Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine by Suzanne Schneider (review)

Much has been written about the British Mandate in Palestine and its divide-and-rule policy — granting religious autonomy to Palestinian Arabs, while denying them collective and national rights or empowerment. On the other hand, the Mandate granted national rights to the Jewish community (known as the Yishuv) as part of the national home policy, promulgated in the Balfour Declaration. This policy de facto institutionalized the bifurcation of Palestine’s education system: the expansion of the Zionist Hebrew education system, which predated the British, and the establishment of a public system for the Palestinian Arabs under the colonial Department of Education. This department was thus mainly staffed with Arab administrators but headed by a British man on the spot. The educational arena remained decentralized until 1948, as missionary, Muslim, and national schools housed roughly a third of the Arab student population, and Hebrew schools were practically independent of colonial supervision. This decentralization served the British as a hurdle for Palestinian educational unity and as leverage for the autonomous and better-organized Hebrew system. By the end of the mandate, most of the Arab population remained without access to schools while the Jewish community achieved universal education.

Suzanne Schneider’s book, Mandatory Separation, thoroughly and effectively analyzes the translation of this policy into colonial religious education, a supposedly neutral system but one that was devoid of concrete social or political goals (p. 42). Her work on the personal papers of the two frustrated architects of colonial education in Palestine — Humphrey Bowman, who was director of education from 1920 to 1936, and Jerome Farrell, who succeeded the former and was director for a decade — reconstructs our image of colonial education in its true colors, seeking refuge in tradition at all costs, anxious about any sort of profound reform that might propagate “instability,” fraught with pedagogic inconsistencies, and incapable or reluctant to bridge the gaps between colonial interest and local needs. Focusing on the functions and features of religious education or religion in education in Mandatory Palestine, the study relies on a theoretical framework which highlights the dialectic interdependence between the modern and the traditional (or religious) in education, stating that “the old and new were in fact co-constitutive” (p. 113). The book follows earlier studies that highlight the reciprocal influences between the Arab and Jewish communities and their formative role in the construction of both collectivities. The book’s novelty lies in its inclusion of education in this analytical framework, seeking to examine how two separate national communities operated under and interacted with the same system. Schneider reveals how, instead of promoting understanding, British colonial educational policy adopted and promoted a mandatory separation between the two communities (pp. 52–58).

The British, Schneider argues, perceived “religious education as a supposed antidote to nationalist passions,” seeking to preserve “traditional” order “in which respect for the sacred was regarded as both an integral facet of individual character and a collective counterweight to mass politics” (p. 3). The study unmasks the fundamental contradictions that rested at the heart of this educational reasoning — one that promoted clear distinctions between the educational and the political, between civic action and mass politics and between proper benign religion and religious radicalism, introducing an impossible pedagogic detachment between individual character-building and its collective and necessarily political implications. These distinctions served as the basis for what Schneider refers to as the colonial “politics of denial,” where British policies or employment of colonial power perceived its own modes of educational operations as nonpolitical. Nonetheless, the book shows how the colonial attempt to immunize the Palestinian curriculum from infectious nationalist ideologies violated the very boundaries they wished to promote (pp. 9, 67). In fact, the opposite occurred, as religious knowledge was utilized by both Muslim and Jewish local educators as a political tool to advance their national projects. What enabled it, Schneider argues, was the flexibility in their interpretation of this knowledge and the porous boundaries between the secular...