All posts by Raza Jaffri

AUTHOR: Historian with a soul

Books, Human Rights, International Politics, Notable Personalities, Women

By Zubeida Mustafa

IN these turbulent times when the Middle East is up in flames, Dr Elise Young’s interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is remarkably insightful and, coming from a Jew, radical. She learnt about her people’s history from her own family, but felt sceptical when as a historian and scholar she was trained to analyze the events of the past dispassionately. As a feminist, who feels keenly for the sufferings of other women, she felt compelled to probe deeper into the experiences of women in Palestine — both Muslim and Jew. As a peace activist, she had the strong urge to stop violence. All these qualities have combined to make Elise Young what she is today.

Young teaches history at the Westfield State College, Massachusetts, USA. She has recorded the findings of her research in her book, Keepers of history: women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a nutshell, Elise Young’s provocative thesis states that the Jewish and Muslim women in Palestine have had a long history of cooperative relationship, which has transcended conventional andocentric nationalism. According to her it was the politics of nationalism, class, race and gender which has manifested itself in the form of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Explaining the underlying theme of her book, Young writes:

“The basic understanding of feminism, that the fate of all women is interconnected, is a bridge between Israeli and Palestinian women polarized by those forces that have brought Jew and Arab to this battlefield….. The purpose of this book is to bring into the foreground critical connections between gender, race, and class as they inform historic and current developments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Women are ‘keepers of history’; feminist critique is the basis for politics that can transform the deadlock between Israeli and Palestinian, ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’.”

I met Young in Westfield where she had organized a conference of Pakistani and Indian women under the aegis of the Global Women’s History Project of which she is the founder and director. Her thinking is so different from the American mainstream opinion on the Middle East. She set up her project to bring together women from different sides of a conflict and help them see their situation from the perspective of history. She has already organized meetings of women of Palestine and Israel, South Africa and Ireland. A strong believer in non-violence — she wakes up before dawn every day to perform yoga for three hours before she starts her day’s work — she feels convinced that all conflicts can be resolved peacefully.

I was curious to know what provoked her interest in the Palestinian issue? And what made her so different from the majority of the Jews in America who are staunchly pro-Israel? Until the end of the sixties Young’s activism had focussed on the anti-Vietnam war protest, the civil rights movement and feminist causes. Her personal experiences and impressions in her first visit to Israel to meet relatives in 1971 made her interested in the region.

“I found the Israeli state highly militarized,” Young remarks (and that went against her pacifist nature). “The link between the military and racism deeply penetrated into my consciousness when an Israeli soldier boasted at length about how he would protect me from the Arabs only to follow me with a knife in an unsuccessful attempt to molest me. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 sharpened my interest in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Many questions came to my mind and I found my knowledge highly Euro-centric. What were the roots of anti-Semitism? What were the forces of dissension that disrupted the long-standing links between the Muslim, Jewish and Christian civilizations?”

Her quest for knowledge took her to Birzeit university in 1985. She was to study the holocaust and how the subject was taught in Israeli academia. But she found the universities too restrictive and regimented, Her favourite theme — relations between the Israeli and Arab women — continued to haunt her. The director of the women’s studies programme at Birzeit, Islah Jad, was a mine of information on the subject.

“Until then I never thought of writing a book. Then one day I visited a refugee camp with a Palestinian guide and met her aunt who had been there since 1948. When I heard the woman speak of her travails, it dawned on me that there is a feminist perspective to the conflict which has not been analyzed. Then she quoted an Arabic proverb saying that the five fingers of the hand are not equal,” Young says.

Thus Young got involved with the Palestinian women’s struggle. She met and travelled with Sarwar Nijab Khatib in 1987, the year of the first intifada, and co-founded the Middle East Peace Coalition. She has a profound understanding of the Israeli women’s perspective and speaks of the exploitation of the woman under Zionism. Though they struggled with the men for Israel, they found themselves driven back into the kitchen when the Zionist state was founded. She cites the election of Golda Meir as the prime minister as the biggest defeat of the Israeli women’s movement. She was coopted by the male leadership which bypassed Ada Maimon, the leader of the Israeli Working Women’s Union.

She speaks lucidly about the direct connection between race and gender in Israel. The Jews were Arab racially and had lived with the Muslims in Palestine for centuries. Zionism was a Europe-centred movement and was used by the European Jews to set up a state for themselves in Palestine. Today Israel is a racist state in which the European Jews who migrated to Palestine oppress the indigenous Jewish inhabitants.

“The Jewish identity in Israel is multi-layered,” she observes. “Factors such as gender, race and class interests are involved. Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been promoted as a smokescreen to conceal the Israeli patriarchal state which seeks to control women and to perpetuate the hierarchical class structures,” she argues compellingly.

When her book was published in 1992, it received positive reviews in women’s journals. However the mainstream Jewish opinion was not moved. Some even denounced her as a traitor while others thought it paradoxical because they saw the truth in what she said. But found it in conflict with what they had learned from childhood. Her book is now out of print but there is no proposal to print a second edition. “It is difficult for women to get their books published if they do not conform to mainstream opinion, and I hardly hold such views” she says.

Her parents migrated to America from Eastern Europe. She now wants to study the radicalization of the Jewish garment workers and their links with Zionism.

For Young, the violence on the West Bank is devastating. “Revenge killings of the kind being witnessed in Palestine every day will not bring peace,” she insists. “The Jews have always been trained to think of themselves as victims in history. This is a dangerous concept which has encouraged them to take positions without accepting responsibility for their action.” Where, in her view, does the solution lie? Without hesitating she says:

  • • The Americans must exert massive pressure on the Bush Administration to halt aid to Israel
  •  A movement must be launched to impose sanctions against Israel
  •  Sharon must be tried as a war criminal
  •  The restitution of Palestine must take place

She denounces the Oslo process and says it is now defunct. “There is need to reconceptualize issues to find a feasible solution. Zionism must end because as a Jew I believe it doesn’t provide me any security. Anti-Semitism must be addressed in the local milieu. In Israel and Palestine, the Jews and Muslims have lived together for ages. By setting up a new grassroots infrastructure, they could connect to each other. There is need for them to connect which they are doing in a small and sporadic way, the troubles notwithstanding. These groups should form the nucleus of a wider network to join these areas together,” Young says.

Source: Dawn

Globalization of terrorism

Foreign Policy of Pakistan, Terrorism and Violence, War and Peace

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

LAST week, Pakistan experienced the horror of its first case of suicide bombing in which 14 people were killed, 11 of them French engineers working on a naval submarine project.

This act of terrorism will have far-reaching implications for Pakistan’s politics, economy, security and foreign policy, apart from the effect it has had of besmirching the country’s image even further at a time when a turnaround was thought to be near at hand.

The authorities had no definitive information about the identity of the attacker, his motive and his connections with a terrorist network, if any. Yet the knee-jerk reaction in official circles was to point an accusing finger at India for this horrendous crime.

These allegations surprised no one, for it has been the traditional practice for the two countries to make the other the scapegoat when such criminal incidents occur.
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Education: ill-prepared for globalization

Development and Poverty, Economy, Education

By Zubeida Mustafa

The recently-released Mahbub ul Haq Centre’s Human Development in South Asia, 2001 report, which focuses on globalization and human development, points to a disaster looming on the horizon for countries like Pakistan.

The report correctly states, “Globalization is driven by knowledge and new technology. Thus there is a need not only to provide good quality primary, secondary and technical education but also to spend more on higher level of professional education. But in South Asia a trend of declining or stagnant tertiary enrolment rates is emerging.” (p.55)

Pakistan will lose in the globalization race for the simple reason that the country has failed to provide good education to its people. Leave aside the tertiary level, we are not even being able to address the problem of illiteracy and primary education. Pakistan’s adult literacy ratio is inching up at a rate slower than our population growth rate. That means that the pool of illiterate adults in the country is growing in absolute numbers every year – it was an appalling 53 million in the1998 census when it was 43 million in 1981.

Then there is the declining standard of education, which is now affecting economic productivity. The country is unable to produce the manpower with the basic expertise to handle modern technology and communication skills.

Even more alarming is the fact that education is promoting a chasm between the haves and the have-nots in the country. Instead of empowering the poor, education is actually perpetuating their poverty. The dismal quality of schooling they receive backwardizes them further. The modern education available to the rich enables them to generate and accumulate more wealth. It is a matter of deep concern that in our system education has become a major factor in the growing economic disparity between the classes and the concentration of wealth.

The first manifestation of this disturbing phenomenon is the decline in the enrolment ratio in primary education. The gross enrolment rate had registered a jump from 52 per cent in 1987-88 to 73 per cent in 1990-91. But by 1998-99 it had declined to 71 per cent. The Economic Survey 2001-2002 released by the government identifies the causes of this decline as the growing poverty and the poor standard of education in the government schools. In fact it admits that in the period that the gross enrolment ratio was falling, the private schools showed an increase in enrolment. But obviously this rise did not correspond to the drop in the enrolment in government schools, hence the overall decrease.  This only goes to confirm two basic facts. First, the parents,, even if uneducated themselves, are discerning enough to realize that it is unproductive to send a child to school if his education will not equip him for employment and a fruitful life. Secondly, private schools, where meaningful education is imparted, are beyond the reach of the poor because their fees are too high. Thus the children of the poorest of the poor are being marginalized from the education system.

With our leadership ostensibly having realized the gravity of the crisis, one would have expected the government to devise an innovative strategy to meet the challenge. And what has been the government’s response? It has come out with a concept it terms the public-private partnership. This envisages 1) provision of a package of incentives in all education sub-sectors; 2) involvement of the private sector in the management of public sector institutions; 3) making the Education Foundations effective autonomous bodies to provide substantial support to private sector educational institutions.

Having said this, the government it appears is not at all clear about how to proceed in the matter. The contradictions inherent in the public private partnership underline the confusion and adhocism which characterize the official approach to education. The fact of the matter is that the government has still not been able to determine its own role and that of the private sector in education and is therefore ambivalent about its relationship with private sector institutions.

In the case of primary schools, which constitute the base of the education structure in the country, the Economic Survey discloses that nearly 20 per cent of the primary school enrolment in the country is in private institutions. This is a significantly high share since it means that nearly a third of the students attending school in Pakistan are going to private schools.

What is more, the government wants to lighten its burden even further to “ease the pressure on its scarce resources” (to quote from the Economic Survey) But will it be possible to attain universal literacy by 2015 (the revised deadline), as is the goal of the government, through the private sector? On the one hand it is acknowledged officially that people are withdrawing their children from school because of poverty. On the other, the government wants people to send their children to private schools where they will be required to pay higher fees. The logic of this approach is beyond comprehension.

The irony of the situation is that the Sindh government is now seeking to enforce this strategy by making primary education compulsory in the province. The Sindh Compulsory Primary Education Ordinance 2001 promulgated in December would cause a parent to be fined as much as Rs 50 a day for not sending his child to school. There could be no greater injustice for the poor than this.

As its dependence on the private sector grows, the government finds its clout vis-a-vis the private institutions declining. Since it is not giving them any grant or subsidy, or providing them any tax rebates, the government can only resort to ordinances to seek to exercise some control over their working. That would explain why the Sindh government felt the need to issue the Sindh Private Educational Institutions (Regulation and Control) Ordinance 2002.

This ordinance seeks to subject the private institutions to government controls by requiring them to be registered with the appropriate authority, which would monitor their working. Since the major contentious issue in the case of elite private schools has been the fee structure, the registering authority would be expected to take it up. The ordinance, however, gives a school the right to impose its fee structure so long as it is not raised in the middle of the academic year. It seems unlikely in view of past experience that the government will really manage to regulate the fees. Earlier efforts to curb fee hikes by private schools have failed.

Having been given a free hand in a laissez faire environment for over 15 years, these institutions insist that they are operating in the open market. If the elite institutions manage to enrol students in spite of their high fees, the reason is the better quality education they provide in response to the popular demand. It being a seller’s market, in the absence of an alternative, the schools have the upper hand. If the government will, as a matter of policy, further expand the role of private schools they will be even more difficult to regulate. As it is, nearly 29,000 of the 36,800 private educational institutions are self-owned — only 2,500 are NGO-operated and 1100 belong to Trusts – which makes it more difficult to appeal to a higher altruistic motive.

The solution lies in adopting the conservative approach, namely, the revival of the public sector school system. Presuming that the political will exists, the government should concentrate its resources, manpower and managerial skills on its own schools rather than channel them into supervising the private sector.

First of all there is the question of mobilizing resources. Although the education budget has been increasing the rise has not been substantial. From Rs 34.8 billion in 1993-94 it has risen to Rs 72.2 billion in 2000-2001. But the education expenditure as a percentage of GNP has fallen in the same period from 2.22 to 2.06. Moreover the rise has not absorbed the inflation rate.  More disturbing has been the authorities’ failure to make optimum use of these resources. Corruption, inefficient use and mismanagement have resulted in wastage, which cannot be condoned. The phenomena of ghost schools, absentee teachers and missing facilities, which are receiving funds on paper, are the biggest evil in the education system today. This would also explain why the cost per child is in many cases higher in the public sector than in the private sector as claimed by the government. Wouldn’t it be more sensible if the inspectors to be appointed to keep a check on private schools were asked to focus their energy on the government schools?

The second major problem is the poor quality of teachers, which is now undermining the education system. Without good teachers it is not possible to effect any improvement in the academic standards. Not only are fewer teachers being trained and appointed in the primary section — the student-teacher ratio has worsened from 39:1 in 1990 to 54:1 in 2000. The quality of teachers training has also deteriorated and the teachers who are the product of this tottering system are not equipped or motivated enough to reform the system. This vicious cycle has to be broken somewhere.

There has been talk of inducting the private sector’s cooperation in the management of government schools. Exactly what form it will take has not been spelt out. The NWFP has invited the private entrepreneurs to take over school buildings and run them as low cost institutions. In Sindh the adopt-a-school programme seeks to improve decrepit schools by getting sponsors to do the job. Such sporadic efforts have not made a dent in the system. There is need to define the paradigms of this partnership between the public sector and the community. The government should drop all ideas of reducing its share in the education sector — at least at the primary level. Once it begins focussing on its own responsibilities, it will be able to devise strategies to resolve the crisis.

Source: Dawn

AUTHOR: Making people think

Economy, Politics, Social Issues

By Zubeida Mustafa

THE response to Professor Noam Chomsky’s visit to Pakistan in November 2001 was too overwhelming for words. Chomsky is known to be a crowd-puller in the United States and elsewhere — his talks being heard typically by standing-room-only audiences. Hence it was not strange that his planned visit should send a wave of excitement among the students and intellectuals in this country.
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Dr Mubarak Ali – With a sense of history

Archive Edition, Education, Notable Personalities, Politics

By Zubeida Mustafa

IN Dr Mubarak Ali’s case, appearances can be deceptive. It is incredible that this soft-spoken, unassuming man has shaken the establishment with his liberal interpretation of history. He has become persona non grata for many who do not wish to upset the apple cart — be it in politics or in the academia. Yet Mubarak Ali is one of the most prolific and versatile historians in Pakistan today. The author of countless books, he has written extensively on issues ranging from the Age of Reason in Europe to the women’s movement and the history of South Asia.
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