Tales out of School: Palestinian Students in a Jewish Institution, 1870–1937

The agricultural school of Mikveh Israel, founded near Jaffa in 1870, is oft-addressed in Zionist historiography as the upbringer of prominent Zionist figures and thus an integral component of the Jewish Yishuv’s development into the Israeli state. In Palestinian historiography, it is similarly taken as an early Jewish colonization of Palestinian soil, harbinger of the entire Zionist project. These selective approaches disregard the stories and perspectives of those students in this institute who did not turn to be Zionist leaders, Zionists at all, or that were not in fact Jews but Arabs.This chapter recovers some of the experiences of Mikveh Israel’s Palestinian-Arab students, narrating the story of these students from the late to the post-Ottoman periods and redrawing the history of this Jewish-Ottoman institution’s integration within its lingual, cultural and political surroundings. This small-scale social history of the school’s pupils illuminates initial Palestinian perceptions of the Zionist project, the differentiation and conflation of Sephardi Jews and European Zionists, as well as exposing ways in which Zionist advocates tried to pave ways into local Arab politics. Through the story of Mikveh Israel, moreover, the chapter discusses the educational arena as a site of Jewish-Arab encounter, cooperation and conflict in Palestine.