Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0724
• Pages: 724153-727
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Author: Alice Duesdieker

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

Alice Duesdieker is a master’s student at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies,

focusing on the history of education in the Middle East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

BOOK REVIEW

Rawan Asali Nuseibeh. Political Conflict and Exclusion in Jerusalem:

The Provision of Education and Social Services.

London: Routledge, 2016. 153 pages. Hardcover $118.04

Reviewed by Alice Duesdieker

The differences in the ways the state of Israel provides services to East and West

Jerusalem offer an example in microcosm of the differences in the ways Israel

treats its Jewish citizens and the Palestinians residing within Israel’s borders.

Since Israel annexed East Jerusalem following the 1967 War, the Israeli govern-

ment has increasingly limited the civil services available to the Palestinian resi-

dents of East Jerusalem. The negative impact of the limited availability of social

services in East Jerusalem has been compounded by the growing network of Israeli

settlements that cut off the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem from economic,

housing, and educational opportunities in the West Bank. Rawan Asali Nuseibeh’s

Political Conflict and Exclusion in Jerusalem: The Provision of Education and

Social Services explores the deprivations of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem

through the lens of education. By examining the education system in East

Jerusalem, Nuseibeh seeks to prove that Israel is an ethnocratic state that une-

qually distributes social services to those living within its borders based on ethnic-

ity. Nuseibeh refers to the “ethnicization” of education in Israel—working within

the common framework that elides ethnic and religious identities in the Israeli

context, where Israeli/Jewish and Arab/Muslim tend to be used interchangeably,

and in opposition to each other. I will be following the author’s usage throughout

this review.

With a background in Applied Social Sciences and in Government and

International Affairs, Nuseibeh blends Political Science-based analysis with inter-

views and focus groups conducted in Arabic with education administration offi-

cials, principals, teachers, and the parents of students in East Jerusalem schools.

These interviews of East Jerusalem residents are complemented with interviews of

their counterparts in West Jerusalem, who work in schools that serve Jerusalem’s

Jewish community. Nuseibeh studies how the community served by the education

system in East Jerusalem perceives the educational opportunities afforded to their