Women in Palestine

Under Ottoman occupation (1516-1917)[1], there was not enough resources invested in schooling. There were a few public and private schools located in the most populated regions which influenced the high illiteracy rate across all genders but especially for women.[13] In the mid-19th century, Christian missionaries began to come to Palestine in droves in attempts to transform and convert Palestinian communities who were referred to as “backwards” and “heathens”.[14] Due to fears of western imperialism and foreign Christian education, the Ottoman government began to emphasize state-sponsored education. In 1864, the Ottoman government created a policy that would only allow missionaries to create schools in communities with large Christian populations in order to prevent the expansion of western imperialism within the Ottoman empire. And under the reign of SultanʿAbdul Hamid II, the Law of Public Education of 1869 was implemented ten years after its creation. Under this law, elementary education was mandatory for all children under the age of 12. This piece of legislation also acknowledged the need for the education of girls as well as their education beyond the primary level; this resulted in the development of co-educational education as well as gender segregated schooling in the regions that had the finances to maintain both schools. However, the promises made by the 1869 law never came to fruition as many girls were at most able to acquire intermediate level education due to the lack of resources.

With the introduction of the press in Palestine in 1908, journalists and theorists began to openly criticize the quality of education under Christian missionaries. In 1911, the literary journal al-Nafaʾis al-ʿasriyya, a ghost writer under the initials Kh. S, wrote an article about women’s education in Greater Syria, the region which included Palestine. In the format of a dialogue between a woman and her servant, the article discusses the lack of nationalist and home management education for young girls.[14] Through the eyes of Arab Nationalists, without nationalist education in combination with training to be mothers and wives, women would not only be unable to care for their families but they would also produce generations of Arabs that did not know the Arabic language or values.[14] Many schools in the Ottoman empire, under the guise of being state-run, gave missionaries and western organizations like the American Colony the authority to administer schools.

During World War I (1914-1918), the Ottoman government faced economic, political and social hardship which resulted in the further deterioration of their schools. The casualties due to military service in WWI in combination with the famine caused by the British blockade of the Syrian coast, hundreds of thousands lost, leaving women and children to protect and defend themselves.[15] Following the war, the Ottoman Empire conceded the territory of Palestine in 1918, and following the San Remo Conference, the United Kingdom was given the mandate to provide “administrative advice and assistance” until Palestine could govern themselves (Article XXII of Covenant of the League of Nations). The British colonial administration witnessed this chaotic time and invested within education understanding that education could protect girls from the effects of the war.

The first Director of Education, Humphrey Bowman (1920-1936) expressed the need for education in order to “train up good citizens of the country.”[15] However, this intent to support the education of children, specifically girls, was neglected and communities across Palestine did not receive the resources needed to expand the education of girls. As regions had to deal with overcrowded and understaffed schools, the British enforced standards that only worsened the conditions. Regions like the district of Hebron who only had one school to support 70,000 residents (resulting in 77% of student applications being turned away), were forced to build a new girl’s school without the financial assistance of the British.[15] Due to the lack of funding, schools, especially ones for girls, were never expanded or often times, ever built. In rural villages, girls had even less access to education for financial reasons, such as the mandatory construction of separate schools for boys and girls, but as well as agricultural ones. The British were concerned that with too much education, it would be a crisis as it would “leave the fields untilled or…lessen the fitness or disposition of the people for agricultural employment” in the words of Lord Cromer, the British Consul General to Egypt.[15]

In 1920, the High Commissioner for Palestine, Herbert Samuel, approved the construction of 300 rural elementary schools for both girls and boys in four years, but by 1925, only 98 new buildings have been constructed and only 10 were for girls.[15] Additionally, A. L. Tibawi states that the British administration reduced their educational budget from £130,000 in 1921 to £97,279 in 1923-1924, while simultaneously increasing their state revenue by over a million pounds over ten years (1921-1931).[15] By the end of the Mandate period (1948), the government only administered 80 girls schools in all of Palestine with 15,303 students, and Arab girls made up only 21% of all the students in government schools.[15] Only about 7.5 percent of girls in rural areas received an education in comparison to 60% of girls in urban regions.[15]

Following World War II, the United Nations divided Palestinian land into different sections. In 1948, mandatory Palestine was terminated and with the Israeli state was created. Palestinian territory was divided among Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Although Israel annexed the land, they did not claim the people on this land which impacted the education of Palestinians;[13] The regions of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip were required to follow Jordanian and Egyptian curriculum.[16] Even after the annexation of the West Bank by Israel in 1967, Palestinians in the regions continued to follow Jordanian curricula due to the Israeli military control over Palestine.[16] Following the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Palestinians were able to create their own textbooks outside of Jordanian guidelines. From 1994 to 2000, the Palestinian authority was given the opportunity to establish their own textbooks with the supervision of the Jordanian Ministry of Education.[16]

According to a 2018 study, in the 2017-2018 academic year of the 48 licensed and accredited higher education institutions in Palestine, women made up about 60% of the student population and 23% of the academic faculty.[17] However, these statistics do not share the full experiences of students in Palestine. The Palestinian Monitoring Group has stated that Israeli military and settler activity in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) affected 28% of the Palestinian student population through killings, injuries and arrests.[18] Additionally, due to curfew imposed by the Israeli army has caused the loss of more than 1,500 school days for students between 2003 and 2005.[18]

Since the mid-1970s, families have been moving towards educating their daughters highly and enrolling them in universities rather than just getting a high school diploma. The reason for this change is that women are becoming needed in the labor market, changing the economic situation in the West Bank. The idea that an educated young woman is desirable for marriage is firmly established.[19] Finally, the young woman is able to afford her expenses and the expenses of her family in the event of her marriage.