Learning to Love and Hate in Gaza: A qualitative case study exploring the interplay between education and violence in post-Oslo Palestine

Formal education is widely promoted as a tool for mitigating conflict and discouraging support for political violence, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Despite extensive investment, however, there is limited empirical evidence that schooling introduced during ongoing conflict achieves these aims. This dissertation examines why formal education has often failed to reduce support for violence by focusing on post-Oslo Gaza, one of the most heavily subsidized educational peacebuilding interventions in the contemporary world. Between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, more than $3 billion in international assistance was invested in creating a Palestinian educational system explicitly intended to promote nonviolence and coexistence. Yet Gazan youth remain among the least likely to renounce political violence.

The study asks whether formal education in post-Oslo Gaza was unsuccessful in reducing support for violence, and if so, why. Challenging functionalist assumptions that schooling is inherently pacifying, the analysis draws on cumulative theories of radicalization, critical pedagogy, and public pedagogy to emphasize student agency and the interaction between formal curriculum, hidden curriculum, and learning beyond school walls.

Methodologically, the dissertation employs a qualitative case study centered on the ‘Class of 2000,’ the first cohort to experience the full post-Oslo curriculum. It draws on fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2025, including focus groups and interviews with 41 Gazan youth holistically reviewing their pedagogical journeys inside and outside of school, complemented by interviews with educators and policymakers, archival research, and critical discourse analysis of Palestinian Authority and Hamas educational materials.

The findings demonstrate that formal education in post-Oslo Gaza did not reduce support for violence and, when perceived as politically constrained or disconnected from lived experience, often intensified grievance and distrust. The dissertation concludes that education introduced amid ongoing conflict cannot be understood in isolation from its political context and may be ineffective or counterproductive when it fails to engage the realities shaping students’ lives.