Canadian Modern Language Review, Vol. 59, No. 1, September 2002

"Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish Palestinian Village in Israel" by Grace Feuerverger

Book Review by Aneta Pavlenko*
_____________________________

The day after September 11th 2001, I had to walk back into the classroom and face my students. Just like many of my colleagues all over the United States, I was at a loss for words. For several of my students and for myself the tragedy also had a personal dimension: we had partners, friends, and relatives who worked in or around the World Trade Center. We yearned to help and yet we remained at home. We were language educators, not nurses, doctors, firefighters, members of the police taskforce, or the FBI, and in the times of peace it was okay, but now our profession just did not seem that useful. And when I walked into my classroom, I could no longer pretend that I found what we do meaningful. I shared my doubts with my students, but then tried to talk to them about the important role we play in educating the new generation in the spirit of multilingualism, multiculturalism, and peaceful conflict resolution. I am not sure I convinced them that day as I did not completely convince myself either and had no examples to offer. I will always be sorry that I did not know of Oasis of Dreams then - I would have made it a central reading in my class.

Feuerverger's book is an ethnography of two unique educational institutions flourishing in the bilingual bicultural village of Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam (literally: 'Oasis of Peace'), located some 30 kilometres west of Jerusalem. This intercultural community was founded in 1972 in an attempt to create a social, cultural, and political framework within which Jews and Palestinians can co-exist in mutual trust and respect, while maintaining their cultural, religious, and linguistic identities. The focus of the book is on the groundbreaking educational experiment that is taking place in the village in the form of two bilingual/bicultural educational institutions, the elementary school and the 'School for Peace.' The goal of this experiment is to create an integrated Jewish-Palestinian school system that could engage the two parties in an ongoing dialog. The elementary school aims to educate the children in a balanced bilingual and bicultural Arabic-Hebrew setting which exposes them to both languages and cultural traditions as well as to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In turn, the 'School for Peace' offers conflict resolution workshops to Jewish and Palestinian teenagers, as well as to groups from other parts of the world, including Northern Ireland, the US, and former Yugoslavia. Language occupies a privileged place in this educational milieu as the diversity of opinions is highlighted precisely through the use of two languages of instruction, whereby learning about events such as the Israeli War of Independence in Hebrew and Arabic exposes the students to different and, at times, incompatible historical narratives.

The book consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the village, its inhabitants, and the elementary school and its curriculum. In the spirit of contemporary postmodernist scholarship, it also offers insights into the author's own life trajectory, that of a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in postwar Montreal, longing to belong to the 'majority culture' and feeling emotionally alienated from it. Chapter 2 grounds the discussion in a sophisticated theoretical framework which combines narrative inquiry with explorations of moral development and presents the educational experiment in the two schools as 'border pedagogy' (Giroux, 1988) which allows Arabic and Jewish teachers working together to deconstruct borders and hierarchies and to teach children how to consider more than one perspective. Chapter 3 begins with a useful socio-historic overview of Israeli educational and language policies, showing how in the past decades the school curriculum consistently favoured Hebrew at the expense of minority and immigrant languages and highlighting the newly emerging awareness of the need for a multicultural policy of linguistic pluralism. The discussion also offers a glimpse into the complex sociolinguistic landscape of contemporary Israel. This overview allows the author to locate the reconceptualization of the curriculum taking place in Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam within the larger social context and to show just how dramatic is the local attempt to employ two languages of instruction on an equal footing. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to the 'School for Peace' and examines the conceptual framework underpinning its pedagogy as seen in a workshop conducted for Jewish and Palestinian high school students. Chapter 5 is devoted to three in-depth interviews conducted by the author with the founders of the village and its Palestinian mayor. In chapter 6 the author reflects on the conversations she had with the educators in the village and on ways in which they envision the place of their community in the larger sociopolitical landscape. Chapter 7 describes Hilary Rodham Clinton's visit to the village and offers concluding remarks.

This outstanding book documents a groundbreaking attempt at creating an egalitarian curriculum in the context of ongoing intergroup conflict and as such represents a major contribution to the fields of peace studies, bilingualism, and multilingual education. The engaging and emotional narrative is further enhanced by the photographs of the village and its inhabitants, generously sprinkled throughout the text to bring the protagonists closer to the reader. At the same time, the book is not without its problems. While its conceptual framework is richly grounded in contemporary social, linguistic, and educational theories, one cannot help but wish for a similar grounding in the historic roots and sociopolitical realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which many of the readers may not be fully familiar with. As a result, the book at times conveys an impression that linguistic and social mediation may be sufficient to solve the conflict between Jews and Palestinians, while in reality the tension is inextricably linked to the fate of the Palestinian nation-state, of the occupied territories, and of Palestinian refugees. It is equally unfortunate that the text dedicated to conflict resolution does not problematize the notions of 'moral development' and 'peace' pointing to conflicting views of morality and peaceful resolution espoused by the various parties. In view of the importance of the text and the literature it draws on, it was also upsetting to find that a large number of references provided in the text were missing from the bibliography.

Despite these relatively minor problems, Oasis of Dreams is an extremely valuable and innovative book which offers a working model of peace education in the context of intergroup conflict. Its focus on language awareness, and on sustained attempts to challenge symbolic domination of the majority language, make it a fascinating reading for language educators and bilingualism scholars and illustrate precisely what is meant by 'border pedagogy.' Most importantly, this is a book that offers its readers hope and restores their faith in the meaningfulness and power of the teaching profession.

References

Giroux, H. (1988) Schooling and the struggle for public life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
_____________________________

*Temple University