"There’s more to the story than the bit you learned": complexity as an educational path to peace

My book, Judaism, Education and Social Justice, is coming out in paperback in May. If you like the sound of a challenging, academic, philosophical read about faith, education and progressive politics, this is the book for you. It’s available here with a 20% discount if you pre-order – use code GLR AT5.

Here’s today’s extract. If it whets your appetite, please be in touch (I’d love to discuss!) and share with friends and colleagues.

Tamar*, director of a ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’ organisation, seeks to challenge the political views of the participants on the trips she runs to Israel and the West Bank. Echoing the Christian see–judge–act pastoral cycle derived from Jesuit education, Tamar sums this up as a three-stage process: exposure to new facts and experiences (1) stimulates reflection and intellectual or ideological change (2) which leads to political action (3):

So the educational stuff is giving people the opportunity to actually look at the complexity, more broadly, speak to people, and meet with people they wouldn’t normally get to hear. That might be everything from Palestinian and Israeli human rights activists to former heads of the Shin Bet inside Israel, the security services, and have a critique of the direction of travel of the country, and we are keen to mobilise people to be more vocal about that. And to actually physically get people out on the ground to see things, and take people beyond the Green Line that everyone talks about to actually into the field and actually see for themselves.

This educational process means helping learners replace what Tamar sees as their incomplete or biased perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with more complete ones. For example, she reflects on the reaction of two teenagers to a day-trip organised by her organisation which took place in the context of a month-long Israel tour:

There were a couple of kids who took real exception to the content of the programme, and in the end the guide said to them ‘did you go to Tzfat [Safed]?’ Yeah, yeah, we learned about the kabbalists, we learned about the sixteenth century, we learned about the Inquisition. He said ‘did you talk about the Palestinian population though, that existed before 1948?’ Blank faces. ‘Did you talk about the fact that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president came from Tzfat?’ Blank faces. ‘Did you talk about the fact that he went on television a few months ago to say “I know I can’t return to this place as anything other than a tourist even though it was my family home?” ’ Blank faces.

He turned round to the kids and said, ‘look I’m not going to pretend that what I am trying to teach you does not come from a specific perspective, that it has its own biases and its own subjectivity in it but what I am trying to explain to you is that everything else you have done on this tour has brought bias in another direction. I’m just asking you to expand your possibilities.’

What he was saying is it’s not that what you learned in Tzfat is not true, all of it is true, but there is more to that story than the bit you learned.

*All names are pseudonyms.