Education during the First Intifada
During the First Intifada in Palestine, from 1987 to 1991, the Israeli government repeatedly ordered almost all Palestinian schools closed for various lengths of time, including every single Palestinian university. The government justified its orders on the widespread participation of Palestinian youth in demonstrations, saying that schools had become hotspots of unrest and stone throwing. The school closures became a key site of non-violent resistance among Palestinians, with popular committees organising a variety alternative underground classrooms. Those underground classrooms were in turn banned by the Israeli government and targeted by Israeli crackdowns, ultimately causing significant disruption to the education of many Palestinian youth.
Yamila Hussein of the Radical Teacher has argued that "during the 1987 intifada, Palestinian education—formal and informal—effectively became illegal as Israel closed schools and universities indefinitely, and Israeli soldiers harassed and arrested students and teachers for participating in 'underground' classes or even for carrying books." According to Stanley Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "In the academic year 1987–1988, pupils in the West Bank lost some 175 out of 210 school days because of forced closures."
Background
On 9 December 1987, an Israeli truck driver collided with and killed four Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp. The incident sparked the largest wave of Palestinian unrest since the Israeli occupation began in 1967: the First Intifada. During the early stages, the Intifada was largely characterised by a non-violent campaign, with actions including labour strikes, tax strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, boycotts of Israeli institutions, demonstrations, the establishment of underground classrooms and cooperatives, raisings of the banned Palestinian flag, and civil disobedience. The actions were led by the led by a decentralised leadership composed of the grassroots organisations of the PLO, such as labour unions, student councils, and women's committees, who organised themselves into the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, mainly outside of the direct control of the PLO leadership, who were mostly in exile or imprisoned.The Israeli government responded to the breakout of the Intifada with a harsh crackdown, however, with Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin pledging to suppress it using "force, might, and beatings," including ordering Israeli soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian protestors, imposing widespread lockdowns on Palestinian cities, mass arrests, and demolitions of Palestinian houses. During the later stages of the Intifada, as the Israeli crackdown severely damaged the Palestinian economy and morale, and as the PLO leadership in exile attempted to take on greater day-to-day control over the Intifada, the UNLU began to lose control over the uprising and the uprising grew more violent during its last stages, including Palestinian internal political violence against rumoured collaborators. By the end of the Intifada, over a thousand Palestinians had been killed and over a hundred thousand injured by Israeli forces, with around two hundred Israelis having been killed by Palestinians. The First Intifada would come to an end with several high-profile peace negotiations, including the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Primary and secondary education
School closures
During the First Intifada, Palestinian youth played a major role in demonstrations, and many Palestinian youth participated in writing graffiti and throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Writing in the NWSA Journal, Thomas M. Ricks stated that "public schools were centers of daily demonstrations in the schoolyards that inevitably led to Israeli forces arriving, shooting tear gas and warning shots over the girls' heads to stop the chanting and clapping. Inevitably, the high school girls ran into their classrooms and halls to avoid the 'rubber bullets,' live ammunition, and tear gas canisters. Almost all of the girls carried onions, water bottles, and handkerchiefs to ward off the effects of tear gas."In response to youth participation in the Intifada, the Israeli government repeatedly issued orders forcing certain Palestinian primary and secondary schools to be closed, saying that closing the schools would prevent youth from gathering and organising, and would consequently prevent unrest and violence. At times, the Israeli government also imposed blanket orders forcing all schools across the Palestinian Territories to be closed, beginning in late December 1987. As well, Palestinian schools were frequently ordered closed when the Israeli government imposed curfews on Palestinian cities, confining all residents to their homes. Public schools across the Territories and UNRWA schools in Palestinian refugee camps were particularly targeted by the closure orders, as private and religious schools were seen as enforcing stricter discipline on their pupils. Some school buildings were taken over the Israeli military after being ordered closed, with the military using them as temporary outposts and detention centres.
In early February 1988, the Israeli government ordered almost all Palestinian schools indefinitely closed, alleging that the order was necessary to prevent further unrest. The schools would remain closed for four months, until June, when the Israeli government allowed them to re-open, claiming that the Intifada was losing momentum.
In early July 1988, the Israeli government again ordered all Palestinian schools closed, for a three day period, in response to calls by the UNLU for a general strike and for Palestinian schools to rename themselves with more Palestinian names.
In late January 1989, the Israeli government ordered all Palestinian schools in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip indefinitely closed again, as part of a move to increase the force of the crackdown on the Intifada. Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin pledged that "schools that repeat stone throwing, I refer to high schools, will be closed, and we have already closed several schools," while Brigadier General Ariyeh Ramot stated that "I know that some children are doing this for fun. But it is very important that parents watch their children because today the throwing of a stone is liable to lead to very serious punishment."
In late July 1989, the Israeli government allowed Palestinian schools to re-open for the first time in six months, conditional on the schools preventing pupils from demonstrating. The Israeli military also ordered its soldiers to keep their distance from Palestinian schools on the day that the schools re-opened, following a request from Palestinian education leaders. Only one small clash occurred between Israeli soldiers and pupils that day in Beit Fajjar, with Israeli soldiers firing tear gas at a group of primary school pupils after the pupils threw stones at the soldiers. The re-opening also coincided with a general strike in the Palestinian Territories, causing some confusion among pupils as the PLO called for pupils to join the strike while Hamas called for students to return to school.
All Palestinian schools would be ordered closed again from mid January to late February 1991, during the Gulf War in Kuwait. The Gulf War closures were part of a general six-week curfew imposed on the Palestinian Territories by the Israeli government, where all Palestinians were ordered confined to their homes. Israeli settlers in the Territories were not included in the curfew, although were advised to be on high alert for possible Iraqi missile attacks, and were given free gas masks, which Palestinians were not offered. Throughout the rest of 1991, however, according to Human Rights Watch, "elementary and secondary schools were closed less frequently than in previous years. For the first time during the intifada, military authorities permitted schools to remain open in the summer months to make up for lost days."
School strikes and protests
As well as due to the forced closures of schools, Palestinian pupils during the First Intifada also several days of schooling due their participation in general strikes called for by the UNLU. In some cases, such as a March 1990 general strike called by the non-UNLU Hamas, participation in the strikes was enforced by gangs of Palestinian militants.In mid-1990, the UNLU issued a leaflet calling for pupils to keep protests separate from their education.
One secondary school student from Bethlehem quoted by The New York Times in July 1988 stated that "There is no atmosphere to study, with soldiers at the entrance to schools," and saying of his fellow students, "Where are the others? One was shot and killed during the uprising, four are in jail and the other six are under curfew in the Dheishe refugee camp. Nobody is in the mood to study." A teacher from the El-Ma'amuniya High School in East Jerusalem quoted by The New York Times in October 1988 stated that "Students here will feel sentiment for their friends in the West Bank, and they'll strike."
Alternative and underground classrooms
To try and ensure that Palestinian youth were still able to access education during the school closures, Palestinians organised a number of alternative underground classrooms. Writing in the Radical Teacher, Yamila Hussein described two main forms of alternative classrooms organised by Palestinians during the Intifada: substitute teaching and popular teaching. The substitute teaching form, mostly led by UNRWA and private school teachers, focused on distance learning, creating self-study kits based on the Israeli-approved curriculum for pupils to use at home and holding exams outside of school grounds whenever curfews on cities were lifted. The popular teaching form, mostly led by the decentralised UNLU popular committees, involved members of a community giving ad hoc lessons to the youth of their community on their own field of work, and placed a focus on Palestinianising lessons instead of following the Israeli-approved curriculum.Popular teaching initiatives took place in a number of ad hoc locations, including rooms in houses, gardens, mosques, and churches. Popular teaching initiatives were also largely led by community members without a formal training in education, including parents and local university students. One Palestianian who was a schoolgirl during the Intifada described popular teaching in the NWSA Journal: "we used to go to a neighborhood teacher's home and spend our days studying history, Arabic, geography, mathematics, and literature with students from the area. We were a strange mixture of public and private school kids using old books and our notes for lessons, reading at different levels, solving problems in different ways, and eagerly enjoying our new teachers and classmates. Sometimes, the teacher was arrested for having such schools so we had to find another teacher or a parent willing to help us with our lesssons." The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit described one underground popular teaching classroom:
"In the village of Kobar, a group of 12–14 individuals transformed a number of old rooms into classrooms, moving from house to house and inviting students to join them. The teachers were women and mothers from the village who never had any experience in teaching. The students, often of varying ages in the same class, would take turns in standing guard to watch for the arrival of the military in search of forbidden gatherings.
The flexibility of these schools was the most important demonstration of their revolutionary essence. For instance, when some girls would have to miss class to help their families in the field, the entire class would often move there. The content of the actual lessons included farming and the relationship of the farmer to the land. The students would deal with the publications of resistance organizations such as the UNLU as reading materials, using them as grammar practice in their Arabic language classes, and then proceeding to discuss their content in their political science classes."
Popular teaching initiatives also placed an emphasis on Palestinianising lessons, placing greater emphasis on teaching Palestinian culture and history than the Israeli-approved curriculum, while allowing pupils more freedom to discuss the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and current affairs. According to Joel Brinkley of The New York Times, wrote that "the Israeli Government did not realize that when the 277,000 West Bank school children were freed from the heavily controlled, politically sanitized school curriculum, many of them would instead attend free-form, underground schools that ignored all the Government's rules. Teachers in these schools – in churches, mosques and the basements of private homes – have in many cases been lecturing children on Palestinian history and discussing current events in a way they could not before, probably fueling the uprising"