Landscapes of Education in the Golan Heights
Jumanah Abbas
On 13th August 1967, two months after the end of the June war, employees working in all educational institutes and levels of education in the West Bank declared that they will not work, or even cooperate with the occupation authorities. This rejection was expressed in a letter (6th August 1967) to the authorities and was one of the many acts of refusal and resistance against the rising Israeli state and subsequent changes in the educational sector. 1 One of the earliest measures to be carried out by Israeli authorities was the closure of the Education Office of the Governorate of Jerusalem. This was followed by the refusal of the Director of Education and the Administrative Supervisor to join the Israeli educational staff, and the Arab teachers’ position was that of non-cooperation. They resorted to different ways, such as memoranda, written protests, and strikes, to retaliate against these incremental educational changes and what will soon become an educational indoctrination across the occupied territories. In an attempt to break the unity of these Arab teachers and educators, a team of 30 Arabic-speaking Israeli education workers were sent to a room full of school books to inspect every word, hunting for any hint of what was then called “Arab propaganda.” Nearly 400 books were seized at once when Israel occupied the West Bank of Jordan, Syria’s Golan Heights (Jawlan in Arabic), and the Gaza Strip, previously under the Egyptian rule. 2
The focus and scope of this essay is the Jawlani lands in particular, which geographically lay at the border between Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Israeli state. In this visual essay that encompasses both narratives and visual modes of representations, I draw upon how the scales of educational indoctrination multiplied, and consequently, shifted from the classroom and the textbook into the larger Jawlani landscape. The series of disrupted narratives and events presented here reveals how schools were not just spatially constructed in the Jawlan urban landscape to justify the necessity of a ‘state of emergency’. Instead, in these occupied spaces, colonial control over schools is as crucial as the imposition of a state of emergency and the deployment of exception means, such as destruction, ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, and military occupation. In the Jawlani territories, schools are thus no longer under the auspices of the local authorities, but are centrally administrated under an Israeli legal framework. The Israeli state has also infiltrated other means of educating to impose its dominance of the landscape. These include extra-curricular spaces like summer camps, local community organizations, art institutes and other platforms for producing and disseminating knowledge. The normalcy of the Israeli occupation was enshrined in schools and classrooms, but also in the Jawlani landscape as well.
My interest in schools and their operations started in a seminar, Mapping Borderlands: Drawing from the Jawlan, taught by Nora Akawi in partnership with Aamer Ibraheem and Khaled Malas at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. One of the many objectives of the seminar was to produce “new geopolitical maps and architectural drawings of the terrain that are aligned not with official state narratives, but with indigenous narratives of the land.” 3 After two months of intense discussions and preparation, we traveled to Jawlan and met with inhabitants of the region, authors of the works that we studied throughout the semester, and officials from Al Marsad organization, an international Arab Human Rights Center operating in Jawlan. What initially started as investigating different modes of resistance at schools became undeniably much larger. The initial scope was trying to understand the relationship between colonial refusal and local schools’ pedagogical structure, urban positionality, and architecture. Yet, after many conversations with local inhabitants, activists, and officials, the project became about examining how the landscape itself was appropriated by indoctrination strategies, and how the schools and the colonizer’s control of education, within and across the landscapes of Jawlan, was crucial for colonial expansion. In an effort to trace this contested terrain and its link to appropriated educational institutes, maps and architectural drawings became tools integral to expose these untold stories.
Today the maps of Jawlani lands are a testament to the astonishing efforts exerted to wipe out village names and to redraw geographical lines. In this essay, my own visual mode of representation is a multilayered map that illustrates objects, artifacts, sites, and events pertaining to Jawlan. These illustrations are not meant to be an exact depiction, instead they are purposefully multi-scalar and eccentric. Disrupting conventional representations of architectural drawings, this accumulated map is accompanied with images and narratives and aims to reveal the complex layers and forces that are inscribed in my account on landscapes of education.
Colonizing Pedagogies
During the 1967 war that was partially fought in Jawlan, Bashar Tarabieh indicated that “95 percent of the population of the Golan Heights, 130,000 people in 129 villages, fled or were expelled by invading Israeli forces.” 4 Jawlan fell under Israeli military rule until it was unilaterally annexed on 14th December 1981. By then, Israeli military governors had already replaced the Syrian curriculum with Israel’s, dismantled local councils, and removed any existing local educational frameworks. Many primary and secondary schools in the Jawlan became part of the Israeli educational system, the Bagrut. 5 One of the first strategies to cement a long-term occupation was intensifying the teaching hours for the Hebrew language and reducing the number of Arabic language classes. 6 In addition, the schools were forced to adapt to a curriculum that comprised of tailored subjects such as Arabic for Druze, Hebrew for Druze, History for Druze and Math for Druze. 7
Despite all of these academic changes, Tarabieh indicates that most academic studies were about the region’s water resources, agricultural production, and strategic position. Tarabieh, who was an active member in the Golan Academic Association, questioned the educational spectacle in Jawlan and its relation to the occupation. Tarabieh’s article, titled Education, Control and Resistance in the Golan Heights, centered on how “schools and their educational policies became the fundamental sites of struggle.” 8 He narrates that the new curriculum not only carefully coordinated in-depth studies on Zionism and the Israel state, but also contained critical information to ensure that the Jawlani population were separated from surrounding Arab identities. For example, they indicated that the Druze minority are not a part of Syria, Palestine, or any Arab nation-state. 9 Israel used these tactics for ethnic manipulation, and to ensure their authoritative control over this collective minority in the long-term. 10
In reconstructing the landscape, each of these new settlements followed a certain urban typology and comprised of a school or some form of educational institute as part of the state’s centralized planning. In the Israel National Photography collection, the images posed in the institutional archive depict how the occupation was strengthening in conjunction with the increase of colonial educational institutes. In these images, we see an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) solider guarding one of the earliest kindergartens at Ramat Magshimim in 1974, a young Yeshiva students waiting on the roadside of Jawlan in 1981, and the growth of multiple kindergartens dating as early as the 1970s. Schools became instrumental for colonial expansion. The unparalleled growth of these schools amplified the asymmetrical and unbalanced growth of the educational environment and enforced power relations between the colonizer and the colonized.
Summer Camps as Resistance
In 1985, summer camps began to operate annually and had a communal political agenda to combat the unreliable, weak, and corrupt educational institutions. Acts of solidarity and resistance were rendered visible in the operation of Jawlani summer camps. They became alternative measures to combat the state infiltrating local education, as well as to resist against occupation authorities. Each camp, collectively representing appropriated Jawlani lands, would individually symbolize each of the destroyed villages. In each tent, children would learn about the history and the urban geography of the villages, as well as the history of expelled families, their roots, traditions, and socio-cultural practices. Even the intentional choice to geographically locate these camps between the two largest villages, Masa’ada and Majd Al Shams, was to mirror the unwavering unity of the Syrian-Jawlani population. 11 In each annual cycle, the names of the camps changed according to major events that were suppressed in school teaching. For instance, to honor sacrificed lives under Israeli occupation, the second year of the summer camp was named after the martyr Ghalia Farhat. Consequently, the camp names evolved each year: Camp of Steadfastness, (مخيم السنديانة), Camp of martyr Ghalia Farhat (مخيم اسم الشهيدة غالية فرحات), Camp of the Earth (مخيم الأرض), Camp of Persistence (مخيم الوحدة), Camp of the Flag (مخيم الراية), Camp of Arab Unity (مخيم العروبة), Camp of Solidarity (مخيم الصمود), Camp of Evacuation (مخبم الجلاء), Camp of the South (مخيم الجنوب), Camp of the Levant (مخيم الشام), and Camp of Tomorrow (مخيم الغد).
These summer camps became spaces for the youth to exercise their rights and identities, and spaces for unlearning. The anthem of the summer camp projected a clear and powerful agenda, as the following excerpt shows:
The anthem reinforced the importance of education, and of the means to seek alternative knowledge. Another verse narrates:
Undoubtably, the summer camps were threatened and condemned for their unlawful activities. For instance, Israeli forces raided the camps at night on multiple occasions. During one incident in 1988, as Israeli forces came to arrest the organizers, Tarabieh indicated that “more than 1,000 people rallied to defend the camp.” 12 Moreover, these camps inaugurated a series of organizations that fought against educational indoctrination and state control. For example, the Golan Academic Association, now known as the Parents’ Committee, was established in 1983 by university graduates and students. The committee set up different political, cultural, and social events, held demonstrations, and taught alternative courses such as drama, art and foreign languages. 13 In addition, established in 1984, the Women’s Committee in the Golan provided alternative spaces for teaching and learning. They even opened three kindergartens where children learned and sang Syria’s national anthem, but as it was seen as a national threat, the kindergartens were shut down. 14 Since their closure in 2010, the history of these camps as well as the offshoot organizations remains understated, despite their crucial insight to an alternative mode of refusal that emerged in response to Israeli cooptation of the Jawlani educational system.
Statelessness and Schools
Today, Jawlani schools continue to be reshaped into a space that is “concomitantly both threatening and normal.” 15 In Colonial Conquest and the Politics of Normalization, Moriel Ram reminds us of the coupling of spaces of exception/encampment, and spaces of normalization as two contradictory yet inseparable conditions manufactured for the colonization of the Jawlan. Since most of teachers in Jawlan are not Israeli citizens, the Israeli Ministry of Education denies them any bureaucratic seniority rights. Based on how these teachers behave and teach the Bagrut curriculum, they are given a one-year contract by the ministry. This state of exception contradicts with the normalization we see in the schools’ textbooks. For instance, books targeting sixth-grade students contain chapters such as The Borders of the Israel-State, which indoctrinate false histories to these upcoming generations. These ‘lessons’ are essentially multiple large maps that neither depict Jawlan’s post-annexation territorial lines, nor the United Nations Demilitarized zone. Instead both are censored and appropriated to be part of the Israeli nation state. Furthermore, in these lessons, small figures are strategically placed next to homework assignments with bubbles preaching the following:
‘as the population of the Israel state increases annually, where will they live? We must expand our current lands and build new ones’. ‘We also need to need to increase the level of water intake.’ ‘We hope that the nation-state will have enough money to invest in your education.’
Similarly, these books do not contain any references to the historical events of the ongoing Israeli occupation or the 1982 Annexation. One of today’s Jawlani parents shared her concern on the erasure of history in the local organization, Al-Marsad’s recent publication:
‘It is left to the parents to tell their children about Syria. My father told me, and in turn I tell my children. I wish I would be able to send my children to a Syrian school, but this is not possible. I try to make a difference through my work in the parents’ committee, but I am worried that my children to grow up without an idea on what it means to be Syrian.’16
Jawlani youth were indoctrinated to be stateless from as early as the 1970s, and today’s youth remain uncertain about their identity. Are they Syrian, Jawlani or an occupied Jawlani-Syrian? An Arab-Israeli, or an Israeli? 17 The two most prominent schools in the Jawlan, Majd Al Shams High school and Masa’ada High School, are instrumental in fostering the youth’s ambiguity towards what their ‘identity’ should be. Issues of citizenship and national belonging are entangled with how these schools operate, both socially and spatially. This sense of national belonging to the Israeli state is fostered through events which are curated by the Israeli ministry of Education, such as inviting the Irish military, or organizing school trips to Israeli courtroom to teach students about Israeli jurisdictions. 18 In regards to the architectural dimension, Majd Al Shams High school is visible immediately upon entering the area. The school is located on a steep hill with synthetic topographical steeps engraved with a large ‘Welcome to Majd Al Shams’ sign, which extends the notion that a school can construct a national identity through its spatial performance and urban positionality. The school was central also as an alternative space for resistance. For example, on 30th October 2018, a nonviolent protest against imposed elections took place in its backyard.
Ruins and Sculptures
As part of the many trails incorporated to facilitate the Israeli state’s tourism and its economy, Figure 7 shows an urban path connecting Lake Tiberius to Mount Hermon that appropriates the Jawlan landscape to adapt to these new artificial geographies. This trail, outlined as an abstract line, is essentially aimed at tourists to go on hiking and camping trips. However, many primary-level students from the Jawlan study, learn and take part in these hiking trips as well, and in some cases are accompanied by other students from the Jawlan settlements and from Israel. Wael Tarabieh, as part of Al Marsad Organization and the Parents Committee, indicated that these trips directly positioned the Jawlani child in this landscape to learn distorted truths about the urban geography and territorial history of the area.
These distorted truths are reinforced by many colonial sculptures and memorials placed by the state cross the Jawlani lands. On both a conceptual and a spatial level, they wipe traces of Jawlani history and glorify new colonial realities. In the case of Za’oura village, for example, ruins of a school for local children now functions as a military camp site for training Israeli soldiers. Salman Fakharreddine, one of the founders of Al Marsad Organization, indicated that this is an intentional act to stage the difference between a need and a purpose: there was a need to ethnically cleanse and completely erase the villages, but to also register an understanding of ruins in the ongoing context of Israeli’s settler-colonialism. Salman’s observation guides us to ask: what is the purpose of making visible the ruins of a school and transforming its playground into military training grounds.
Reviving the Arts
Many initiatives have emerged as a response to reverse state-imposed educational narratives about these staged, displaced ruins. One of these is the Al Mansura Revisited project, a collaboration between Ayman Abu Jabal and Devora Neumark. The aim of the initiative was to clean and beautify the schools as an allegory against Israel’s own act of colonial beautification of the Jawlan landscape.
Ruins and sculptures serve as a critical node in the production of alternative historical knowledge in the Jawlan. For instance, the sculptures in Majd al Shams and Ein Qineye by Hassan Khateb (1986), serve as a powerful reminder of the ongoing occupation and how creative discipline can mobilize resistance. For instance, the location of the sculpture depicting a fighter, a leader, a teacher, a mother and a child in the center of the Majd al Shams town was once a public square where a protest took place against the 1982 annexation.
Jawlani youth also seek and continue to be active in documenting, narrating and fighting the injustice and violence of the ongoing occupation. One of the ways they do this is through their participation in regional art spheres. They participate in many art festivals in Jawlan, and recently, in the West Bank. Most significant was the first annual exhibition in 2005 displaying the work of Jawlani artists in Ramallah, and illustrating different resistance strategies. It was symbolically entitled Role of the Educator (دور المدرس). The Jawlani population has also become more involved in cultural and social events. The Fateh Al Moudarres Art Center in Majad Al Shames hosts classes, exhibitions, and organized many festivals for the local population, such as the installation of stone sculpture along the main road of Ein Qenia. 19 During our visit to Al Marsad organization in Majd Al Shams, Wael Tarabieh also reaffirmed the investment in the arts in order to reverse the erasure of local history, encouraging the youth to document and produce alternative knowledges. Under his supervision, Al Marsad has launched a new project called New Ways of Seeing that encourages the youth to practice arts, poetry, story-telling, and music as a tool for resistance.
In this examination of the educational spectacle, I highlighted how education under the control of colonial authorities creates complex understandings of identities and local narratives. The Jawlani youth are increasingly struggling with issues of identity, while Israel continues to appropriate Jawlani territories. Educational indoctrination is no longer confined within the boundaries of school walls and its textbooks; the Jawlani landscape was appropriated and instrumentalized to erase local history and construct a colonial instrument. The appropriation of the landscape, coupled with the steady erasure of the Jawlani identity, amplifies the Israeli state’s control of schools, the education system, the people, and ultimately, the land. However, one verse from the camp’s anthem song reminds us, “Tomorrow with education, not ignorance.” With the revival of the arts, Jawlani youth are active in generating different forms of alternative knowledges, and in seeking different modes of resistance to combat the occupation. Mahmoud Darwish’s statement at the 2008 Palestinian Literature Festival also stresses on the importance of the arts, reminding us that “in this zone of tension between the long “State of Emergency” and between his literary imaginations, the language of the poet moves. He has to use the word to resist the military occupation.” 20 Arts, poetry and fiction have become powerful tools to rewire the landscape of education in the Jawlan and turn the colonized into owners of a humanizing history. 21
Author
Jumanah Abbas is an architect, a writer, and a curator based in New York and Qatar. She received her master’s degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practice from Columbia University (2020) and her undergraduate degree in Architecture from American University of Sharjah. Using architectural drawings, videos, and objects, her practice looks at how educational pedagogies and environments impact how different forms of knowledge circulate, as well as condition the urban landscape. Jumanah worked on exhibitions such as Makassed: Patron of Modern Architecture at Saleh Barakat Gallery in Beirut, and Curricular Exchange in collaboration with CCCP/2020 at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. Her work was also on display at Sharjah Art Foundation (2016), and Maraya Art Center (2017).
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“The Arabs under Israeli Occupation,” Palestine Research Center 55, (February 1969), 69. ↩
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“The Arabs under Israeli Occupation,” Palestine Research Center, 70. ↩
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An extract from Mapping Borderlands: Drawing from the Jawlan Syllabus, by Nora Akawi in partnership with Khaled Malas and Aamer Ibraheem. ↩
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Bashar Tarabieh, “Education, Control, and Resistance in the Golan Heights,” Middle East Reports, no. 194/195 (1995): 44. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ahmad Ali Knaan, “Resistance in the Jawlan,” University of Damascus Publication, (2013): 58-61. ↩
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Bashar Tarabieh, “Education, Control, and Resistance in the Golan Heights,” 44-45. ↩
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Bashar Tarabieh, “Education, Control, and Resistance in the Golan Heights,” 43. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Amal Aun, “Isreali Education Policies as a Tool for the Ethnic Manipulation of the Arab Druze” (PhD Thesis, Cornell University, 2013): 16-18. ↩
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Wael Tarabieh (An activist working in Al Marsad Organization) in discussion with the author, November 2018. ↩
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Bashar Tarabieh, “Education, Control, and Resistance in the Golan Heights,” 46. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ram Moriel, “Colonial Conquests and the Politics of Normalization,” Political Geography, no. 53 (2015): 22. ↩
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Alexandra Neumann, “Education,” in Forgotten Occupation (Al Marsad Organization, 2018): 77.
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Bronagh Carvill, “A Distortion of Democracy: Local Election in the Occupied Syrian,” Al Marsad Organization (2018): 4-5. ↩
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For more information about these events, the Jawlany website documents the activities extensively, and also contains the latest news on the schools in Jawlan. ↩
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For more information on the investment in the arts see: Melissa Gronlund, “Syrian artist Wael Tarabieh on reclaiming cultural identity through art in Golan Heights,” The Guardian, accessed November 30, 2018 https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/syrian-artist-wael-tarabieh-on-reclaiming-cultural-identity-through-art-in-golan-heights-1.778747 ↩
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Mahmoud Darwish, “Introduction,” In This is not a Border: Reportage and Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature (London: Bloomsburry, 2017): 9. ↩
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Ibid ↩
