Separate But Not Equal
Most of Israel’s Arab children attend poorly-performing segregated public schools.
What can be done and what does it mean for Israel’s future?
To read part one of our Israel's Arab Citizens series, click here
This is the second installment of Moment’s series on Israel’s 1.7 million Arab citizens. The first, which ran in our September/October 2009 issue, traced the evolution of one family’s identity from Arab to Palestinian-Israeli. Here Moment explores the separate but unequal education of Israel’s Arab children, who comprise 26 percent of the country’s elementary and high school students. New York Times contributor Dina Kraft reports from Israel.
It’s morning in Jaljulia, a small, sleepy Arab village in central Israel. A bumpy main street is lined with small grocery shops, clothing and hardware stores and the occasional coffee house. Sparse hills are covered with squat, multi-story concrete houses. There are no sidewalks. Beneath bobbing backpacks, students walk in the middle of the roads on their way to school. The older children head to a limestone building, surrounded by a chain-link fence. It’s the Jaljulia Education and Science High School, which serves the village and neighboring Kfar Bara. Its principal is Khalid Arar, a tall, wiry 38-year-old former national karate champion with a Ph.D. in education from Tel Aviv University. He strides into the teachers’ lounge as the school day begins with a bell playing the Disney tune, It’s a Small World.
Schools around the world are microcosms of their societies, and this Jaljulia school is no different. Arar’s world is full of problems. His car was torched and part of the school set on fire by students angry over his crackdown on test cheating. His 460-student school suffers from low achievement, high drop-out rates and violence. There is no gym or money for extracurricular activities for his charges. “So they are in the streets after class is let out,” Arar says, looking out a window, his gaze hardening. “And that is where the violence starts.”
Although fairly new, the building was constructed without air conditioning: Funds were later raised within the village for window units. Teaching materials and equipment are limited: Only seven of 25 computers function. Arar manages to outfit science labs with donations from universities where he has connections. Space is at a premium: In one Hebrew grammar class for 12th graders, 41 students, some without desks, are squeezed into a room. A young teacher in a white headscarf is deconstructing l’gdol, the Hebrew verb for “grow.” The kids are rowdy, and the teacher is forced to raise her voice to be heard.
Outside the building, a 15-year-old girl, wearing jeans and a snug headscarf, delicately balances a notebook on her knees. Saja Shrem tells me she and her friends, sitting beside her on the steps, should be in algebra class. But on Wednesdays the English class needs the room, and algebra is canceled. “We are disappointed,” she says bluntly. “We have class, but really we’re sitting outside and not learning.”
Nearly everywhere you look—not just on the steps of Jaljulia’s high school—Israel’s public education system is in trouble. Poor teaching, overcrowding and discipline problems, set against the backdrop of the ever-widening gap between the country’s wealthy and poor, mean that Israeli students—both Jewish and Arab—are now scoring near the bottom on international tests. But the situation is the most dire for Israel’s half-million Arab children and teenagers, who mainly live in self-contained towns and villages in the north and central Israel and the Negev, or in mixed urban centers such as Haifa and Yaffo.
Some wealthy and middle-class Arab parents, in particular those from the small, more educated Christian minority, send their children to private or well-funded parochial schools. But many Arab students, such as Shrem, attend public schools, which in Israel are segregated. Ultra-Orthodox, modern Orthodox and secular Jews each have their own public schools, as do Arabs.
Officially, Arab students can attend Israel’s Jewish public schools but only one percent does. Even in Haifa, which is more integrated than most communities, the number is not much higher. Almost no Jewish students attend Arab schools due to cultural and language barriers: While Arab children learn Hebrew from 3rd grade on, Arabic is only compulsory for Jewish students in secular schools from 7th to 9th grades. While a new pilot program is making Arabic mandatory in 170 schools starting in 5th grade, currently most Jewish students speak only a smattering when they graduate.
Theoretically, Arab and Jewish schools are equal. In reality, the infrastructure of Arab schools is generally poorer than that of Jewish schools and achievement rates are significantly lower: Barely 32 percent of Arab students pass the university matriculation exam, called the bagrut in Hebrew, compared to nearly 60 percent of their Jewish counterparts. The reasons are multifold, but paramount are decades of unequal attention and funding. The difference in funding varies by study: This year the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which Israel was invited to join in June, concluded that public spending per Arab child, although improved over the past decade, is still one-third less than public spending on a Jewish child. In 2005, the American-based New Israel Fund found the state education budget had provided approximately $200 per Arab child compared to $1,000 for a Jewish one.
Historically, Israeli-Arab municipalities have had less money to invest in schools than Jewish ones. Jewish municipalities receive funds from a greater variety of sources, including Jewish organizations abroad. They are also the beneficiaries of special budget allotments to schools in “national priority” areas—strategically important border areas and the so-called development towns that are home to immigrant and disadvantaged groups. In 2006, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled this system discriminatory, stating that only four Arab villages and towns out of 500 were granted national priority funds, but the ruling has yet to be implemented.
“For over 62 years, there has been ongoing discrimination against Arab children in a country that is supposed to be democratic,” says Yossi Sarid, former head of the political party Meretz, who served as education minister from July 1999 through August 2000. “This is not just a moral issue. We are raising generations of young, frustrated people, and the anger does not bode well for the future.”
Majid Al-Haj, Israel’s leading expert on Arab education and a dean at Haifa University, the first Arab to hold such a post, has long been sounding a warning call. “It is in Israel’s interest to integrate the Arab minority—especially the elites—because we learn from history that a frustrated Arab elite usually leads to radicalization.”
Not all Jewish Israelis view inequality in the Arab sector as a pressing issue in light of Israel’s other domestic and foreign challenges. A minority even believes that problems will be solved if the border is moved so that major Arab population centers become part of a future Palestinian state. But others think that Israel’s economic—and even political—future hinges on the full integration of the Arab minority into Israeli life: 50 percent of Arabs now live below the poverty line and unemployment rates are high.
Recent Israeli governments have recognized the problems that inequity is breeding, and although their policies have differed, all have allocated additional money to Arab schools. In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed a bill that designated an additional $214 million to 12 Arab towns over five years not for education but for infrastructure improvement. “The Arab population’s potential is not being realized,” said the conservative prime minister at the signing ceremony. “It is vital to us that there be equality of economic opportunity in employment, infrastructure, education and quality of life in the non-Jewish sector.” Growth in these areas, he said, would “stand to transform the face of Israeli society.”
Fifteen miles north of Jaljulia, near the entrance to the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm—known for Arab protests against the Israeli government—a new stone building stands on a steep hillside. Students hurry along sun-drenched hallways festooned with palm trees and greenery and file into freshly-painted classrooms covered with artwork. Rows of Bunsen burners and glass beakers line the shelves of physics and chemistry labs. Welcome to Al Ahyla School.
A select group of students from across Israel—about one in three applicants—gain admission to this semi-private Arab school. Many of the teachers here have master’s degrees and doctorates in their fields. Homework assignments are rigorous and punctuated by frequent tests and quizzes. The students are impeccably behaved.
One of them is 10th-grader Ismail. The slim soft-spoken 15-year-old wants to be a doctor. “I like to help other people,” he says. His morning starts with a co-ed class on Islam, during which a teacher with a thick dark beard speckled with gray, wearing a button-down shirt and tie, recounts a story about Mohammed’s disciples. Soon a bell rings, and a civics teacher, who is also the deputy mayor of a neighboring village, addresses the sensitive issue of Israel’s Memorial Day, when most Jews stand for the sounding of a siren in memory of the country’s fallen soldiers, but Arabs do not. The teacher talks about the tenets of respect for fellow citizens. “As Jews avoid eating in front of Muslim Arabs during the fast month of Ramadan, Arabs stand during the siren if they are in the company of Jews,” he explains.
Al Ahyla School, which literally means “the best” in Arabic, is a success story. Its students regularly score top marks on the national high school matriculation exam, often the highest average for any school in the country, says Samir Mahamid, the school’s principal and founder. The 46-year-old with a Ph.D. in genetics from Hebrew University has made the school a boot camp for Israel’s competitive university admissions, including intense preparation for the bagrut, something that is being emulated by his colleagues at Jewish schools. “Our school can be a solution,” says Mahamid, to Israel’s troubled education system. As a youth, Mahamid studied at a Jewish school because his parents hoped it would help him succeed in Israeli society. “But I think our students here learn more than I did,” he concludes. “Our school really is exceptional. We have book clubs, a leadership course, tutoring, lots of parent meetings and workshops.”
Established six years ago, Al Ahyla School is part of a network of Jewish and Arab schools known as Atid (“future” in Hebrew) schools that focus on science and technology. They are funded both by tuition—about $750 a year—and the education ministry. These schools have critics, however, who think the privatization of education does not solve the bigger problems that face the public education system.
The $5.8 million tab for the school’s construction was picked up by the Islamic Movement, which controls the Umm al-Fahm municipal council. The city is the headquarters of the Islamic Movement’s northern branch, which has been criticized for its anti-state rhetoric. Some Jewish Israelis believe its strategy is similar to Hamas—which amassed power in part by providing social services to the underprivileged, who are neglected by authorities.
Atef Moadi, executive director of the Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education, the official voice on education in Israel’s Arab community, expresses concern for a different reason: “Our problem with these schools is that they are selective,” he says. “They take the good students out of other schools, posing a dilemma for us. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity for these students, who will go on to university, but it hurts public schools,” he says, echoing the debate over charter schools in the United States.
Schools like Al Ahyla are not the only alternative to public schools. There are now four bilingual schools known as Hand in Hand [Yad B’Yad in Hebrew]. The first two began in Jerusalem and the Galilee more than 10 years ago and recent additions are a nursery school in Beersheva and an elementary/middle school in Kfar Kara, an Arab village in northern Israel. Hand in Hand schools are run by co-principals, one an Arab the other a Jew, and each class is co-taught by Jewish and Arab teachers. Classes have an equal number of Jewish and Arab students who are expected to become fluent in both languages.
The Hand in Hand schools are known for becoming communities where children as well as parents bond. Students study and play side by side, becoming parts of one another’s lives—a rarity in Israel. “I say as a Zionist that it is essential to the Zionist idea that the Jewish state not be based on the concept of segregation,” says Sam Shube, executive director of Hand in Hand.
Like Shube, Amnon Rubinstein, education minister from 1992 to 1996 and winner of the 2006 Israel Prize, is an advocate for integrated schools. “Mixed schools should be encouraged,” he says. “I believe the separation between Arabs and Jews is bad for the future.” But despite such calls for integration, there is no major push to desegregate Arab and Jewish schools. Most people in both communities prefer to study in their native languages and within their cultures. “I think the schools have to be separate,” says Moadi. “We are talking about two communities, two peoples, a different heritage and history and culture.” Hand in Hand’s Shube admits that the public lacks the will for modeling public schools after his own. “Our concept requires a great amount of mutual tolerance and respect, which is not something that pervades Israeli society right now.”
Gideon Saar is said to have his eye on the prime ministership. At 46, he is the education minister and a rising star of the Likud Party. The handsome bespectacled Saar is young for an Israeli politician. He lives in a trendy central Tel Aviv neighborhood and on many issues is socially liberal. But the liberalism of this fifth-generation sabra, raised on the slogan of “Israel, on both sides of the Jordan,” comes to a complete stop on the subject of Palestinians. A fervent Zionist, he has tried to inject a sense of patriotism into Israel’s public schools.
In some ways, his political opposite is Yuli Tamir, 56, whom he replaced as education minister in 2009 when Netanyahu became prime minister for the second time. Tamir, a former philosophy professor, is a founder of Peace Now, and while she was education minister allotted funds to teach about equality, mutual respect and partnership as a way to promote coexistence between Arabs and Jews. She infuriated the right in 2007 when she approved the use of the word nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic—in history textbooks for third and fourth graders in Arab schools.
In 2009, almost immediately after his appointment, Saar reversed course, ordering the removal of the offending sentence: “The Arabs call the war nakba—a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation—and the Jews call it the Independence War.” In his Knesset speech explaining the decision, Saar was indignant. “In no country in the world does an educational curriculum refer to the creation of the country as a ‘catastrophe,’” he said. “The objective of the education system is not to deny the legitimacy of our state, nor promote extremism among Arab Israelis,” he added.
The firestorm over the use of nakba in textbooks taps into more than a century of disagreement over how to address the national identity of Arab schoolchildren in what is now Israel. Arab education in the 19th century was, for the most part, run by Ottoman authorities. The language of instruction was Turkish, with Arabic taught only as a second language and usually as part of religious instruction. Education for Arabs was nearly non-existent outside urban areas, which led to illiteracy rates as high as 70 percent for men and 90 percent for women.
When the British took over in 1917, they changed the language of instruction to Arabic, but still only four out of 10 Arab children attended school, most of them boys, says historian Tom Segev, author of One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. “In 1931, one director of the [British] education department said, ‘Keep your peasants happy, then they won’t make trouble,’” says Segev. Children of the Arab elite were often educated in Christian schools and many left the country to pursue higher education.
Meanwhile, most Jewish schools between 1917 and 1948 were funded by international Jewish philanthropy and were strong academically. “Nine out of 10 Jewish kids got an education,” says Segev. The disparity between Arab and Jewish schools had major political ramifications. “The result was that by 1948 Jews had produced a strong united community and national identity, much superior to that of the Arabs,” he continues. Segev goes so far as to suggest that the neglect of education was one reason the Arabs lost the 1948 war.
Immediately upon independence, Israel introduced co-education and made school mandatory and free for children between the ages of five and 13. But the young nation’s leaders could not agree on a clear policy for dealing with its Arab minority. Recommendations ran the gamut from complete separation to complete integration. Some argued in favor of what was dubbed an “assimilationist policy,” designed to minimize feelings of difference. As a 1949 government memo suggested, this approach might make Arabs “closer to us but also to take them away from the Arab world surrounding us.” But J.L. Benor, the deputy director general of the education ministry in the 1950s, argued that general citizenship “values” had not yet developed among the Arab population and counseled in favor of both separation and control.
Curricula for Arabs was a divisive subject early on, with Arabs pushing for greater control over content. In 1961, textbooks that included a chapter on Arab history were introduced, and over the years, other concessions were made to Arab educators. A watershed moment came in 1971 when Israeli sociologist Yohanan Peres published a study that showed that the lack of national Arab content in the curricula was alienating Arab youths from the state. In response, directives that Arab students celebrate Israel’s Independence Day with parades and parties were phased out.
Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, optional units on Palestinian history and the Arab national movement were introduced in Arab schools. In 1999, Jewish schools began to use new history textbooks that portrayed the conflict in a more nuanced manner. In addressing the fighting in 1948, some departed from the traditional Zionist narrative: Arabs were described as not simply fleeing but, at least in some cases, as being driven out.
Some Arab educators like Al-Haj remain dissatisfied. “The entire question of civil culture is missing in these books,” he complains. “The spirit of these books merely reinforces the ethno-nationalist culture that dominates Israeli society.”
Segev says the tension over textbooks is unlikely to be fully alleviated as long as the struggle between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East continues. “Israel’s Arabs now are very much aware of the importance of education and this is their way of developing their society and identifying as Palestinians,” he says. “They have realized that they need to do things for themselves and this is what Israeli democracy allows them to do. It reminds me very much of the Jewish community under the British.”
Policy analyst Abdullah Hadib, head of the Ministry of Education’s Arab department, is optimistic: He believes that there is finally substantial movement to improve Israel’s Arab schools. “New investment and commitment are being seen on the ground,” says the former teacher and principal who is the highest-ranking Arab in the ministry.
Last year, he tells me, the government pledged additional funding for all Arab third graders to receive supplemental classroom hours in math, science and Arabic, and more tutors will be assigned to those subjects in 20 percent of schools. There is more funding to improve Hebrew-language instruction and reducing school violence and drop-out rates. The ministry is underwriting 3,200 new classrooms, about half the number needed. There’s even progress, says Hadib, on the content debate. New curricula are being developed that include “Arab world” culture and Islamic history in the context of Israeli and world history. “Descriptions,” he adds, will be “within the consensus. They won’t deal with politics.”
Hadib is particularly proud of what has already been accomplished. Arab girls, in particular, have made great strides in Israel’s education system, in many cases surpassing their male peers in recent years. “It’s a huge cultural change,” he says. In 1990 only 1.2 percent of Arabs with 16 years of education or more were women compared to 10 percent in 2006.
But Hadib’s optimism about the government’s efforts are met with skepticism by some educators within the Arab sector. Reform of Israel’s Arab schools has been slow. Saar’s education ministry has put on hold plans made by Tamir’s education ministry in conjunction with Arab education leaders. Some Arab education analysts feel left out by the current ministry and are anxious for increased involvement. “We see it as a joint mission to bring our decision makers inside the ministry of education so we can keep our uniqueness, help craft our own curricula, our narrative, how our language and history are taught,” says Moadi.
Other reformers believe it is time to establish an independent Arab-led educational structure to oversee curricula. Ayman Egbaria, a lecturer in the education department at Haifa University, is one of them. “There is no such thing as an Arab education system in Israel,” he says. “There are Arab employees within the system, but no Arab education system.” What Arabs are demanding, he says, is “full and meaningful participation.”
Despite voicing frustration with the current system, Arab educators are also looking inward. They are seeking to change the traditional approach that values rote learning over discussion, hires principals based on family ties instead of merit and undervalues teacher training. “We have no power. Politically we are impotent because we are not part of any ruling coalition, and we are not in the consensus,” says Khaled Abu-Asbah, an expert in education in the Arab sector who heads the project for the Advancement of Arab-Israeli Citizens in Israel at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute. “But,” he continues, “I think we are now being taken by a sense of empowerment. Parents are more active, the teachers are better. The Arab community is learning how to take responsibility and not just protest.”
Back at the Jaljulia Education and Science High School, I meet Saeed Rabi, 18, the school student council president. He has thick, gelled back dark hair and proudly wears the school’s navy blue hooded sweatshirt. We talk about his plan to battle graffiti by having students paint walls themselves, which he hopes will bolster school spirit. He wishes that conditions here were more like in the Jewish school in nearby Kfar Saba, where students have a choice of activities after school.
Noor Qormatta, 15, an earnest girl whose long black ponytail tumbles down, also wears a school sweatshirt. She wants to be a lawyer one day, “because in our community good lawyers are needed to help deal with the problems of living in Israel.” She defends the school from criticism about behavior problems. “I think our school is great, no place is perfect. Our teachers are great and our principal is too,” she says. “He makes sure things are under control.”
Principal Arar seems to have endless energy. He has seen much improvement in the school in recent years, but the drop-out rate is still too high, and Arar estimates that half of the students who remain have the equivalent of less than a C average.
His wife wonders why he remains at his job with all of its headaches. He stays because he is committed to making the system better, he tells me. “I feel responsible to this school,” he says. “I have a vision that I still want to fulfill. I want to help create people who are capable and who can succeed in Israeli society.”
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