Dr. Mohammed Awad Tawfiq Shabir, Academic and Educational Researcher – Palestine
As war began to encroach on the small geographical sliver of this world in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian students and children were bombarded with new and strange concepts and terminology, breaking into their minds and adding to their lexicon of pain, suffering, and oppression. These young students have been unable to acquire knowledge about these terms and concepts due to their limited necessity and to the difficulty in comprehending them, and their lack of use in their daily lives; moreover, they are not included in the textbooks of the curriculum in a way that allows them to be incorporated into their knowledge structure and linguistic inventory.
The nature and reality of terminology
The concepts and terminology of the recent war on Gaza have created a new learning environment for Palestinian students outside of school, and it has become necessary for them to deal with them and practically employ them in life contexts, recognizing the importance of their usage in their daily practices. It is a new learning situation that has led them to a state of daily action and mobility with these terms, constituting a state of positive effectiveness to invest in the ordeal during wartime. In other words, the interruption of the educational process in Gaza limited students’ receipt of information and knowledge within its official framework, however, war practices in their various forms created new things to learn but in an irregular way, nevertheless it is a learning from life, for life, during wartime.
Because pain generates need, students need to learn about those terms and concepts, and they dedicated new doors for it in their verbal dictionary, becoming part of the state of everyday feeling and discourse, circulating in various student dialogues in the Gaza Strip to grow up with new ages and long years, having to keep up with the political, military, institutional and living discourse that has forcibly lured them to his verbal platforms. This speech brings adults and young people together in one space, to understand the meaning and purpose of the words and their interpretations in the critical moments of their daily lives.
Once you hear these terms and concepts thrown around by students in their daily dialogues, you end up saying, ‘Gaza students, you have grown in years and reasonings, because such a thing requires specialized people in different areas from which these terms originated.’
In the context of research and pursuit of terminology scattered in written and audible speech, we found a few of them that stopped me and prompted me to look into the motive behind that situation, where I heard a child playing on a street in the area where we were displaced, as young as five years old, and when they heard a loud, bomb-like sound, the child rushed to their house, saying: “Fire belt… fire belt “. The fire belt is a military term used to describe some type of airstrike carried out by the Israeli army to isolate residential neighborhoods. Such a situation made it necessary to keep track of the motives behind it, and how it would affect children of such an age while going through difficult ways of life with their big, weird terms, clad in letters of fear, pain, suffering, and fate.
Areas of terminology and their impact on students
By scanning these terms, I was able to gather what my mind and pen could grasp from the street alleyways and smoke-filled atmosphere, where the terminology varied and its fields of employment mixed. New terms reflect the difficult living situation of the Palestinian population, which expresses pain and daily suffering, such as: family reunification; caravans, which are iron houses for displaced persons; nonhuman conditions; humanitarian truce; displaced persons; humanitarian corridor; black market; war and crisis traffickers; shelter center; coupon, which is a share of food aid; blockages, residential squares divided by the Israeli army to evacuate them; voluntary and forced migration; genocide; cleansing offences; Nazi detention camps. These terms are in the context of the daily dialogue of the Gaza Strip population during the war there, that Palestinian students and children heard, and that opened up many questions about what they were. It also created a passion and a need in them to learn more about it, to understand it more deeply, with the goal of knowing something new and expanding the space and meanings of life, culture, and language concepts.
A number of new terms from the health and medical field have also entered the Palestinian Students’ Dictionary, which was circulated in the media and transmitted by students, such as: under the rubble; unidentified martyr; field hospital; premature children; recovery of a body; prosthetic limbs; mass graves; decomposition of bodies; high-risk wounds; psychological trauma; clinical death; air medical aid. These terms are never without pain, psychological distress, and bitter memories for adults and young adults alike. However, they have occupied a large space in students’ minds in their daily dialogues and stories. These students were quick to investigate the meaning, connotation, and timing of each term, until they had compiled a list of terminology and concepts commonly used in young people’s dialogues.
The Palestinian Students’ Dictionary now includes a range of military terms and concepts, which have been communicated through the media and interacted with by students in their daily speeches and conversations with their friends and family. These terms include: The War Cabinet, the Israeli council responsible for military actions that makes war decisions; redeployment and positioning; indirect negotiations; combing areas; ground and marine barriers and fences; unilateral withdrawal; Iron Dome; The David Slingshot, an Israeli missile interception system; fire belt; sirens; front combat lines; distance zero; infiltration behind combat lines; air discharge, which is the loud sound of an aircraft resembling bombing, through piercing the sound wall; Blitz and concentrated operations; soft belt; flare bombs fired by Israeli occupation forces as they penetrate by land into cities at night; Quad Captor, a type of remotely piloted aircraft that depicts and shoots at citizens; reconnaissance aircraft; systematic assassinations; scorched Earth policy; air cover; arbitrary arrest; human shields; Kibbutz, which is synonymous with the term a settlement on Palestinian land; coercive confessions; hazardous combat zones; neutralizing combat elements; reconnaissance; exchange transactions; the cantons, which separate Palestinian towns and villages with military barriers; restore deterrence power; catastrophic clashes; The Expatriate Unit, a special unit of the Israeli army that is proficient in Arabic and can coexist between Palestinians and assist the army in arrests; spy satellites; cluster missiles; phosphorus bombs; mercenaries; brigade, division and military Battalion; penetration of ground fortifications; prisoners of war; child recruitment; security companies; Al-Hallabat, an Israeli barrier set up by the Israeli army to search Palestinians as they are displaced from their areas; the Philadelphia axis, the area around the Rafah crossing on the border strip with Egypt. It is no secret that military terms and concepts have been a painful mental picture for Palestinian students to hear and use, with each term associated with a difficult memory both at the level of their consciousness and in their unconsciousness. Students investigated these terms by asking adults about them, to gain a conceptual understanding of each term.
Additionally, Palestinian students have been introduced to new political terms in the international arena through media discourse, that have legal and institutional connotations, including: international guarantees; future scenarios; International Red Cross; United Nations; International Court of Justice; International Criminal Court; anti-Semitism; hate speech; racial segregation; United Nations Envoy; Veto power; UNICEF; UNESCO; Amnesty International; World Health Organization; International protection; imposing new dictates; International legitimacy; Nazism; iron swords, the name given by the Israeli army in its current war; Violation of international humanitarian law; Green Line; artificial chaos; The repellent living environment. These terms created a state of confusion among Palestinian students, prompting them to dismantle them and understand their symbolism.
In the same context, a range of terminology has emerged in relation to internal Palestinian political affairs, such as: technocrats; grassroots incubator; internal front; popular resistance; cultural, religious and civil objects; psychological warfare; malicious rumors. These terms and concepts, which surpassed the age limits of the recipients, encouraged students to consider their meanings deeply, leading to early adulthood, advancing their mental age and life attendance, while also dismantling their paths of thinking. It is incumbent upon them, and indeed necessary, to deal with these terms, understand their connotations and use, and their fields of employment so that they can protect themselves and communicate the image and the suffering and oppression of their people. And that is done by addressing the world in a language that can be understood, for the language of bleeding blood, children’s tears, mothers’ cries, and innocent blood no longer convinces this world, to stand up for a moment and say that what is happening to Gaza students, Palestine, and its children is a full-fledged crime, in an era when people are afraid to say: ‘Enough disregarding humanity and childhood’. Child protection institutions were widely discussed, but it seemed that Palestinian students were not included in their calculations, so the Palestinians’ childhood is in the wind, and it merely became daily news for media channels.
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The previous narrative urges Palestinian curriculum holders to consider systematically integrating these terms into curriculum contexts, disaggregating them, and incorporating educative and educational discourse. Forced learning and education in times of crisis and emergency has become a tragic situation for Palestinian students, for war will eventually determine the practical paths of thinking for these children and students, by retaining these terms and concepts in their minds and as part of their daily lives, to build upon it more comprehensive assessments, and it will become the medium of communication with the world, because the war, with its big terms, will change the personalities of Palestinian students at all levels.
On the contrary, the field of question remains open and present in the minds of Palestinian students: why does this all happen? And why exactly do we always pay the price? However, children and students experience the reality and difficult circumstances surrounding them, understanding terminology and concepts, knowing their meanings, and incorporating them into their increasingly semiotic dictionary every day of war.
This article was published in issue 16 of Manhajiyat magazine and was translated into English as part of a joint project with the Centre for Lebanese Studies and (PROCOL). All rights reserved. Republishing or quoting the article is prohibited without citing the source or obtaining written permission.