Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation, by Tom Sperlinger (Zero Books: £9.99)

FEW teachers would deny that in the classroom they learn as much as their students.

Tom Sperlinger, who in 2013 left his Bristol University base to spend a semester teaching at the Al-Quds University in Abu Dis in the West Bank occupied Palestinian territories, certainly learned much about the place and influence of literature.

But, above all, he gained knowledge of the plight of a generation of young students whose studies are conducted in a world of constant disruption, danger and humiliation.

Being broadly used to a system of rote learning, where they were expected to absorb packaged answers rather than to critically examine meaning, his Shakespeare classes at first questioned the value of studying literature.

But through a kind of alchemy between the plays and their experiences, Sperlinger saw many students acquiring “a space to reflect on their lives, without seeming to do so.”

If Romeo and Juliet provided grounds for questioning personal relationships, the power politics of Julius Caesar echoed and explored key aspects of the political realities confronted daily under Israeli oppression.

Sperlinger’s book has the freedom of a diary, allowing the reader to build a vivid picture of the individual stresses these youngsters have to contend with. He recognises that, with all their problems, they exhibit a kind of creative energy largely absent from the formal academic responses of Western students.

Unlike most of his students, the author was free to make occasional trips into Jerusalem and Tel Aviv where he notes that: “Whereas in the West Bank, the occupation permeates everything, in Israel what was striking was the denial about what was happening just a few miles away.”

More than many more sociological and political descriptions or television documentaries of what cannot be called a conflict — “This isn’t a war… There isn’t another side,” he writes — this book exposes the myriads of personal humiliations relentlessly heaped on the emerging generations of Palestinians.

Hopefully, it also suggests that education will provide a telling weapon in the ongoing struggle to achieve the sense of dignity which must contribute to and come with independence.