A few months after the recent unprecedented surge of violence in Israel/Palestine, the semester started and I began teaching the course Introduction to Critical Pedagogy. In the first few weeks of class, I usually teach what I regard as the foundations of critical pedagogy with texts from several thinkers, among them The Wretched of the Earth by the radical psychiatrist and political philosopher Franz Fanon (2001), which alongside Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2017), are the focus of this presentation. In the book’s opening essay – On Violence, written during the war in Algeria in 1961, Fanon provided a penetrating analysis of the violence in the colony, and specifically of the violence enacted by oppressed. Controversially, it could also be seen as its enthusiastic justification. The course was taught in Jerusalem, and as to be expected in a binational city, the student population was composed mainly of Israeli Jews and Palestinians in almost equal measures. I knew that bringing up questions of violence, oppression, and liberation in such troubled times was bound to be tense, especially when the students in class are collectively and personally involved in the conflict – either by having family members suffering in Gaza (Palestinians) or by having family members and friends serving there as soldiers in the IDF (Jews). Moreover, the events of 10/7/2023 – Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli military bases and villages and the murder and kidnapping of civilians, followed by the no less horrifying Israeli bombing of Gaza, have brought Fanon’s decolonization theory (whose original context is the 1960’s decolonization of “third world” countries) back to the headlines, and proved it to be a relevant analytical framework for understanding current events. Seeing how Fanon’s iconic text gained popularity over social media and was often quoted by pro-Palestinian activists, I expected this particular weekly reading to charge the class discussion with discomfort and interest. Indeed, the painful question that came from both Palestinian and Jewish students stayed with me and became the basis for this presentation – how, if at all, can education counter oppression without resorting to violence or risk inciting it?

In my presentation, I will discuss some of the encounters that took place during this volatile class – between Israeli Jews and Palestinians; the oppressor and the oppressed (Freire); the colonizer and the colonized (Fanon), between the historical context of On Violence and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and their contemporary undeniable relevance, and finally, between Fanon’s justification of violence as a means for social and political change and Freire’s call for love as the ingredient crucial to emancipation. These charged encounters bring up two connected and overlapping questions.

Firstly, from a theoretical perspective, it seems that Freire largely accepts Fanon’s depiction of society as construed along a strict border between the powerful and the powerless. Quoting Fanon on the first chapter of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire adopts his view of the colony as based on a dichotomized and rigid structure in which an individual belongs exclusively to one group - either colonizer or colonized. Moreover, for Fanon, the only way to change this structure is through reclaiming the violence of the oppressor, or as Sartre famously puts it in his forward to The Wretched of the Earth: “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.” Freire does not address directly Fanon’s solution to colonialism – violence, neither supporting nor condemning, and the question, therefore, is how does Freire view the violence of the oppressed – as forbidden? As a necessary evil? As an undesired yet effective means of liberation? And to follow up on this question, if Freire accepts Fanon’s view of the colonial social structure as rigid, so much so that it takes violence to break it, which educational means would be powerful enough in his view to change such a social structure? What makes Freire’s pedagogy just as strong? Secondly, and from a more general perspective, the question is can one educate students from opposing sides of the social dichotomy even while they are in the midst of a bloody conflict, and counter violence without resorting to empty moralism or to a downplaying of the existing power structure and its rigidity. Said differently, how can we acknowledge the violence immanent to a state of events yet advocate educationally for its change by nonviolent means?

To answer these two overlapping questions, I will first present Fanon’s essay, the interesting history of its translations into Arabic and Hebrew, and his influence on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I will then read carefully in Freire’s work to understand his approach to violence, and its role in critical pedagogy, arguing that when educating for change and against the status quo, Freire calls for the enactment a power no less strong than violence – love. This love, however, is not obvious and needs to be fleshed out for it is quite different from common romantic notions. In fact, it is closer to the concept of love in Christianity, particularly in the Catholic tradition, and as such it unveils how crucial was the influence of liberation theology on critical pedagogy. To conclude, I will discuss the possibilities of a love-inspired critical pedagogy in war-torn Jerusalem, and by extension, the possibility of individuals and collectives engulfed by violence to cease it and adopt a loving view of the other.

Cortez, Franz Giuseppe. The Overcoming of Violence: Paulo Freire on the Use of Violence for Social Transformation. Kritke, 2:2. 2016. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Penguin Classics, 2001. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Classics, 2017. Gaztambide, Daniel. From Freud to Fanon to Freire: Psychoanalysis as a liberation method. In L. Comas-Díaz & E. Torres Rivera (Eds.), Liberation psychology: Theory, method, practice, and social justice. pp. 71–90. American Psychological Association, 2020. Harms Smith, L. Epistemic decoloniality as a pedagogical movement: a turn to anticolonial theorists such as Fanon, Biko and Freire. In Kleibl, T., Lutz, R., Noyoo, N., Bunk, B., Dittmann, A. and Seepamore, B. (eds.) The Routledge handbook of postcolonial social work. Abingdon: Routledge, pages 113-126, 2019. Leonardo, Z., Singh, M. Fanon, Education and the Fact of Coloniality. In: Parker, S., Gulson, K., Gale, T. (eds). Education Policy & Social Inequality, vol 1. Springer, 2017.