument itself. The paper goes on to explicate how a pedagogy of argument might benefit Israel education. By centering the disagreement rather than the consensus, we invite the learner into an active involvement in their identity development that includes a dynamic engagement with Zionism's questions and Israel's answers. This approach does not suggest one stops teaching information about Zionism and Israel; it recommends altering its purpose. The educator would look to teach as much information the students might need in order to engage in a healthy argument about the topic. An ongoing commitment to holding a growth mindset, to learning multiple contrasting viewpoints, and to having the confidence and enthusiasm to argue for their perception of the collective good might describe the behavior of the ideal graduate: someone who enjoys a good argument about Israel.

This paper offers a philosophical analysis of Israel education as reflected in the Jewish education research literature. Six distinct conceptions are identified that all share an educational objective to engender personal and collective Jewish commitment with Israel as an integral value. This conceptual mapping revealed the need for writers on Israel education to clarify what they mean by the idea of Israel's "complexity" and to address the philosophical difficulty with the reliance of much Jewish religious identity outside of Israel on comprehensive liberalism. This paper addresses this philosophical challenge by outlining an alternative paradigm of Israel education called mature Zionism.

Identity Zionism as a Mature Zionist Approach to Israel Education Israel Education should be layered, accurate, factual, historical, and able to withstand the most exacting, objective scrutiny. But Israel Education, like all forms of Jewish education, should also instill pride, foster a sense of belonging, and inspire. ,Israel Education should cultivate a sense of Jewish citizenship, urging students, in Israel and throughout the Jewish world to take responsibility for themselves and their people. To achieve that, this article advances a vision of "Identity Zionism," emphasizing that Zionism is not just a political stance or a movement, but a journey of the Jewish soul from deep from within the Jewish soul -- and tradition. This approach is historically valid -- just as Theodor Herzl's Political Zionism addressed the Jewish Problems of the 1890s -- anti-Semitism and assimilation -- Identity Zionism addresses the most pressing Jewish problem -- and Western problem of today -- what the sociologist Emil Durkheim called "anomie." Going far beyond Israel advocacy, Identity Zionism offers Jews a sense of community and a sense of purpose, while also respecting them as individuals. In so doing, Identity Zionism resonates with some of the latest analyses of what young modern Westerners are seeking, be they Jewish or non-Jewish.

Everyone seems to agree that Israel education is complex. But all too often, the concept of "complexity" becomes a euphemism for the existence of unpleasant truths about Israel that challenge students' preconceived notions. I propose that instead of focusing on cultivating attachment to Israel, Israel educators should offer students an account of Israeli history grounded in careful historical research while preserving a vision of the Jewish future that remains compatible with national pride. Drawing on the work of Richard Rorty, Maxime Rondinson and James Baldwin, I suggest a new perspective on some of the tensions in israel education. National pride can be maintained by presenting a narrative that honestly acknowledges a nation's past, but inspires students to strive for a better future.

This review outlines the historiography of education in the Middle East, focusing on events from the nineteenth century through the 1980s, and on Bilad al-Sham, mainly Jordan, Palestine and Israel, Iraq, and Northern Africa, including Egypt and Türkiye. Modernisation and nationalism were the main lenses through which educators, researchers, and students viewed the significance of their schooling in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East. Scholars likewise take these frameworks as key to understanding the importance of education in the region's history. This review suggests that historians ought to recognise the saliency of previous frameworks for the actors who lived them while analysing the region beyond those limits. It advocates incorporating education more consistently into other fields, such as histories of the environment and race. It recommends that historians of education include those fields in their own work, while following historical actors, texts and ideologies across regimes and borders.

For Jewish Ethiopian refugees at the Tikvah summer camp in Gondar, Ethiopia, Jewish informal education keeps their dreams of Jerusalem alive while simultaneously reinforcing Israeli gatekeeping practices. The ethnic and religious ideologies underlying Israeli nation-building and statecraft surface in the campers' exterritorial encounter with Israel's vision of an "ideal" Jew. Through a collaborative, community-based approach, this study provides a holistic representation of Tikvah as a world suspended between Israeli socialization and informal Jewish education, exposing the distance between the diverse traditions and identities of Jews across the world and Israel's reconfiguration of what it means to be a "Jew."

Background: The sociocultural turn redefined learning in terms of shifting identities. In recent years, learning scientists have explored the connections between learning and various types of identities, including disciplinary identity, gender, race, and more. In this article we focus on national identity, to understand how it is constructed and how it might be made more inclusive through learning. Methods: Drawing on sociolinguistics and discourse analysis methods, we present a telling case study aimed at elucidating previously obscure theoretical relations by providing a rich and detailed account of a single student whose national identity shifted over the course of a school year. Findings: Our analysis shows how Joshua, a 9th grade secular Jewish-Israeli student, constructed his national identity. Joshua's identity developed across three stages, which were marked by a shift from an essentialist disposition to a constructionist one and by an increasing sense of belonging. Contribution: We highlight a connection between learners' views on the continuum between essentialism and constructionism and their degree of belongingness. Our findings suggest that a constructionist approach to identity can translate into a greater sense of belonging and help ameliorate some cases of social marginalization.

Over the past decades, neo-Zionist discourse has gain prominence in Israel. This approach, which gives preference to the definition of Israel as a Jewish state over its definition as a democracy, is a specific version authoritarian populism. This paper explores how educational discourses, policies and curricular changes are being shaped by right-wing populist organization and politicians to strengthen New-Zionism, while delegitimising liberal-democratic values. The paper draws on three examples. The first focuses on the campaign to ban the activist groups 'Breaking the Silence' -- a group of army veteran who collect testimonies on Israel's misconducts in the occupied territories -- from entering schools. The second example is the case of 'Im Tirtzu', a right-wing organization, and their campaign against left-wing influences in the academy. A third example focuses on the changes to the compulsory civic curriculum -- an example to the ways in which education is used to perpetuate a particular notion of Jewish nationalism. These cases help reveal the reactions of academic institutions to such actions, and the partial acceptance they have gained in recent years. They also show how the boundaries of the political were redrawn and the role education policy and institutions play in delegitimizing left-wing critique.

This study focuses on the intersection of global and local identity as it pertains to the case of Israeli youth studying at United World Colleges (UWC) versus those studying at local secondary schools. We examine how education at UWC schools shapes the national identity of Israeli high-school seniors, in contradiction with their socio-economically matched peers who studied at local Israeli schools that encourage a distinctly locally oriented identity. Specifically, twenty Israeli youth participated in semi-structured interviews; ten of them had just completed their final year of studies at UWC schools abroad, whereas the other ten had recently graduated from the Israeli public education system. We show that Israeli youth at both UWC schools and Israeli schools were pushed away from a cosmopolitan outlook, each for different reasons. As such, we discuss how complex relations with one's nation's political conflicts promote locally oriented identities even for students who were educated with a cosmopolitan ethos and surroundings, such as Israeli students at UWC schools.

While the literature on the history of history education in Israel is vast, little has been written about it from teachers' perspectives. This article focuses on teachers' motivation for teaching history and explores what formed the ways in which they understood their profession in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of great social and political change in Israel. By focusing on history teachers' reaction to the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the introduction of a new history curriculum (1975) and to the diversification of the Israeli society, the article shows that, in a rapidly changing world, these teachers saw themselves first and foremost as the ones in charge of maintaining unbroken links between their students and their national past. This often put history teachers in conflict with their professional surroundings, giving rise to heated arguments over the question: what should be the purpose of history education?

A qualitative practitioner research study was conducted with 31 high school students studying religion contemporary Israeli society. The purpose of the study was to understand how using cartoons written and illustrated by the religious Jewish-Israeli settler Shay Charka challenged students to think about religion in Israeli society in new ways and whether introducing perspectives that were foreign to their North American Jewish education led to new ways of relating to and understanding Jewish-Israeli communities. Results of this small-scale study yielded that the comics were successful in introducing new ways of thinking about religion and in introducing a more complex portrait of Israeli society. As a pedagogical device, comics proved to be of salience and interest to the learners, which also led students to be motivated to study them. Students were particularly interested in the ways that Charka subverted their assumptions of gender in religious-Israeli communities and this specifically led to increased awareness of religious diversity in Israeli society.

Over the past few years, the civics curriculum for Israeli high-schools has become the centre of a heated political debate. Following this debate, in May 2016 a revised official textbook was introduced. This paper draws on an in-depth analysis of the revised official textbook, comparing it to the previous official textbook published in 2000. The analysis focuses on the discursive changes that took place regarding the ways in which the revised textbook conceptualises Israeli citizenship. A particular focus is placed on how the revised version of the official textbook often prioritises the ethno-national model of the nation state over and above the commitment to democratic values, including minority rights. The main argument of this paper is that these changes are a reflection of the penetration of a neo-Zionist discourse into the civics curriculum.

This study applies the notion of 'alternative futures' in globalisation and education by focusing specifically on the intersection between religion and education. Through an in-depth exploration utilising a case-study approach, we delve into the organisational dynamics of an Israeli school catering to a closed-off, traditional Jewish religious community while also proactively embedding specific forms of internationalisation. We identify and analyse the conflicting rationales and agenda maintained by this school based on interviews with the school's community, including teachers, superintendents, school leadership, and parents. We argue that the ideas of segregation, religionalisation, and nationalism are nurtured through the hybridity of the networks of influence, custom-tailored by the school's leadership to serve this unique community. In particular, we analyse the school's distinctive practices, norms, and routines designed to overcome the gap between the seemingly contradictory values of universalism vs particularity; globalisation vs nationalism; segregation vs unity; and religion vs modernity, and the ways that these dynamics play out in a country struggling for (self)-recognition as a Jewish and Democratic State, while being situated in an intractable internal and external conflict.

This theoretical paper is about the role of emotions in historical reasoning in the context of classroom discussions. Peer deliberations around texts have become important practices in history education according to progressive pedagogies. However, in the context of issues involving emotions, such approaches may result in an obstacle for historical clairvoyance. The expression of strong emotions may bias the use of sources, compromise historical reasoning, and impede argumentative dialogue. Coping with emotions in the history classrooms is a new challenge in history education. In this paper, we suggest that rather than attempting to foster positive emotion only or to avoid emotions all together, we should look at ways of engaging with emotion in history teaching. We present examples of peer deliberations on charged historical topics according to three pedagogical approaches that address emotions in different ways. The protocols we present open numerous questions: (a) whether facilitating engagement with own and the other's emotions may lead to better processing of information and better deliberation of a historical question; (b) whether promoting national pride boosts reliance on collective narratives; and (c) whether adopting a critical teaching approach eliminates emotions and biases. Based on these examples and findings in social psychology, we bring forward working hypotheses according to which we suggest that instead of dodging emotional issues, teachers should harness emotions--not only positive but also negative ones, to critical and productive engagement in classroom activities.

The Israeli education system is divided and segregated along the lines of nationality and religiosity. While Israeli society and its education system, in particular, have generally been subjected to the influence of globalisation, including universal discourses of citizenship, in many ways it remains highly particularistic and nationalistic. To a large extent, what we see today in terms of school curricula in Israel stands in contradiction to the main trends in civic education in the developed world. It expresses a move towards neo-nationalistic religious (neo-Zionist) discourse which overtly gives preference to the Jewishness of the state over and above its commitment to democratic universal principles. This article will focus on these recent discursive changes. It will examine the space, or rather the lack of it, that is given to the Palestinian identity and narratives in the official civics textbook for high schools. The article explores several discursive practices adopted by the textbook in reinforcing the marginal position of Palestinian citizens, constructing them as the ultimate 'others' and undermining their civic status and rights.

Modern historical research challenges religious education by undermining the arguments in favour of the existence of a supreme power who is responsible for patterns of reality. This article explores how the new generation of history textbooks of Religious Zionism, one of Israel's ideologically most influential populations, cope with this dilemma. Two international models of faith-based history teaching that we characterize the 'national-religious' and the 'divine', analyse the novelty and singularity of these textbooks. The analysis reveals that the new Religious-Zionist textbooks surmount the gap between faith in divine responsibility for human events and professional research and analysis of these events by creating a hybrid learning process that has two parallel interpretive dimensions. The first presents a historical process that remains formally true to the principles of reason and the discipline, although segueing to tendentious content at sensitive junctions. The second explores a metahistorical dimension in which these principles are bracketed with and subjugated to a theological, metaphysical, interpretation of history. The findings concerning both the two international models and the unique historiosophical stance of the Religious-Zionist textbooks provide fertile soil for future research on faith-based history teaching in a variety of theological, political, and social contexts and circumstances.

In this essay we develop the concept of 'cosmopolitan nationalism', offering a working definition and suggesting ways sociologists of education might draw on it in their future work. We show how it is a useful analytical lens through which to examine contemporary policies and practices that navigate global processes (ranking systems, mobility of people, expectations for futures) but also take account of nationalistic tendencies, as well as local and national attempts to challenge persistent inequalities within education systems. By using policy examples from three countries (South Korea, Israel and the US), we illuminate how cosmopolitan nationalism is evident across various initiatives in these countries, and the varied implications this has for education systems in terms of equality, access and quality.

In recent years, a number of studies have explored the link between Zionism and the latent racism prevalent in Israeli society. As a result of these studies, it has become clear that successive generations of Israeli citizens (and non-citizens) are exposed to a single historical and cultural narrative. Such a narrative is intentionally designed to strengthen the emergent ethno-national character of Israeli democracy. This study examines a selection of Jewish--Israeli teachers' reflections on teaching in Israeli high school history and civics classrooms, and the institutionalized racism that they encounter both within the textbooks and from their students. I will demonstrate that these reflections are examples of negotiating "dilemmatic spaces", resulting from the unique 'structural conditions and relations to everyday practices' that Israeli educators must face. Israeli teachers must mediate the curricular materials vis-à-vis the degrees of freedom they are provided to teach counter-historical narratives and their own emotional responses to both the content of the textbooks and their students' reactions to the dominant national narrative presented therein.

The purpose of this paper is to problematize the place of religious authority in politics and education. Specifically, this essay highlights the role of religious authority in establishing a moral order that values compliance and conformity at the expense of liberty and critique. In doing so, the essay reflects on Israeli politics and Islamic political thought. Pondering on both, the essay explains how the authority conferred through the use of religious language creates a condition of hyper-solidarity. Under conditions of hyper-solidarity, religious authority becomes pervasive, permeating, and more entrenched and difficult to challenge. It becomes increasingly difficult to be critical, because to criticize is to forgo that hyper-solidarity, and to assume a position of exteriority. Therefore, obedience becomes a choice and a position taken in favor of stability, consistency, and continuity of the group.

It appears as if a discussion about the need for patriotic education is relevant not only for the Western countries, which have many nationalities and cultures, but also especially for the State of Israel, whose social cohesion is being weakened and there is a fear that the different factions in the society are unable to work together. In this paper, I take a much-needed first step for a systematic study of the issue of education for patriotism, as a solution for the construction of social solidarity between and within groups of Israeli citizens. I examine the justification and the practicability of a cosmopolitan-patriotic education as a substitute for a unique local patriotic education in contemporary Israel. My main argument is that cosmopolitan patriotism education is inadequate for the current societal and political atmosphere in Israel. Not even in a Zionistic-Jewish-Israeli cosmopolitan version of three Jewish thinkers: Herzl Levinas, and Gur-Zeev.

The current field of Israel engagement has been significantly challenged by young North American Jews' reported alienation from contemporary Israel. Literature in the last decade has addressed this challenge in depth, offering a wide variety of theoretical analyses and recommendations for program development. The present study is the first to thoroughly focus on one of these programs, the young emissaries ("shinshinim") program, a joint initiative between the Jewish Agency for Israel and a growing number of Jewish communities around the world. Data were collected in the Greater Toronto Area, out of which the local Jewish Federation operates the largest "shinshinim" program worldwide. Levels of emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement with Israel were assessed in 47 local institutions' representatives, 84 host families, and 197 high school students in relation to their interaction with "shinshinim". Changes in attitudes toward Israel, Jewish tradition, and peoplehood, following their Year of Service, were also assessed in 36 "shinshinim". All data were collected using questionnaires developed especially for the purposes of this study. Results show that the "shinshinim" program has a significant and positive impact on host families' level of Israel engagement and that the Year of Service has a significant and positive impact on the "shinshinim" inclination to adopt Jewish traditions and to affiliate themselves with a Jewish Peoplehood. Results also show that the program is positively associated with Israel engagement among students and Jewish institutions' representatives. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The state educational system in Israel reflects the declared character of the state as a "Jewish state", and, consequently, the deep inter-group divisions in society, including a large Palestinian Arab minority. This study demonstrates how Israeli educational policy and curriculum are designed to support the Jewish nation-building project. As such, they silence the Palestinian Arab narrative while reshaping regional history for both Jewish and Arab students to fit the Zionist narrative. Furthermore, Israeli educational policy has played an essential role in consigning Palestinian Arabs to the social, economic and political margins of Israeli society.

This paper explores the process of national identity development, and closely related themes among Palestinian student activists in the Israeli universities. Informed by the tradition of social identity theory, in-depth qualitative inquiry was conducted with an intensity sample of 35 Palestinian student activists attending the major five Israeli universities. Grounded theory analysis conducted on the open-ended interviews, document analysis and field observation revealed five dominant themes, which characterize Palestinian student activist. First, national identity was conceived as a cause of involvement in student activism, and as a psychological construct, which was reconstructed and developed through the experience of activism itself. Second, a sense of group relative deprivation in comparison with the dominant Jewish group was prevalent and closely related to the students' sense of national identity. Third, political party membership constitutes a mid-range identity linking the individual and the collective levels of identity. Fourth, women student activists advocated an intertwined feminist-nationalist agenda. Finally, psychosocial development and adjustment was revealed as an outcome of involvement in student activism. Findings reinforce the vital role of the student movement as a national socialization context in light of the continuing Israeli hegemonic practices over Palestinian formal education. (Contains 1 table.)

The return of religion and religiosity, on almost all social, cultural, and political fronts, has informed the academic agenda of the last decade. It is marked by a growing scholarly use of the concept of the "postsecular." Against this background, this article brings the concept of the postsecular to bear on the transformation of contemporary Jewish national education in Israel. Its main argument is that the arrangements currently on display between secular and sacral notions in national Jewish education illustrate the rise of a new theocratic vision for Israel. This neoreligious thrust challenges the former interplay between secular and religious notions, which has served as the basis for Jewish national (i.e., Zionist) education. The article also places the notion of a postsecular emergent society within a particular social and political context, pointing to a broader and much richer phenomenon than hitherto suggested.

If national education is, as Ilan Gur-Ze'ev thinks, inevitably a matter of agents for and victims of a national system, only a "counter-education" can correct it. Martin Buber shared many of Gur-Ze'ev's concerns, but advocated a more positive view of national education. This essay examines Buber's development of his pedagogical theory in its context, notes his influence on several educational models, investigates how his view of national education either continues or is ignored in the modern State of Israel, and shows that his positive view draws not only on his "I-Thou" dialogical insight but also on his advocacy of a myth of Zion, a myth that provides an alternative not just to the dominant myths in Israel today but also to Gur-Ze'ev's counter-education.

This article discusses strategies used by Arab principals and teachers in Israel to cope with dilemmas involved in education for national identity stemming from conflict between two national narratives. While the Israeli Ministry of Education expects the Arab education system to educate students according to the Jewish State's values, Palestinian Arab society expects its schools to educate its children according to Palestinian Arab national-cultural values. A qualitative research employed a semi-structured interview to elicit views on this issue from 7 principals and 14 teachers in the Arab education system in Israel. The findings indicate a conflictual reality. Interviewees expressed fear, humiliation and affront when required to obey Ministry of Education instructions in contradiction to attitudes prevalent in their society. They therefore developed coping strategies to foster students' national identity without disrupting the necessary balance; primarily the construction of a covert learning program through manipulations in the official overt learning program. This study contributes to our understanding of minority education in a reality of conflict between the state and its national minority.

This study examines the interface between ethnicity and nationality in a nationalized educational site--the annual school trip--that took place in a Jewish high school in Israel that serves underprivileged ethnic groups. Based on ethnographic field work, I analyze how the Ashkenazi (central-eastern European origin) hegemonic national culture that is embedded in the field trip is worked out by the Mizrahi (Asian and north African origin) students, in light of their ethnic background and the ethnic Ashkenazi/Mizrahi division that characterizes the Israeli society. Although both groups share the same national sentiment, the analysis exposes the different ways the pedagogical practices used by the trip represented the national hegemonic culture and the ways it has been contested and reshaped along ethnic lines while reflecting the existing ethnic borders that the pupils were trying to widen.

This article reviews research on history education that addresses recent or ongoing conflict since 1990. History education is recognized as a key site for constructing identity, transmitting collective memory, and shaping "imagined communities," which makes its revision or reform a complex and important part of education in emergencies work. The article reviews 42 empirical studies from 11 countries, exploring whether recent conflict forms part of national curricula and, where it does, how this teaching is approached. Young people learn about recent conflict in all of the cases reviewed; in the majority, curriculum is one source for this learning, but in some cases the history of recent conflict is taught without curricular guidance or not at all. Where recent conflict is taught, the review finds a reliance on a traditional, collective memory approach to disseminating national narratives, although often in social studies rather than history classrooms. In many cases, these narratives are top-down and ethno-nationalist and rely on devices like mythical past unity and the exceptionalism of conflict. The review concludes by suggesting that actors undertaking a revision or reform of history curriculum attend to recent conflict as an "active past" and offers some promising ideas for approaching such a past in history curricula.

A new approach to Israel education has emerged to counteract what has been a tendency to romanticize Israel by avoiding criticism; it presumes that Israel engagement has much to offer a meaningful Jewish identity, but only when encountered critically, taking into account Israel's many complexities. However, prevailing scholarly trends may not provide a clear stance on which to base critique and academic criticism may raise hard questions about the very idea of a Jewish and democratic state. This article addresses these concerns by offering a conceptual framework for scholarly study of Israel called "Mature Zionism" in which to ground a critical engagement with Israel that is genuinely educational.

Education systems worldwide have served as a nation-building apparatus and national consciousness facilitators since the appearance of the modern nation-state. With the emergence of globalization in recent decades, however, a growing presence of cosmopolitanism and internationalization can be traced in education policy and school curricula. Schools currently face contradicting pressures for internationalization on one hand and nationalism on another. The major aim of this work is to inquire when and why those pressures occur in one public school system and to analytically trace these processes over time. We analyze a test case of the transformations in the Israeli education system, focusing on history curricula, and on the rationale for such transformations during the last 20 years. We undertake a comprehensive analysis that combines qualitative and quantitative data at policy and curriculum levels to provide insight into the ways by which global and local processes influence national curriculum.

There is growing interest in the impact of Jewish and Arab historical narratives on intergroup relations and conflict. A randomized placement comparative study set out to examine it empirically. Conventional-Authoritative official narrative, Empathetic Dual narrative, and Critical-Disciplinary multiple-source teaching interventions were designed around the topic of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Seventy-five Jewish and 85 Arab Israeli adolescents were placed in each of the three different approaches to teaching history and in a control group. Following the learning intervention, participants from both communities were paired by condition, and discussed the causes and possible solution of the refugee problem. Dominance and agreement in discussion were analyzed, revealing a significant effect of teaching approach. Findings show discussions in Empathetic Dual narrative, and Critical-Disciplinary feature a lower degree of dominating discourse by the dominant group. Conventional-Authoritative approach featured lower frequency of agreement on solution for the problems caused by the conflict, compared to control and multiple perspective teaching approaches.

Since the concept of nationalism first emerged on the world stage, universities have played a key role in its collective formation and dissemination to the masses. Established under challenging circumstances and subjected to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the wake of the 1967 war, Palestinian institutions of higher education have trodden a thin line between the training of human resources requisite to their national movement and compliance with the dictates of a military regime bent on curbing such aspirations. This research examines the various roles played by Palestinian universities in the ongoing struggle for national independence. Spanning from its inception to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, this collection of first-hand accounts, historical documents and critical analysis explores the evolution and adaptation of Palestinian higher education amidst three decades of social and political turmoil.

This study aims to examine the affect of the degree of religiosity of student teachers, and their nationalism and scientific background on their perception of the nature of science (NOS). First year Arab and Jewish religiously observant, traditional and secular students in Israel (101 in number) with different scientific backgrounds participated in the study. The students completed a closed questionnaire with 35 statements that explored diverse aspects of the perception of the NOS. The findings show that previous scientific knowledge or belonging to the Jewish or Arab nation barely impacts the perceptions of the NOS. In contrast, religious belief, whether Jewish or Muslim, had significant impact. The more religious the students the greater weight they afforded culture and society versus science, and their support of the freedom of inquiry and of the tentativeness of science declined. The educational implications of the findings are discussed in view of the social increase in dogmatic religious belief alongside the unreserved exacerbated skepticism of every truth. Emphasis is placed on reinforcing the liberal dialogue approach that does not fear criticizing tradition, according to which it is possible to educate to critical thought without negating religious belief.

In this article I wish to trace three everyday moments in which my Mizrahi Ethnic Identity intersects with the academic one, and then extract experiences of ethnic otherness that are built within those moments. Exploring these moments while considering Mizrahi identity construction, practices of otherness, and terms of silences enables a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which hegemonic practices work and oppress Mizrahi subjects, and how these subjects work against them.

The teaching of religion raises opportunities to reduce prejudicial beliefs and attitudes among students. In this study, 30 religion, history, and civics teachers in Israel, East Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Territories were interviewed about their motivations for teaching religion. This study found that teachers expressed a variety of motivations, some of which complemented and some of which conflicted with best practices in prejudice reduction. The study concludes that there is an unrealized opportunity to help teachers approach their teaching with tools that can reduce prejudice, and recommends several such tools.

This paper discusses the attempts of Israeli education, in a similar fashion to other national educational systems, to shape a territorial identity for the pupils of the new State. The Israeli school used a variety of educational means to shape a person who would be modelled on his new birthplace's landscape, including the use of textbooks, illustrations, and maps, to aid in the process of creating a desired image of the homeland's landscape. The hidden curriculum used textbooks employing mathematics questions to learn details about the geographical expanse. Alongside the use of a written curriculum, Israeli education made use of the extra curriculum by becoming physically familiar with a place and creating a local time based on the seasons of the year. Local nature was studied during "moledet" (homeland) lessons, similar to the Weimar Republic of Germany's Heimatkunde studies, as well as during other subjects, such as nature studies and Bible. These studies integrated national goals and progressive humanistic educational schools of thought which viewed a child's encounter with nature as a vital part of his or her education. The readers, which were built on a timeline of the seasons and the school celebrating nature festivals, created a natural time frame for the pupils in which they acted and studied. The discussion about the ways territorial identity was structured by the Israeli education system is another chapter in the wider debate about national education and illustrates the schools' function as one of the State's national social agents, particularly in its early years. (Contains 1 figure and 79 footnotes.)

This paper examines militarisation in child culture in Israel's transition from a pre-state society engaged in the nation-building process to statehood. The paper studies children's culture and the literary corpus for children created in the 1940s and 1950s in Jewish Palestine, before and after Israel's establishment. It investigates the main stages in the rapid development of the militaristic narrative for children--from the beginning of World War II in 1939, through the War of Independence in 1948, and during the first decade of statehood. By examining the nature of the national-military children's story, I demonstrate the extent to which militarisation in Israeli children's culture was dictated from above. I also argue that society's rapid change following the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 brought about a dramatic shift in the attitude of state institutions, and especially the education system, towards the militaristic narrative addressed towards children that was vigorously promoted prior to 1948. (Contains 33 footnotes.)

This study focuses on "Independence Day", an episode of "Arab Labor" (first season, 2008), a pioneer bilingual Hebrew-Arabic satirical Israeli TV series, written by Sayed Kashua, an Arab-Israeli author and journalist. "Arab Labor" was a breakthrough in the Israeli popular TV scape, where, as a rule, Arab-Israeli citizens are either depicted stereotypically, or as symbolically "extinct". Broadcast in primetime, the series exposed Jewish-Israeli viewers for the first time to AI "petit bourgeoisies"--a middle-class Arab-Israeli "normative" family. The episode is a core example of the way in which satire is employed to promote the "liberal bargain" between the Jewish democratic liberal state and its Arab-Israeli citizens, depicting a lifestyle vacillating between hybrid multilayered identity options, within the complex, often difficult reality of the Arab-Israeli citizens in Israel. Methodology combined both integrated CDA and focus groups, in order to reveal the modes in which deep cultural constructs are embodied in the episode, and to explore how these representation modes are deciphered by middle-class academic Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Israeli female viewers. As opposed to the prevailing extreme nationalism accompanied by multiculturalism, to a large degree as a consequence of neo-liberal economy, our analysis and findings reveal that "Arab Labor" suggests an alternative vision for Israeli society: the "liberal bargain", which favours liberalism and cultural pluralism within a welfare nation state, in which disputes and conflicts are peacefully resolved. (Contains 22 notes.)

This study is based on data from teachers' research reports in the context of an in-service workshop for professional development for teachers of the bilingual-integrated Palestinian-Jewish Schools in Israel. We used conventional qualitative methods, looking for patterns and thematic issues of relevance, which were then coded to allow for further analysis and triangulated with field notes taken during workshop discussion sessions. Findings point to the dominance of Hebrew in Israeli society as being replicated in the schools, to the detriment of Arabic language learning among the pupils. This situation stems from three major themes as perceived and reinforced by the participant teachers: national identification versus coexistence, scholastic achievements versus ideology and traditional pedagogy versus teaching for retention of the cultural heritage. Based on the results, we suggest a pedagogical model of inter-comprehension and inter-cultural communicative competence as an initial stage in bridging the gap between declared policy and practical results in conflict-ridden contexts. (Contains 1 table.)

This article presents an in-depth analysis of two commemoration events in a first-grade classroom of a bilingual school in Israel. The two events presented--the commemorations of the Holocaust Day and the Memorial Day--derive from a longitudinal ethnographic study of integrated bilingual schools in Israel. The analysis of these events shows teachers' and students' ambivalent emotions about the Other, as a result of pedagogical efforts to engage with the work of mourning in integrated classrooms, while attempting simultaneously to promote mutual respect and understanding. We further argue that ambivalent emotions in the context of integrated schooling bring to the surface serious concerns about symmetry and asymmetry; such concerns reveal elements of the emotional risks and benefits as a result of bringing children from conflicting groups closer. The implications for teaching and learning in integrated school settings of conflict-ridden societies are discussed. (Contains 1 note.)

The adoption of multiculturalism and multiethnic views of society seems to be a convergent tendency among Western democracies where population flows are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. However, the established citizenship models and migrant groups' experiences have different impacts on the multicultural discourse in each country. This "integration without assimilation" thesis has been examined comparing two countries--Israel and France--that differ largely in their definition of nationhood. Despite large demographic changes in both countries, the evolution of conceptions of citizenship in France and in Israel reflects a reaffirmation of existing models--the particularist Israeli ethno-nationalism and the universalist French republicanism and laicite--and the continuity of their assimilationist and homogenizing tendencies towards a Jewish uniform identity in the former and towards a uniform secular (or catho-laique) identity in the latter. (Contains 3 notes.)

This article discusses citizenship policies in Israel within the context of language, ideology, and nationalism. According to the "Law of Return", Jewish immigrants are entitled to be granted citizenship with no prior conditions; Arabs who were living in Palestine in 1948 (the time the state was founded) and their children are entitled to citizenship as well. All other groups, including Arabs who were not living in Israel in 1948, can obtain citizenship only in very rare cases. In these cases the law requires that they have "some knowledge of Hebrew," yet official tests are not used. In Israel, both Hebrew and Arabic are official languages but Hebrew has a preferred status by being the language that symbolizes the collective national identity of Israel as a Jewish sate. Although Hebrew is not required for citizenship, Jewish immigrants are faced with strong ideological pressure to acquire and use Hebrew in all domains of life. For Arabs, Arabic is used in Arab communities, at home, and as a medium of instruction in schools, but not at universities. Thus, while Israel does not implement "a language "testing" regime" for citizenship, knowledge of Hebrew plays a central role in implicit and covert ways and thus prevents full participation in civic life (Shohamy, 2006). By using the term "hollow citizenship" (Jamal, 2007), we demonstrate that in Israel there are different levels and types of citizenship. Thus, discrimination based on language is experienced by both Jews and Arabs despite their citizenship because language plays a crucial role in meaningful civic participation. Specifically, we show that for Arabs in Israel hollowness implies limited rights for entering and participating in higher education. Moreover, we claim that the hegemony of Hebrew in Israel is a gatekeeping device from societal participation to all linguistic minorities, including Jews, as the power of Hebrew as the single hegemonic language "hollows" the citizenship of various groups.

This paper advances the analysis of multiculturalism by examining multiculturalism in a contextualized manner. To understand multiculturalism and assess its effects on the recognition of migrant children, researchers need to analyse multicultural practices in schools by taking into account the social mirrors resulting from different social and structural conditions, such as national ideologies and the ethos of reception. The analysis of multicultural policies in four different types of daycare centres enrolling migrant workers' children in Israel--community, Catholic, municipal, and those supported by private associations--points to three types of contextualized multicultural models: contextualized misrecognition, contextualized recognition, and de-contextualized recognition. By juxtaposing recognition or misrecognition appearing at the daycare level with legal and ideological social mirrors, multicultural patterns can acquire a different meaning. Municipal daycares with a few migrant children as well as daycares supported by private associations that adopt a "blind-homogenizing" approach reflect an absence of recognition that is contextualized in the larger society. Community daycares adopting a survival approach, Catholic daycares applying a "business as usual" approach, and municipal daycares enrolling a large number of migrant children adopting a multicultural approach reflect different degrees of cultural and religious recognition. However, when analysed in the larger local or national context, this recognition results in a de-contextualized recognition that suppresses the beneficial character of the multicultural education provided. (Contains 30 notes.)