The purpose of Examining Education, Media and Dialogue: The Case of Palestine and Israel is to address the reality of occupation through the domains of education and the media, while focusing on and problematizing the dialogues expressed within and emerging from those domains. In order to undertake the examination, the editors have established a framework for analysis consisting of four strands, identified as enactment, transaction, reaction and resolution. Enactment is the strand where policies regarding occupation are initiated – typically the governing bodies that control and regulate societies and utilize whatever means available to them, education as one of its systems and media as an ostensible partner to exploit and disseminate its policies. Transaction looks to the core of education – the classroom – where ideologies are transmitted, either directly or indirectly (e.g. through declared and hidden curricula and teacher beliefs and practices); and media, its transaction with the public is located in the scripted and shared word, a version of a story that can corroborate a governing body’s perspective or refute it. Reaction is the immediate response by the public living under occupation; in the case of this book, the reaction addressed is that of teachers and students to the educational system and that of the recipient public to the broadcast or print media.

Ultimately, Examining Education, Media and Dialogue: The Case of Palestine and Israel addresses all three components in the Palestinian-Israeli context and looks at dialogue as a way to take steps toward the final strand: resolution. By presenting difficult issues and being reflective about them, the authors of the chapters in this book have also engaged in dialogue in the sense of Habermas (1971) where ‘what raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language’ (Habermas, 1971: 314).