Ethnicity and Education: Nation-Building, State-Formation, and the Construction of the Israeli Educational System
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ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION: NATION-BUILDING, STATE-FORMATION, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ISRAELI EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM GAL LEVY A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR PHD DEGREE THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2002 2 ABSTRACT The dissertation is about the ethnicisation of social relations in Israeli society and its reflection and manifestation in education. My main aim in this study is twofold: first, to offer a critical account of the development of ethnic relations in Israeli society and to examine the role ethnicity has played in the processes of nation-building and state-formation; and, second, to propose a history of the educational system in Israel which accounts for the role of education in creating and perpetuating ethnic identities. The first part of the dissertation consists of a critical reading of existing analyses of ethnicity in Israel. Its aim is to bring the state into the analysis of ethnic relations and demonstrate that such an approach is vital to the understanding of ethnic relations and identities. In the following part, I trace back the processes of nation-building and state-formation demonstrating how governments and major political actors became involved in the formation and re-production of ethnic boundaries within Israeli society. In these two parts, I am arguing against both functionalist and critical accounts of ethnicity in Israel, which tend to ‘essentialise’ ethnic categories and thus deny the political nature of ethnicity and its power as an organising basis for political action. In the third and major part of the dissertation, I seek to re-construct the history of the Israeli educational system within an understanding of ethnicity as a structural feature of state-society relations. This re-construction reveals how ‘ethnicity’ became an organising feature of this system since its inception as a Zionist national educational system in the early days of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine. Whereas the ‘national’ educational system was characteristically sectorial, non-European (mizrahi) Jews were denied the same autonomy that their European counterparts enjoyed. With the transition to statehood, and the massive influx of Jewish immigrants, the educational system was re-organised under the aegis of the state. Yet, it turned out, this new system retained the ‘old’ lines of division between Arabs and Jews, and between European and non-European Jews, thus imposing upon the latter the stigma of being ‘non-modern’ and ‘non-Zionist’. This re-emphasised ethnic boundaries, and entrenched ethnicity as a powerful basis for political action. In the 1960s, when the state engaged itself in reforming the educational system, making it compatible with the new needs of industrialisation and nationhood, ethnicity again played a critical role in legitimising state policies. ‘Integration’, that is, the de-segregation of the educational system, turned out to be nothing but a political token and, in fact, a means for entrenching ethnic boundaries and identities. The state, I argue, has thus been a crucial factor in perpetuating those ethnic images and realities, and hence a focus of ethnic discontent in the 1980s and 1990s. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 List of Tables and Charts 6 Glossary of Hebrew terms and Abbreviations 8 INTRODUCTION 12 Education and Ethnicity: contemporary illustrations 13 State, ethnicity, and education: arguments 18 The structure of the study 21 Contribution to research 24 PART I THEORIES OF ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 26 CHAPTER ONE THEORIES OF ETHNICITY: A CRITICAL ACCOUNT 29 Ethnicity – placing theories in context 33 The first wave – modernisation and nation-building 34 The second wave – ethnicity discovered and revisited 38 The third wave – post-colonialism and the ‘return to culture’ 44 Re-calling conventions: ethnicity and the state 48 The state, citizenship and ethnicity 50 CHAPTER TWO EDUCATION, NATION-BUILDING AND STATE-FORMATION 52 The state and social boundaries 53 Education and cultural homogenisation 56 Education and political integration 58 Universalism and education: between order and hegemony 60 Universalism and order: from Durkheim to structural-functionalism 61 Universalism and hegemony: a critical perspective 63 Universalism Ethnicity, and the state 65 PART II ETHNIC POLITICS, NATION-BUILDING AND STATE-FORMATION 67 CHAPTER THREE THE PRE-STATEHOOD PERIOD: COLONISATION AND THE TRANSITION TO STATEHOOD 70 Colonisation and ethnicisation 71 The Ottoman Period: preliminary notions of modernity 72 The conquest of labour: a dynamic of an ethnically split labour market 73 The conquest of the land: a dynamic of ethnic segregation 75 Labour, land and politics: the ascendance to power of the Labour movement 76 Ethnic politics and the politics of ethnicity 77 Conclusion 78 The transition to statehood 80 4 Between the yishuv and statehood – some structural constraints 81 Mamlakhtiyut: an ideology of the state 83 Mamlakhtiyut, the state, and political institutions 85 Conclusion 86 CHAPTER FOUR AFTER STATEHOOD: IMMIGRATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 88 Absorption of the immigration project 89 ‘Selective immigration’ and differentiation 91 Immigration and the construction of the ‘Oriental’ 94 Conclusion 97 The industrialisation project 98 Economic growth, population dispersal and ethnicity 99 The making of the Israeli (ethnic) periphery 101 Industrialism and the road to liberalisation 103 Wadi-Salib: the dynamics of citizenship and ethnicity 104 The political economy of ethnicity 106 Liberalisation, citizenship and ethnicity 107 PART III EDUCATION AND ETHNICITY 110 CHAPTER FIVE THE MAKING OF NATIONAL EDUCATION IN PALESTINE, 1846-1947 114 The Ottoman Period: notions of modern education in Palestine 115 The Mandatory educational system: an interplay of three systems 119 The British educational policy in Palestine 119 The development of Arab education under the mandate 121 The nationalisation of Hebrew education 124 Missing subjects – mizrahi Jews in the yishuv 127 ‘A state to be’: the structure of the Zionist educational system 131 Conclusion 134 CHAPTER SIX IN-GATHERING OF THE EXILES: ETHNICISING THE ISRAELI MELTING POT, 1947- 1953 138 “To think in terms of a state”: The ‘Interim Period’ 140 Arab education and the dispute over the stream system 141 Knesset yisrael and the state: alternative conceptions of the state 143 The “spirit of Eretz-yisrael”: Immigration and Education 145 The transition to statehood 147 Appropriating educational authority 148 Separate, but unequal: Arab education and political control 148 “The charm of the state”: the ‘struggle over education’ 150 Autonomy and control in religious education 150 Geography and Demography in education 153 The struggle over education in the immigrant camps 154 The Great Immigration and education: the question of The Uniform Education 155 The break out of the crisis 157 The transition to state-sponsored education 161 The abolition of the pre-statehood stream system 162 The 1953 State Educational Act 164 5 Conclusion 165 CHAPTER SEVEN FROM “EGALITARIANISM” TO “COMPENSATION”: THE MAKING OF ‘ETHNIC THINKING’, 1953-1959 169 Identifying the ‘ethnic problem’ 170 The dispute over the ‘uniform curriculum’ 173 Locating the problem: changes in education policy 178 From ‘Egalitarianism’ to ‘Compensatory Education’ 178 ‘Compensatory Education’: Assumptions and Practices 181 Conclusion 185 CHAPTER EIGHT EDUCATIONAL REFORMS, CITIZENSHIP, AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES, 1959-1968 187 From ‘melting pot’ to ’cultural pluralism’ 188 The expansion of post-elementary education 191 The debate over the expansion of secondary education 192 Comprehensiveness and diversification 193 Pre-vocational education: entrenching ethnic segregation 195 The 1968 Educational Reform Programme 198 The elusive nature of the notion of Integration 200 Unravelling Integration: achievement and the new social order 204 The reform in Arab education 207 Conclusion 209 CONCLUSION 212 APPENDIX A THE SEPHARDI LEADERSHIP TESTIMONY BEFORE THE PEEL COMMISSION: AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW 222 APPENDIX B THE EXPANSION AND EXTENSION OF EDUCATION 223 APPENDIX C ELECTIONS AND PARTIES, 1949-1969 225 BIBLIOGRAPHY 226 6 LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS Table 3-1 The ethnic composition of the population of Palestine, 1880-1953 ........................................ 80 Table 4-1 Jewish immigration to Israel, 1948-1953 ................................................................................ 90 Table 5-1 The development of the Hebrew schools under the control of the Zionist movement, 1914- 1921....................................................................................................................................... 125 Table 5-2 Schooling in the Zionist sector according to educational stream, 1926-1945 ...................... 126 Chart 5-1 The structure of Zionist/Jewish education in Mandatory Palestine....................................... 132 Table 6-1 The development of the Hebrew educational stream system, 1948-1953 ............................. 155 Table A-1 School dropout rates in the yishuv, 1941............................................................................... 222 Table B-1 Students in the Israeli Educational System ........................................................................... 223 Table B-1A Students in the Educational Streams by level of school, 1946/47-1947/48 .......................... 224 Table B-2 Students in Hebrew Post-Elementary Education, 1948/49-1971/72 ..................................... 224 7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing a doctoral