Realizing Participation Rights of Minority Youth in Conflicted Societies: The Case of Councils Integrating Jewish and Palestinian-Arab Youth in Israel

Abstract

This study explored the intersection of participation rights, politics, and culture in youth councils operating in a polarized socio-political climate. It drew on the case of youth councils integrating Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth in Israel. Based on interviews with youth council members, adult leaders, and Ministry of Education officials, the findings portray the interrelated political, lingual, and cultural barriers hindering the participation of Palestinian-Arab youth. These barriers were embedded in top-down activities, practices, and structures, unintendedly importing unequal power relations into the councils. We argue that realizing participation rights in youth councils operating in diverse and conflicted societies requires adapting the councils to their participants, their locality, and the circumstances. These adaptations should acknowledge that youth participation is a multidimensional concept whose implementation is contextual, rely on a willingness to relinquish the common one-size-fits-all model of youth councils and aim to create participation spaces that challenge inequalities and social friction.

Introduction

What should we do [when the national anthem “Hatikva”] is playing? Make [the Palestinian-Arab youth council members] stand? Allow them to sit? The dilemmas are present all the time.

Student and youth councils are one of the primary mechanisms that facilitate children’s right to participation in collective decision-making. This study explores the realization of participation rights in youth councils integrating Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth in Israel. It examines the intersection of youth participation, politics, and culture in the councils and portrays the barriers associated with minority youth participation in a polarized political climate characterized by sociocultural friction. The excerpt above, citing a Ministry of Education official responsible for youth councils in Israel, exemplifies some of the barriers hindering minority youth’s participation rights in councils dominated by the majority culture. Concluding a conference with the singing of Israel’s national anthem, underscoring the state’s Jewish nature, manifests the socio-political characteristics of these barriers.

The opening section elaborates on the context of youth councils integrating Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth in Israel. The subsequent section presents a literature review comprising two subsections. The first subsection discusses children’s and youths’ participation rights and explains the scholarly contribution of the study. Whereas student and youth councils have attracted vast scholarly attention as a framework for the realization of participation rights, there is scant knowledge of barriers to the interactions within diverse youth councils and of the cultural factors that contextualize participation in such councils. The second subsection of the literature review focuses on studies that addressed conflictual issues in educational settings. This body of literature contributes to understanding the benefits and complexities of confronting conflictual issues in diverse youth councils. Subsequently, we explain the research design, which drew on interviews with youth council members, adult leaders, and Ministry of Education officials.

The findings portray the interrelated barriers hindering the realization of Palestinian-Arab youth’s participation rights. These include political barriers relating to activities and discussions that intersect with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, language barriers due to the councils’ meetings and activities conducted in Hebrew, and cultural barriers relating to different approaches to informal education and clashing conservative and liberal values. The conclusions highlight that these barriers were embedded in top-down activities, practices, and structures, which did not consider the context, thus unintentionally importing unequal power relations into the councils. We argue that realizing participation rights in youth councils operating in diverse and conflicted societies requires adapting the councils to their participants, their locality, and their unique circumstances. These adaptations should acknowledge that youth participation is a multidimensional concept whose implementation is contextual, rely on a willingness to relinquish the common one-size-fits-all model of youth councils, and aim to create participation spaces that challenge inequalities and social friction.

Context: Jewish-Arab Youth Councils in Israel

This study examines Israel’s municipal and regional youth councils as an arena for exploring youth participation rights in a culturally diverse and conflicted society. Israeli nationals comprise 74% Jews, 21% Arabs, and 5% citizens of other social or religious affiliations (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Israel’s Arab and Jewish populations typically reside in separate areas and are enrolled in separate educational systems. Power relations between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens are often described as asymmetric, as the Jewish majority controls most material and political resources and determines the country’s national character (Maoz, 2011; Meshulam, 2019). The relationships between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel are also embedded in the Israeli-Palestinian historical and ongoing conflict.

Some Israeli municipalities have mixed Jewish and Arab populations, but most are not integrated. Youth councils operating in integrated municipalities are expected to incorporate both Arab and Jewish representatives, following legislation of the Local Municipalities Act (2011). The act required Israeli municipalities to establish a municipal youth council, “including representatives from educational institutes, community centers, youth movements, youth organizations” (Article 5c) who “will represent the matters of children and youth in the local municipality” (Article 6). Integrated youth councils also operate in some of the Ministry of Education’s regional districts, which include both Jewish and Arab municipalities. Regional youth councils operate under the Ministry of Education regulations, which require each municipal youth council to send representatives to the regional youth council (Ministry of Education, 2022). Integrating Jewish and Arab youth in municipal and regional youth councils is a relatively new phenomenon. Until several years ago, Arab youth did not attend these councils. Our study explores this emerging phenomenon to understand youth participation rights in diverse and conflicted societies.

Literature Review

Children’s and Youths’ Participation Rights

Article 12(1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989, hereinafter UNCRC) anchored children’s rights to participate in decision-making. It determines that “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child” and requires that the views of the child be “given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

The adoption of the UNCRC was followed by the development of legislation, policies, and methodologies to promote the implementation of Article 12 (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2009). Over the years, countries worldwide have adopted mechanisms that aim to fulfill the participation rights of children and youth in various domains, including judicial proceedings, academic research, public forums, and schools (e.g., the edited books of Gal & Duramy, 2015; Percy-Smith & Thomas, 2010).

The establishment of student and youth councils reflects a prominent practice to facilitate children’s participation in collective decision-making that affects policy issues. Many studies have explored children’s participation in student and youth councils operating within schools (Cross et al., 2014; McCluskey et al., 2013; Wyness, 2009), in municipalities (Collins et al., 2016; Richards-Schuster & Checkoway, 2009; Wyness, 2009), or at the national level (Perry-Hazan, 2016; Shephard & Patrikios, 2013).

Unlike other youth participation frameworks, such as youth organizations (DeBower et al., 2023; Malone et al., 2023), student and youth councils operate under the authority of the formal institutions they are intended to influence (Collins et al., 2016), representing not only the interests of the council’s members but also the interests of other youth (Wyness, 2009). Emerging research on student and youth councils has identified various barriers hindering the realization of the right to participation in such councils, including adultism (adults’ tendency to ascribe inferior worth to youth’s opinions; Checkoway, 2011; Perry-Hazan, 2016), top-down structures that mimic adults’ political institutions and enable tokenism or manipulation (Hickey & Pauli-Myler, 2019; Nir & Perry-Hazan, 2016), and exclusion of children from disempowered groups (Collins et al., 2016; Wyness, 2009). Few studies have explored barriers relating to the interactions between children in youth councils (Nairn et al., 2006) and other youth participatory frameworks (see Zak-Doron & Perry-Hazan, 2023). Our study addresses this gap in the literature.

Moreover, there is scant knowledge about the cultural factors that contextualize the right to participate in student and youth councils. As these councils are widespread as mechanisms for implementing participation rights, it is important to gain more empirical and theoretical insights regarding the diverse ways that participation in councils is perceived and practiced in various cultural contexts. Contextualizing the study of participation rights in student and youth councils is embedded in the broader literature exploring religious and cultural aspects of children’s and youths’ participation rights (Duramy, 2015; Imoh & Okyere, 2020; Mason & Bolzan, 2010; Raby, 2014; Rampal, 2008; Wood, 2014). Some of these studies have demonstrated the complexities of implementing participation rights within societies that emphasize communal values and use diverse cultural frames to understand these rights. Such complexities may relate to how different cultures perceive and interpret children’s and youths’ participation. While Western cultures subscribing to liberal and democratic values conceptualize participation as an individual right, collectivist-oriented cultures may understand participation as a social obligation associated with responsibility to family and community (Imoh & Okyere, 2020; Mason & Bolzan, 2010; Rampal, 2008).

Other culturally related complexities include generational power gaps that may be wider within societies valuing obedience to adult authority (Imoh & Okyere, 2020), as well as differences in participatory capital. Wood (2014), following Bourdieu (1977), conceptualized participatory capital as the combined and interrelated social, economic, and cultural capital related to the logic, network, and practices of citizenship participation within a social field. Wood argued that different participatory resources gained through socializing processes inform the nature and practice of participation. Nairn et al. (2006), who studied participatory initiatives in New Zealand, showed that including minority youth in participatory processes could lead to their subsequent exclusion due to their lack of participatory capital. These children experienced marginalization inside the councils, claiming they “did not understand what was going on” during the meetings (pp. 258–259).

Due to barriers to student participation and the cultural gaps in participatory capital, it is not surprising that studies have revealed that practices of youth participation can deepen inequalities rather than reduce them. For example, privileged children might maneuver participation toward their own interests (Fielding, 2004; Wyness, 2009). Fielding (2004) explained that, as speakers’ social location or identity shapes how they see and understand the world, issues of race, gender, and class might be overlooked in participation frameworks. Studies have also shown that participatory practices might lead to participating youth acquiring favored treatment and adults using youth participation as a tool for reinforcing institutional power relations and engendering compliance (e.g., Bragg, 2007; Drew, 2019; Finneran et al., 2023). None of the cited studies addressed power relations within student and youth councils.

Youth Discussions of Conflictual Issues in Educational Settings

The complexities related to the various cultural interpretations of participation rights are intensified in the context of diverse youth councils in conflicted societies. This context raises questions about the extent to which conflictual issues should be brought to the table in youth councils. In light of the absence of literature relating to the interactions between youth within diverse youth councils, we turn to the literature on conflictual issues in educational settings to understand the complexities of such interactions.

Exploring political discussions in the school context, Hess (2009) argued that schools failing to include controversial issues in their curricula or denying the importance of such issues send a wrong and even dangerous message to their students. Hess claimed that avoiding these issues teaches students that political issues are unimportant, that controversial issues are not for youth to encounter, and that the nature of public good is not disputable. Moreover, she held that discussions of public controversies facilitate airing multiple and competing views, hence improving the quality of the decision-making process. Echoing Hess’s arguments, scholars exploring controversial political discussions among youth have emphasized the benefits of such discussions, including developing democratic understandings, skills, and dispositions (Bickmore & Parker, 2014), fostering political and civic engagement (Kahne et al., 2013), and enhancing political tolerance (McAvoy & Hess, 2013). Studies have indicated that teachers can achieve these benefits through numerous practices, including encouraging open classroom discussions (Kahne et al., 2013), developing empathy and acceptance of alternative perspectives (Parker, 2016), challenging norms of silence which contribute to maintaining status quo exclusion (Dabach, 2015), and modeling deliberative discourse (Cohen, 2016).

However, several scholars have acknowledged the complexity of introducing youth to discussions of highly conflictual issues within societies that face a volatile political climate. McAvoy and Hess (2013) recognized that some degree of political stability is needed before schools can discuss controversial political issues. Indeed, Pollak et al. (2018) contended that the scholarly discourse, largely advocating including political discussions in classrooms, tended to examine countries having stable, long-standing democratic traditions. This inclination, they claimed, neglected the research of younger and less stable democracies, such as Israel, in which polarization is a constant rather than a temporary condition, and the very nature of the democratic regime is a controversial issue.

Insights concerning the importance of discussing conflictual issues have particular relevance for implementing participation rights in youth councils. Sidestepping conflictual issues may result in clipping the wings of youth councils and limiting their ability to promote change (compare Nir & Perry-Hazan, 2016). However, the acknowledged complexities of addressing conflictual issues in the classroom might be intensified in youth councils, as the councils’ core goal is to engage youth in shared decision-making and collaboration.

Research Design

The study was based on qualitative methods and drew on interviews with 37 members of youth councils and 12 adults. The youth councils’ members included 21 girls and 16 boys aged 13–18. Ten youth participants were Palestinian-Arab, and 27 were Jewish, all members of one of four integrated youth councils in Israel. Most participants (N = 27) were members of one of two youth councils operating within Israeli municipalities comprising Palestinian-Arab and Jewish populations. The other 10 youth participants were members of a district youth council or the National Youth Council, both of which are councils that integrate Jewish and Palestinian-Arab members. The proportion of Palestinian-Arab youth in each integrated council was around 20% to 30%. The adult participants included eight adult leaders (six women and two men) responsible for integrated municipal or district youth councils and four Ministry of Education (MoE) officials (two women and two men) who were involved in different aspects of the youth councils’ programs. Two adult participants were Palestinian Arabs (one adult leader and one official), and 10 were Jewish. All participants lived in Israel rather than in the occupied territories. We used the term “Palestinian Arabs” instead of “Arabs” or “Israeli Arabs” as some participants identified as Palestinians, some as Arabs, and some used both terms.

As noted in the contextual section, the integration of Jewish and Palestinian-Arab members in common youth councils remains rare. Therefore, we sought potential participants through officials working in the MoE or in the youth departments of the few municipalities that integrate Jews and Palestinian Arabs. We asked the officials to invite their youth council members and their adult leaders to participate. All the youth and adults we contacted agreed to participate in the study. Two Palestinian-Arab adult leaders who initially agreed to participate could not be interviewed due to scheduling difficulties. The high consent rate is not surprising, as youth and adult leaders who engage in participation frameworks are accustomed to investing their free time in various initiatives.

We conducted individual, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with each of the adult leaders and MoE officials. Youth council members attended one of seven focus group meetings, each comprising three to five participants. All groups included participants from the same council. Meetings with adult leaders and youth council members were held immediately before or after the councils’ meetings.

All participants signed consent forms, clarifying that their participation in the study was voluntary, that they could withdraw from the study at any time, and that their information was confidential. Youth under 18 also provided parental consent. The study’s ethical procedures were approved by our faculty’s IRB (#412/11).

The interviews were conducted face-to-face during 2019 to 2020, each lasting 30 to 60 minutes. Both youth and adult participants were asked questions concerning the councils’ structure, procedures, activities, and impact, as well as regarding interactions between the youth and between the youth and the associated adults. Our method of participant recruitment, where adult leaders were asked to recruit youth members, could have introduced bias, as participants may have felt compelled to answer questions favorably, skewing the results in favor of the program. Author 1, who conducted the interviews, sought to facilitate honest answers by establishing trust and encouraging critical and culturally relevant dialogue (see Bassett et al., 2008). The interviews were conducted in Hebrew with the assistance of a translator as needed.

The interviews and focus groups were recorded and transcribed. Data analysis employed categorizing techniques carried out in several stages (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). First, each researcher formulated an initial set of categories, which characterized the contextual aspects of participation rights in the integrated councils. Second, we discussed the initial categories and revised them. Our analysis focused on identifying and characterizing barriers hindering Palestinian-Arab youth’s participation rights, as the data revealed barriers that have yet to be addressed in the youth participation rights literature. We then reviewed the complete data set and organized them into categories based on the barriers we identified. For this stage, we used Dedoose software to analyze the data. Discrepancies in the application of codes were discussed and resolved by consensus.

During the data collection and interpretation, we carefully considered our personal perspectives, informed by our identities and life experiences (Milner, 2007). Author 1 is a Jewish Ph.D. student who has considerable experience in working with youth from diverse backgrounds and leading municipal youth programs. Author 2 is a Jewish Associate Professor whose research expertise is exploring the intersection of children’s rights, religion, and culture. The current study was part of a larger project we conducted that investigates religious and cultural aspects of the right to participate in youth councils. Our position as Jewish scholars inevitably engenders biases when we explore the rights of Palestinian-Arab youth. We were able to interpret the interviews of Jewish youth and adult leaders with greater confidence (see Sapir & Alimi, 2023). Additionally, the Palestinian-Arab participants may have felt less comfortable than the Jewish participants communicating with the interviewer due to cultural and linguistic barriers.

A two-element code identifies the excerpts appearing in this article. The first part of the code is two letters signifying the participants’ role and affiliation as Palestinian-Arab or Jewish (YP = Palestinian-Arab youth council member; YJ = Jewish youth council member; LP = Palestinian-Arab adult leader; LJ = Jewish adult leader; OP = Palestinian-Arab MoE official; OJ = Jewish MoE official). The second element of the code is a serial number (e.g., YP4, OJ30).

Findings

The findings portray the unique barriers hindering the realization of Palestinian-Arab youth’s participation rights in the integrated youth councils. These include (1) political barriers relating to activities and discussions that intersect with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, deliberately or unintentionally; (2) language barriers due to the councils’ meetings and activities conducted in Hebrew; and (3) cultural barriers relating to different approaches to informal education and clashing conservative and liberal values.

“Gaza Has Its Own Black South”: Political Barriers

The councils constituted a unique space for integrating Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth that is not evident in any other sphere of Israel’s education system. Indeed, both Jewish and Palestinian-Arab participants reacted positively regarding their opportunity to meet and establish relationships with each other. YP6 noted: “In other places, the Arabs are afraid to talk with the Jews, and the Jews are afraid to talk with the Arabs . . . Here, everyone talks [freely] with each other.” Similarly, YP9 asserted: “In other places, there are many stigmas . . . and here, we come with confidence.”

These positive relationships notwithstanding, the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have manifested in various intended and unintended ways in the councils’ activities and discussions. An MoE official (OJ1) noted in this regard: “Youth councils mirror the Israeli society . . . the problems we have as a society are also concentrated in the councils.”

As the following examples demonstrate, the political aspects of youth council participation impeded the participation of Palestinian-Arab youth representatives. For instance, formulating an agreed version of the councils’ treaty during the councils’ annual national conference proved difficult. A key sticking point in the treaty’s final version concerned a call for all Israeli youth to serve in the army or volunteer for national civil service, each according to their abilities and beliefs. Another example of conflict was the use of national symbols in the councils’ conferences, particularly Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikva,” which includes allusions to the “Jewish soul.” An MoE official (OJ1) explained her conflicts in this context: “What should we do [when ‘Hatikva’] is playing? Make [the Palestinian-Arab representatives] stand? Allow them to sit? The dilemmas are present all the time.” A municipal youth council adult leader (LJ2) noted that the Palestinian-Arab representatives left the council’s national conference when “Hatikva” started playing. Palestinian-Arab youth also faced conflicts during “Unity Week,” an annual event established after the murder of three Jewish teens by Hamas militants in 2014. An MoE official (OJ3) noted: “Try to think how Arab youth feel about that. They didn’t kidnap or murder anyone, but they’re still Palestinians . . . They participate in the activities. They mention Unity Week because unity in our society is important, but I’m not sure they feel comfortable with it. Yet again, nobody asks them.”

During military operations in Gaza, the political barriers intensified as politics manifested in the councils’ activities. A prominent example was the “Black South” protest led by the National Youth Council. Jewish students around the country came to school dressed in black as a sign of identification with Israeli towns around the Gaza Strip, which suffered from missile attacks. An MoE official (OJ1) recalled her experience of these events: “The Arab representatives said [to me], ‘We can’t be part of this. Our brothers are in Gaza, but we decided to sit still and not get in your way’. Thankfully, it didn’t cause a larger outburst, but you can see everything is very, very fragile.” A similar experience was also recalled by a youth council adult leader (LJ3):

[A Palestinian-Arab council member] spoke during the council meeting and said it’s very difficult for her to join the [Black South] protest with her school because the reality for them is much more complex. We only worry about the Israeli side, but Gaza has its own Black South.

The following excerpt from an interview with a Palestinian-Arab youth council member illustrates the complexities of the political dilemmas among Palestinian-Arab youth and their impact on their sense of belonging to the councils:

YP3: I’m a citizen of Israel, but I don’t define myself as a citizen because I don’t feel I belong . . . I feel that the council represents a [wide] variety of youth in my city, and here I can fit in and listen to other opinions . . . Not everyone [in my community] accepts that I’m in a council with Jewish youth . . . A few days ago, I participated in a Palestinian protest, and I felt I really belonged to my people and the land . . . and then, when I come here, I also feel I belong. Sometimes, it’s hard to reconcile the two [sensations].

Due to these political complexities, Palestinian-Arab youths often refrained from expressing their opinions regarding conflictual issues, as an MoE official noted:

OJ1: Being a representative of Arab society is very challenging. You’re always a minority in the regional council, in the national council, [and] in the country . . . I think [the Palestinian-Arab representatives] are very careful . . . I often sit there watching them, thinking what’s going through their heads, what they really want to say and maybe wouldn’t dare because it’s too conflictual.

“The Language Difficulties Really Take Them Out of the Scene”: Language Barriers

Using only the Hebrew language in the youth councils and not Arabic constituted an additional barrier to the participation of Palestinian-Arab youth. The councils’ discussions were held almost exclusively in Hebrew, with no organized means of translation. As most of the Palestinian-Arab participants were not fluent in Hebrew, language barriers were a key subject they addressed. For instance, YP8 noted: “The language part is difficult; the Jewish kids speak really fast, so it’s really hard for us to understand.” Similarly, an adult leader and an MoE official noted:

LJ6:

Language is the most problematic issue . . . It’s really difficult for [Palestinian-Arab youth] to express themselves in the meetings . . . I had a few boys here last year who dropped out. I think they didn’t really understand what was going on because of the language.

OP1:

The language difficulties really take [Palestinian-Arab youth] out of the scene.

Both LJ6 and OP1 lamented that Arab schools do not teach Hebrew well enough.

Several adult leaders described practices they developed to address the language barriers. However, most of them focused on how they could help the Palestinian-Arab members improve their participation and did not question using only Hebrew in council meetings. For example, LJ6 noted:

I keep encouraging them and telling them how important it is for them to speak . . . Even if they don’t speak, I encourage them to be there and listen. I usually divide [the council members] into small groups to make it easier for [the Palestinian-Arab members] to participate in the discussions.

One adult leader (LJ2) explicitly denied a Palestinian-Arab adult leader’s request for a translation of joint events, even though the latter threatened to “get up in the middle [of the event] and take all of the [Palestinian-Arab] students out” if there was no translation. LJ2 defended her decision by asserting that Palestinian-Arab youth need to know Hebrew to achieve social mobilization:

We can’t translate everything. At the end of the day, we’re a Hebrew-speaking country . . . At age 18, they will leave their schools and enter the outside world, which speaks Hebrew and looks for Hebrew-speaking employees. I don’t want them to end up unemployed or working in minimum-wage jobs like their parents.

A Jewish youth council member described another language-related conflict regarding the timing of documents’ translation (YJ4). Palestinian-Arab council members requested translations of early drafts to enable them to be more involved in formulating the final draft. However, YJ4 did not appear to understand the importance of translation, as he explained:

Often, after certain discussions, we want to issue some sort of document, and then the Arab participants say: “Why isn’t it translated into Arabic? That’s not right.” We tried explaining that “first, let’s approve the document and then translate it into Arabic,” but from their point of view, why wasn’t it translated in advance? That creates disagreements.

LJ4 was the only adult leader who made translation a routine practice. She asked one of the council members who was fluent in both languages to translate the discussion into Arabic and emphasized the importance of this translation:

We started holding the meetings in both languages: First, I speak in Hebrew, and then she translates into Arabic . . . the communication issue is very important to me. I wouldn’t allow a situation where someone doesn’t understand what we’re discussing. If someone doesn’t understand, we stop everything and explain . . . It takes a lot of time; sometimes, it can take up half of the meeting.

“When I First Got Here, I Didn’t Understand What Was Going On”: Cultural Barriers

Cultural barriers also hindered Palestinian-Arab youth participation in the integrated councils. One type of cultural barrier related to the different roles of informal education in Jewish and Palestinian-Arab societies. An MoE official (OJ3) noted in this regard that there are no youth councils in Palestinian-Arab schools and emphasized that most Palestinian-Arab adolescents are unfamiliar with how youth councils operate:

An Arab teenager who arrives at a council meeting may experience something which is the exact opposite of his school experience . . . There are no student councils in Arab schools. If that child comes back to school and asks to form one, they’ll probably kick him out.

A Jewish adult leader (LJ3) recalled how she contacted Palestinian-Arab colleagues and instructed them on how to establish a student council at their school so they could send representatives to the municipal youth council. A Palestinian-Arab council member (YP2) explained that she was not even aware of the existence of a municipal youth council. She joined the council at her teacher’s request rather than as a school council representative. YP2 emphasized her lack of understanding of the role of youth council members when she first joined the youth council: “When I first got here, I didn’t understand what was going on . . . ‘what’s happening here? What are we doing here? Why are we here?’ It’s still difficult to understand . . . it’s complex.”

A related barrier concerned the lack of support among Palestinian-Arab parents for their children’s participation in the council. For example, LJ4 noted that Palestinian-Arab parents preferred their children to focus on school tasks rather than extra-curricular social activities. This lack of support was also due to the councils’ training program clashing with the Palestinian-Arab parents’ traditional values relating to mixed-gender events and overnight seminars with little adult supervision. Several adults discussed these barriers:

LJ6:

The mentality is very different. Arab society here is very closed and religious. The girls could never sleep outside their homes.

LJ4:

I wanted to organize a certain evening activity, and a [Palestinian-Arab] father said, “No, we’re not sending our child after 8 pm.”

Cultural barriers also concerned different approaches regarding issues that reflected a conflict between conservative and liberal values. The following exchange between Jewish and Palestinian-Arab council members during one of the focus group sessions regarding LGBTQ youth reflects these conflicts:

YJ16:

Youth councils are very gay-friendly; there’s no tolerance here for homophobic opinions, and I think the Arab members also support this.

YP3:

This issue is a bit sensitive in our community . . . We’re a new generation, and I think Arab youth do accept this, but the adults are a different matter. We grew up in a society where it’s not so acceptable for someone to be gay . . . and that’s why last year, when the council decided all schools in the city should raise the rainbow flag, our schools didn’t . . . We just accepted that our society has different standards, which don’t always match the council’s position.

The youth council chairman opposed the decision described by YP3 not to implement the council’s decision to raise the pride flag in the schools. However, the adult leader and several Jewish youth members supported this decision:

LJ3:

We can’t force everyone to do that. Some schools still need to go through a process to get there.

YJ9:

Eventually, if they believe that’s the right thing to do, it’s not our place to say otherwise.

YJ11:

It’s their decision to make; everyone has their own opinion, and everyone should decide what’s right for them.

It should be noted that parallel conflicts between conservative and liberal values exist in the general Israeli society, such as between secular and religious Jews. However, youth councils tend to be dominated by relatively liberal values and include mostly secular youth.

Discussion and Conclusions

Previous research on student and youth councils has identified typical barriers hindering the realization of the right to participation in such councils, relating mainly to the power relations between youth and adults and to excluding disempowered groups from the councils (e.g., Checkoway, 2011; Collins et al., 2016; Hickey & Pauli-Myler, 2019; Nir & Perry-Hazan, 2016; Perry-Hazan, 2016; Wyness, 2009). Our study contributes to the literature by identifying barriers to realizing participation rights within diverse youth councils operating in conflicted societies. It supplements the scant knowledge about barriers to interaction within diverse youth councils (Nairn et al., 2006) and about cultural aspects that contextualize the study of youth participation rights (e.g., Duramy & Gal, 2020; Perry-Hazan & Somech, 2023; Mason & Bolzan, 2010).

The current findings portrayed the interrelated political, lingual, and cultural barriers hindering the realization of Palestinian-Arab youth’s participation rights in councils that integrate Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth in Israel. We argue that these barriers are embedded in the youth councils’ top-down activities, practices, and structure designed for Jewish youth and, unintentionally, reflect the unequal power relations characterizing Israeli society.

The complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had various manifestations in the councils’ activities and discussions. Some of these phenomena relate to the council’s policies, such as encouraging army or civic service or singing the national anthem, which alludes to Jewish identity. Political barriers intensified during military operations in Gaza, particularly when council activities addressed conflict-related topics. These activities hindered Palestinian-Arab members’ engagement in the councils and their feeling of belonging. Our findings indicated that although adult leaders did not make a purposive jump into the complex pool of political issues, politics were present in the councils’ activities, particularly those designed by the National Youth Council. The unintended political tensions that emerged were not accompanied by open discussions where youth could share their views. Such discussions could have reduced political barriers and offered a meaningful democratic experience (Hess, 2009; Kahne et al., 2013; Parker, 2016).

Language barriers also hindered the participation of Palestinian-Arab youth council members. The councils’ discussions were held almost exclusively in Hebrew, whereas most of the Palestinian-Arab participants were not fluent in Hebrew. Only one adult leader insisted on translating the discussions into Arabic. Language may comprise a critical barrier to integrating minority youth in various contexts. Even though the Jewish adult leaders, from their perspective, tried their best to encourage the participation of Palestinian-Arab youth members, the lack of translation tools conveyed the message that they were only participating as guests at someone else’s party. Indeed, the interviewees described considerable conflict concerning the lack of adequate translation.

Another type of barrier to participation included cultural gaps relating to the marginal role of informal education in Palestinian-Arab society and the lack of student councils in Palestinian-Arab schools. Several studies similarly recognized the complexities inherent in realizing participation rights in collective and conservative cultures, characterized by wide power gaps between youth and adults (Imoh & Okyere, 2020; Mason & Bolzan, 2010; Rampal, 2008). These complexities are intensified when there is a gap in the participatory capital (Wood, 2014) of different cultural groups within the same council, which might lead to further marginalization of minority groups (Nairn et al., 2006). Cultural barriers were also manifested in Palestinian-Arab parents’ concerns regarding mixed-gender events and overnight seminars with little adult supervision. Other cultural barriers stemmed from conflicting approaches highlighting conservative vs. liberal values, such as raising the pride flag at schools to support LGBTQ youth.

These three interrelated barriers underscore the importance of adapting integrated youth councils in conflicted societies to their participants, the local area, and the particular circumstances in which the councils operate. Councils affiliating with a national participatory framework are required to participate in national activities that may engender political conflict (such as identifying only with Israeli citizens who were victims of missile attacks from Gaza), their taken-for-granted routine practices might not consider minority group needs (such as the exclusive use of Hebrew without providing translation), and their strict structure might be unfamiliar to youth with no history of participating in school councils. The findings indicated that the top-down national framework of student and youth councils in Israel is ill-equipped to realize participation rights in integrated youth councils and, consequently, (re)produce unequal power relations between Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth.

Our findings do not imply that the Jewish adult leaders or the MoE officials intended to discriminate against the Palestinian-Arab youth. On the contrary, the Jewish adult leaders appeared committed to partnerships between Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth and praised them. The barriers we identified were not embedded in purposive actions but rather in failure to actively foster adaptations that would create participation spaces that could challenge inequalities and social friction. Such adaptations require an understanding that youth participation is a multidimensional concept whose manifestations are diverse and intertwined with cultural contexts.

Moreover, our findings do not imply that integrating Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth is not without benefits. Many of the participants asserted that the joint activities reduced prejudice and created friendships. However, we did not thoroughly examine these benefits, as different tools and time frames would have been required. Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis holds that contact between groups in conflict can help reduce intergroup stereotypes and mutual prejudice if contact is based on equal status between members of the two groups and receives institutional support. The contact hypothesis has received extensive support in a large body of literature (e.g., Gaertner et al., 1996; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Scholars studying intergroup encounters between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Israel have noted that intergroup encounters conducted without maintaining and empowering each group’s independent identity and without recognizing and addressing social structures of discrimination might perpetuate existing asymmetric power relations (Bekerman, 2007; Maoz, 2011; Halabi & Sonnenshein, 2000). Considering the context entails establishing a dialogue between youth council members in conflicted societies as one of the rationales for participation, alongside other rationales that typically justify participation rights. These include rights-based moral rationales; pragmatic rationales relating to the quality of the decisions; developmental rationales relating to agency, belonging, and competence; and pedagogical rationales relating to civic skills and critical thinking (Perry-Hazan & Somech, 2023).

Limitations and Practical Implications

Our study was limited to a specific sociocultural context; it draws on a sample that fits its qualitative method but does not permit generalization. However, we believe that the study’s conclusions carry relevance to other contexts of conflicted societies facing the challenges of integrating minorities in youth councils as well as to broader contexts of youth diversity within participatory frameworks. We outline the broad relevance of the conclusions in the paper’s final section. Future studies can conduct quantitative and comparative inquiries into the identified barriers, relying on larger samples that could enable generalization. Another study limitation concerns the use of interviews rather than ethnographies. We were unable to conduct observations in council meetings as we did not receive signed consent from all the council members’ parents. However, we believe that the rich information we obtained in the interviews and the considerable number of interviewees we were able to recruit in the small research field of youth councils that integrate Jewish and Palestinian-Arab members enabled us to gain a robust understanding of the barriers to participation in such councils. Future studies drawing on ethnographic approaches could provide more insights regarding the interactions between youth in diverse youth councils. A third limitation of the study concerns the recruitment process. Due to the small size of the research field, we had to recruit youth participants through the adult leaders. As noted, this method of recruitment may have influenced participants to express positive opinions about the program. We believe that this limitation did not undermine the candor of the interviews, with some being highly critical, in light of our efforts to ensure that the participants were aware that their answers were confidential and to encourage critical dialogue.

Our study has important practical implications. We believe that adequate training for both adult leaders and youth council members can raise awareness of the identified barriers and reduce some of them, particularly political and language barriers. However, reducing the barriers also requires organizational change. First, our study highlights the importance of appointing more Palestinian-Arab adult leaders to guide the youth councils and assist in cultural and contextual adaptations. Studies examining how controversial issues are discussed in the classroom showed that teachers’ practices are highly influenced by their personal background, experience, views, and knowledge (see Cohen, 2016; Kello, 2016). The influence of these personal factors is heightened in a divided socio-political climate (Kello, 2016). Palestinian-Arab adult leaders can also serve as role models for the Palestinian-Arab youth. Second, establishing more student councils in Palestinian-Arab schools is critical; this would develop the participatory capital of Palestinian-Arab youth (Wood, 2014) and encourage them to join higher-level youth councils. Third, the simultaneous translation of council discussions, activities, and documents is essential to reduce practical and symbolic language barriers. Finally, focusing on shared goals embedded in local contexts may facilitate collaboration and create a positive impact, particularly if these goals relate to reducing social disparities and discrimination (see Checkoway, 2013).

Concluding Remarks

The study’s conclusions regarding various barriers typifying the integration of majority and minority groups in a country characterized by intense socio-political conflict have broad relevance beyond the context of highly polarized societies. Understanding how participation is embedded in interactions between diverse groups of youth, in hegemonic practices that serve majority groups, and in cultural understandings is crucial for promoting the participation rights of minority and disempowered youth in councils and other participatory frameworks.

The criticism of the top-down, one-size-fits-all model of student and youth councils is not new (McCluskey et al., 2013; Perry-Hazan, 2021). However, whereas most studies addressing this issue have focused on the exclusion of disempowered groups from youth councils (Collins et al., 2016; Nir & Perry-Hazan, 2016; Perry-Hazan, 2016; Wyness, 2009), we presented the ramifications of the formal youth council model when it encompasses subgroups characterized by power and opportunity disparities. The study highlights that the inclusion of disempowered groups is only the first step of many required for equalizing participation rights.

These steps may have distinct manifestations in different contexts. Prominent models of children’s participation highlight the importance of context in designing, understanding, and evaluating participation (Gal, 2017; Herbots & Put, 2015; Perry-Hazan & Somech, 2023). These models answered repeated calls in the children’s participation literature for frameworks more attuned to diverse cultural environments that view participation as a multidimensional concept (e.g., Perry-Hazan, 2021; Raby, 2014; Wood, 2014). Our findings illustrate the importance of considering the context of diverse and conflicted societies when designing the council’s activities, practices, and structure. Understanding the context underscores that to realize participation rights, youth councils should be adapted to their participants, their locality, and their unique circumstances. Integrating diverse youth in the hegemonic framework of youth councils requires careful thought as to the processes of institutional discrimination that might operate in unintended ways through ostensibly neutral practices (Rydgren, 2004). It requires a willingness to relinquish the common model of youth councils, which might unintentionally import unequal power relations into the councils and create participation spaces that challenge inequalities and social friction.