Full Description
Palestinians have used the language of human rights to articulate their struggle against the Israeli occupation and internationalise the injustices they face. Palestinian young people learning about human rights at school experience a dissonance between the aspirational and internationalised framework of those norms and the layers of injustice of their own lived experience. Drawing on research in the occupied West Bank, this book explores the three layers of marginalisation faced by Palestinian young people - the Israeli occupation that denies them their humanity; the Palestinian pseudo-state that denies them a voice; and patriarchal structures that deny them agency - to show how these barriers influence their understanding of, and scepticism towards, human rights. Influenced by decolonial theories, this book illuminates how space needs to be created for the counter-narratives of the oppressed in human rights discourse, which may not align with more conventional representations of human rights. It contends that human rights and, by extension, human rights education in the Palestinian context (and beyond) needs to be critiqued, decolonised and ultimately transformed.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Human Rights: The Dominant Global Discourse
3. Human Rights Education: Narrow and Expansive Conceptualisations
4. Human rights as a Vehicle to Struggle against the Occupation: Reclaiming the Human of Human Rights
5. Human Rights as a Vehicle to Critique the Authoritarian Palestinian Pseudo-State: Reclaiming Voice
6. Human Rights as a Vehicle to Challenge Patriarchy: Reclaiming Agency
7. Human Rights Education in Palestinian Schools: Discordance Between the Dominant Discourse of HRE in School and the Struggle for Rights Outside School
8. Conclusions
Appendix- Timeline of Key Historical and Political Events in Relation to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Bibliography
