(1) Israel maintains two separate educational systems - one for Jews, one for Arabs (2) Separate schools for Jews & Arabs justified on Ethnic? No, on Religious grounds (3) Arab pupils learn mostly in Arabic, and Jews in Hebrew (4) Israel spends 3 times as much on schools for Jews than on Palestinian schools (5) Racial segregation in Israeli schools - Ethiopian children are ghettoized (1) Israel maintains two separate educational systems - one for Jews, one for Arabs http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-makdisi-why-support-the-academic-boycott-of-israel-20160108-story.html Why Israel's schools merit a U.S. boycott Daily life in Jerusalem Saree Makdisi At its annual convention this week, the Modern Language Assn., which represents 26,000 language and literature scholars, will become the latest academic body to consider the merits of adopting a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. This follows endorsements of such a boycott by the Assn. for Asian American Studies, the American Studies Assn. and, most recently, the American Anthropological Assn., which voted 1,040 to 136 to endorse a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions at its November annual meeting in Denver; the AAA's entire membership will soon vote on the resolution, which is expected to pass. The justification for an academic boycott — which targets institutions, not individual scholars — stems from the peculiar relationship between Israel's educational system and its broader structures of racism. The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes. - Human Rights Watch --- FOR THE RECORD: Israel: A Jan. 8 Op-Ed arguing for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions cited a study saying there wasn't a single high school in Palestinian communities in the Negev desert in southern Israel. The author and the study were referring specifically to Bedouin villages that are unrecognized by Israel. — ---- The United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination points out with alarm that Israel maintains two separate educational systems for its citizens — one for Jewish children and another for the children of the Palestinian minority — a structure that reinforces the profound segregation of Israeli society in everything from matters of citizenship and marriage to housing rights. According to official Israeli data cited by the human rights organization Adalah, by the turn of the 21st century Israel was investing three times as much on a per capita basis in the education of a Jewish as opposed to that of a Palestinian citizen. The consequences are obvious: Schools for Palestinians in Israel are overcrowded and poorly equipped, lacking in libraries, labs, arts facilities and recreational space in comparison with schools for Jewish students. Palestinian children often have to travel greater distances than their Jewish peers to get to school, thanks to a state ban on the construction of schools in certain Palestinian towns (for example, according to Adalah, there is not a single high school in the Palestinian communities of the Negev desert in southern Israel). These naked forms of discrimination extend into the university system as well. "The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes," Human Rights Watch points out. "At each stage, the education system filters out a higher proportion of Palestinian Arab students than Jewish students." Discriminatory policies risk Israel's longtime bipartisan U.S. support In other words, children denied access to adequate kindergartens do less well in elementary school; students in dilapidated and resource-starved high schools find themselves funneled into work as carpenters or mechanics rather than doctors, lawyers or professors. Indeed, the university admissions process is the point at which the country's two separate and unequal schooling systems converge, with calamitous results for Palestinian students, who fall short on matriculation or psychometric exams that are weighted toward the Jewish school curriculum, according to Human Rights Watch. About a quarter of Israeli schoolchildren are Palestinian. But as a recent study by the Assn. for the Advancement of Civic Equity points out, the higher you go in the system, the lower the number of Palestinian students. As of 2012, according to data published by the Israeli Council for Higher Education, Palestinians constituted only 11% of bachelor's degree students, 7% of master's students, and barely 3% of PhD students. A mere 2.7% of the faculty in Israeli universities are Palestinian, and the percentage of Palestinians in administration is even lower. According to sociologist Majid al-Haj of the University of Haifa, Israeli universities systematically fail their Palestinian students. These students end up feeling alienated in an academic environment that stubbornly resists integration and seems designed to consolidate rather than challenge discrimination. All of this is damning, but there is more: Israel's long-standing assault on the right to education of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Israel has bombed schools and besieged university campuses; it detains and harasses students and teachers at army checkpoints; it has restricted the flow of school materials to Gaza; it has prevented Palestinian students from studying overseas. One must conclude that Israel's educational system is intended to consolidate the nation's putative Jewish identity and further dispossess the Palestinians. This is a process that the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling once identified as "politicide." Surely one of its components could be called educide, which international educators ought to reject by endorsing the academic boycott of institutions that engage in it. Such a boycott wouldn't affect individual Israeli scholars, whose freedom to participate in international conferences, publish in journals or collaborate with other scholars would not be threatened. Rather, it calls for a break in institutional cooperation and affiliation. For example, the MLA would not co-sponsor an event with Tel Aviv University. Boycotts have been among the most effective means of nonviolent protest against institutional injustice in the modern era. They played a key role in bringing about the transformation of the Jim Crow South and the downfall of apartheid in South Africa, both of which bear an unmistakable resemblance to the situation in Israel. It is as unthinkable to turn a blind eye to the racism of the Israeli educational system as it would have been to disregard those earlier forms of injustice. Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and a member of the Modern Language Assn. He presented a longer version of this piece at the MLA convention in Austin on Thursday. (2) Separate schools for Jews & Arabs justified on Ethnic? No, on Religious grounds http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/schools-for-jews-and-arabs-separate-but-definitely-not-equal-1.443811 Schools for Jews and Arabs: Separate but Definitely Not Equal In one clear step, Israel’s Education Minister has demonstrated that the separate Jewish and Muslim school systems have nothing to do with preserving an autonomous space for Jewish and for Arab culture, but rather - plain segregation. Rivka Cohen Jun 25, 2012 12:38 PM In one clear step, Israel’s Education Minister has demonstrated that the separate Jewish and Muslim school systems have nothing to do with preserving an autonomous space for Jewish and for Arab culture, but rather - plain segregation. In the United States, the infamous phrase "separate but equal" evokes images of racially segregated drinking fountains, restaurants, and, most notably, schools. The phrase, which originated in a U.S. Supreme Court case back in 1896, was eventually superseded by another: "Separate is inherently unequal," a paraphrase from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board in 1954. The exact wording, that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," made aliyah in 2009, when the Israeli Supreme Court explicitly quoted it in a decision against ethnic segregation in a private religious school. But until today this ruling has still to be enforced across the whole spectrum of the Israeli educational system, particularly in terms of the unequal separation of Arab and Jewish students in Israeli schools. This need has become even more urgent following this week's insensitive declaration by the Ministry of Education that students in the Arab educational sector will be required to study Menachem Begin and David Ben Gurion in the same way as their Jewish counterparts. First, some background to the case in Israel that triggered the Court's co-option of the judgment "separate is unequal". According to Israel’s Student Rights Law, educational facilities must not be segregated on ethnic or political grounds. In the case in question, Noar KeHalacha v. Ministry of Education, a group of Sephardi families protested the separation of their daughters from their Ashkenazi peers in two different academic tracks. However the High Court found that that the separation was not purely on an ethnic basis – which would have been clearly illegal. Instead, the Court ruled that a two-track educational system was based on religious criteria – and judged this to be illegal, even though the law doesn’t explicitly prohibit discrimination on grounds of religion. Thus a ground-breaking precedent was born. Yet separation based on religious criteria is a founding principle of Israel’s education system, not least in the separation of Arab and Jewish students in both elementary and secondary schools. Justice Melcer, who sat in the 2009 discrimination case, cited a comment by MK Silvan Shalom that was made when the Knesset’s passed the Student Rights Law: "If a Jewish or an Arab child wishes to be admitted to an Orthodox Jewish school or a religious Arab school, or in a certain kind of Jewish school or a certain kind of Muslim school, [and is refused admission] the student cannot say that the reason for the refusal is discrimination." What are the consequences of Shalom’s overly broad remarks? They collapse the differences between what can be understood as a legitimate preference - filtering school choices according to a strong religious preference, such as a child seeking admission to "an Orthodox Jewish school or a religious Arab school" – and what should be seen as a far wider application of discriminatory entrance policies to an unspecified range of Jewish or Muslim schools. These ambiguous criteria would allow Arab students to be excluded from any Jewish school considered to be "a certain kind of Jewish school," potentially including public state secular schools in the Jewish sector. The same would apply to Jewish students seeking enrollment in Arab schools. Israelis may well feel incredulity on reading that a Jewish student might seek enrollment in the Arab sector, or an Arab student in the secular Jewish one. This itself is a warning sign of the ease with which widespread segregation is accepted as natural in Israel's schools. However, there is an even more serious concern. When originally spoken, MK Shalom’s words were just words. But when Justice Melcer cited them, they became part of a High Court of Justice ruling, and they were presented as an example of appropriate segregation. The effect of the ruling was to say: segregating Sephardi and Ashkenazi children, even if it is partial and officially voluntary, is illegal, but the near-absolute segregation of Arab and Jewish students is legitimate. Aside from legal concerns, a public educational system divided by religion has clear pitfalls. A study published on Israel’s own government website Israel notes that "Arab schools – more than any other educational sector – suffer from a severe shortage of classrooms and substandard classrooms," and have fewer counseling and psychological services than in Jewish schools. The study adds that Arab schools suffer a lower quality of teaching, of classroom conditions, and of academic results. Just imagine if Jewish students were also enrolled in these schools: Government funding for more classrooms and better teachers would surely appear, and quickly. There can be only one justification for this segregation, bearing in mind the many disadvantages that Arab students suffer because of it. A separate school system that is so clearly unequal can only maintain a pretext of justice if it exists in order to accommodate the different educational needs of Arab students in a predominately Jewish society. Yet the Ministry of Education’s recent mandate that Arab students must study Menachem Begin and David Ben Gurion cuts this justification down at the knees. The new requirement will force Arab schoolchildren to celebrate a Jewish-Israeli history that excludes them. The Ministry has, in one clear step, demonstrated that the separate school systems have nothing to do with preserving an autonomous space for Arab culture, but rather plain segregation. With racism rearing its ugly head in verbal and physical attacks on African refugees, close on the heels of racist vandalism against one of Israel’s few integrated schools, we need to pay attention. Forget the question of whether segregating different religious groups beginning in kindergarten is just, let alone legal, in the aftermath of Noar KeHalacha. With rising mistrust and hatred between Israeli Jews and non-Jews, can Israel afford a "separate but equal" policy that disregards cultural sensitivities and promotes greater tension and hate? (3) Arab pupils learn mostly in Arabic, and Jews in Hebrew http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-incognita-Is-separate-education-working-in-Israel-383276 Terra incognita: Is separate education working in Israel? In a sense even the "liberal" voices in Israel accept segregation. A wall at a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school in Jerusalem reads "death to Arabs." On Saturday night, as protesters gathered outside the prime minister’s house to denounce the "Jewish nation-state" law proposal, vandals and arsonists struck the Max Rayne Hand in Hand Hebrew-Arab bilingual school in Jerusalem. They spray-painted graffiti celebrating extremist right-wing rabbi Meir Kahane and bashing Arabs as "cancer." This isn’t the first time the school has been targeted. The real message of outrage over this incident, however, should not just be against hate crimes, but rather a soul searching about why there are not more schools like Hand in- Hand. The Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel has been operating schools since 1998 and currently has five campuses in the country, one each at Jerusalem (624 students), Sakhnin (130 students), Wadi Ara (240 students), Jaffa (30 students) and Haifa (70 students). The last two are preschools. In 2013 there were 2,008,100 students in Israel. Thus, the percent of students studying in mixed Arab-Jewish schools is effectively 0. Catherine Rottenberg, an assistant professor at Ben-Gurion University, wrote in 2013 that "even though 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab, Jewish and Arab children rarely if ever get to know each other as they grow up. They go to separate schools, play in different neighborhood playgrounds, and really don’t have an opportunity to meet one other until, perhaps, university." In 2006 she was involved in founding an organization named Hagar: Jewish-Arab Education for Equality to build Israel’s fifth integrated school. Last year around 225 children were enrolled in this pioneering venture in Beersheba, which she calls "the only nonsegregated school in the Negev." I point out these examples to show that although there are a few examples of schools swimming against the current, the sheer paucity of these endeavors is extraordinary. To put it in perspective, around 536 people have been to outer space and 3,500 people have climbed Everest, so you have a better chance of summiting the world’s tallest mountain than attending a school in Israel in which Jews and Arabs play together, and you are almost as likely to have gone to space. So when everyone expresses outrage at the hate crime perpetrated against Hand in Hand it would be good to funnel some of that anger into a wider debate on how everyone takes for granted the total segregation in Israel’s school system. Like all things in Israel, the oddity dates from the creation of the state. Jews were a minority in Mandatory Palestine and at the beginning of the Mandate the Zionist Executive decided to maintain a Hebrew-language school system entirely separate from the British government system in order to inculcate "proper values" in the students. This system became segmented between Mizrahi- run institutions that catered to religious Jewish children and Labor-run institutions by the Histadrut for youth from kibbutzim. After the establishment of Israel in 1948 the Jewish minority that had wanted an autonomous education system became the majority. Khalid Arar writes in a 2012 paper, "Concerning the question of autonomy, it was argued that since Jews had always demanded educational autonomy wherever they constituted the minority, they could not deny this right to the Arab minority." So when the Knesset passed a Compulsory Education Law in 1949 it instituted a segregation of the education system into an Arab-only system for Arabs and a segmented Jewish system of religious, secular and other streams for Jews. Some Jews at the time expressed horror at this divisive system. Dorothy Bar-Adon, writing in The Palestine Post, declaimed that "many parents had hoped that the new state would bring their children basic education while the ‘isms’ would be taken care of at home," by which she meant that school would now instead be used to indoctrinate children to be religious, secular, Labor voters or Arab nationalists. Arab education was seen as a priority to bring the minority "up to Jewish standards" as one newspaper put it, but primarily as a method to prevent Arabs from becoming a "fifth column". The prime minister’s special consultant S. Dabon told him in 1957: "What is the goal of Arab education? It can be assumed: education of its citizens benefits both the state and themselves, and so that they should not constitute a fifth column or active potential for surrounding enemies." Arar notes that over the years, "Some policymakers supported the assimilation of Arab schools within the general education system while others supported separation." There was an obsessive fear of having any sort of mixed education. During the Mandate some Jewish pupils had attended private Catholic schools that provided some of the best education in the country (as they still do), but after 1949 one Knesset Education Committee member claimed allowing Jews to attend non-Jewish schools was "sacrificing them to Moloch." Fears of Catholic schools led to attempts to ban Jews from teaching at those institutions and removing Jewish children from them. This was a time of zealous separation, despite what we are told today about the utopian, progressive and "egalitarian" aspects of 1950s "secular" Israel. Because of the zealous foundations on which education was constructed there was never a discussion about integration in education. Arab pupils learn mostly in Arabic and Jews in Hebrew. Over the years the issue of divided education has popped up primarily in relation to allocation of resources. Ami Volansky, in an academic article, notes, "Over the years various infrastructural and service disparities have been identified between the Jewish and Arab [sectors]." The Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education in Israel discusses primarily budget allocations as discrimination. After anti-Arab graffiti was sprayed on a school in the Arab-Jewish community of Neve Shalom, Rivka Cohen wrote in Haaretz comparing the Israeli education system to the "separate but equal" racist policy in 1950s America. She bemoans educational initiatives that "will force Arab schoolchildren to celebrate a Jewish-Israeli history that excludes them." In a sense even the "liberal" voices in Israel accept segregation; they just want Arab schools to have more money and "preserve an autonomous space for Arab culture." In 2013 Or Kashti wrote in Haaretz: "A new policy toward Arab society also requires declaring war on racism." It’s one thing to educate against racism. But Israeli society needs to stop taking for granted that 99.99% of Arabs and Jews should naturally attend different schools. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Jews and Arabs almost always live in separate locales, under different councils. It is exacerbated by the fact that within the Jewish community there is mass segregation between religious and secular Jews and to a large degree between secular Ashkenazi Jews in communities like kibbutzim, and Mizrahi, Russian and Ethiopian Jews who are concentrated in "development towns." We’ve even seen cases of schools that became almost entirely Ethiopian, or catered exclusively to the children of foreign workers. As it is, the "integrated" schools remain a tiny drop in the bucket, primarily catering to children of a small pluralist Jewish and Arab elite, which perpetuates the notion that anti-racism is only normal among "enlightened" upper-classes. Israeli society needs to ask whether the separate schooling is working. When we see the ease with which riots begin in the country and the boiling anger against the institutions of the state that hang just under the surface in many communities, the answer should be obvious. Separating every group into a balkanized, insular ghetto is not working. It shouldn’t be easier to climb Everest than to have a modicum of coexistence in education. (4) Israel spends 3 times as much on schools for Jews than on Palestinian schools http://www.seamac.org/SegregationSchools.htm School Segregation in Israel Why are Palestinian students channeled into a segregated school system within Israel lasting from 1st grade through high school? Segregation for Israel’s Palestinian students, who make up roughly 20 percent of the country’s student population, is a result of rigid geographic and residential segregation. Palestinian Israelis live largely in Arab villages or neighborhoods and rarely mix with Jewish Israelis until they begin working or until they attend university. Israeli governments have never tried to promote the integration of Israel’s public school system. In the United States, we call this de facto, rather than de jure (legal) segregation. However, our democracy has recognized the harm that results from de facto segregation and has tried to address it in many ways to promote equal opportunity. These efforts followed the famous 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v Topeka Board of Education, which ruled against the so-called "separate but equal doctrine." The Supreme Court found that segregation was inherently unequal because it isolated black students from the dominant white culture and therefore put them at a disadvantage in a competitive workforce. Israel’s funding for education is rarely reported in detail. However, in 2004 the government released statistics showing its system was not only separate but also unequal. The statistics revealed that Israel spent 3 times as much on schools for Jewish students than it did for Palestinian schools, according to an analysis by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. The same 3 to 1 ratio in spending occurred in schools in Jerusalem, where Jewish schools in West Jerusalem received three times more funding than schools in the largely Arab East Jerusalem, according to a separate study by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Further evidence of inequality can be found in the decisions by the Israeli government in designateing certain communities for "high-priority status" for improving the local educational system. In recent years Israel has designated 553 Jewish communities for high-priority status, compared with 4 Palestinian communities. The Israeli government also attempts to control the curriculum to prevent Palestinian and Jewish students from learning about the Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe"), the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and land within present-day Israel. The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, recently passed a law that forbids commemoration of the Nakba in school curricula or textbooks in an effort to prevent all Israeli students from learning the truth about the country’s origins as an apartheid state founded on ethnic cleansing. Moreover, curricula and readings for Jewish students emphasize racist stereotypes of Palestinians and Arabs in general, according to a five-year-long study by the Israeli Jewish professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan of Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Peled-Elhanan found that Israeli textbooks for Jewish students routinely depict Palestinians "as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don't pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don't want to develop. The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer." Progressive Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel have attempted to defy Israel’s de facto segregation in recent years, creating five mixed Arab-Jewish alternative schools in defiance of the segregated system, according to the Israeli Jewish historian Ilan Pappe. Successive Israeli governments, however, have opposed any effort to establish equal rights for all by insisting that Israel can only be a Jewish state, rather than a state for all its citizens. (5) Racial segregation in Israeli schools - Ethiopian children are ghettoized http://mondoweiss.net/2011/09/usa-1950-south-africa-1980-no-israel-2011-racial-segregation-in-israeli-schools USA, 1950? South Africa, 1980? No, Israel, 2011 – Racial segregation in Israeli schools David Sheen on September 6, 2011 The fact that Palestinians are subjected to a siege in Gaza, an occupation in the West Bank, and systemic discrimination in Israel is rarely disputed. Those who oppose prejudice point to it as a source of embarrassment that must end immediately; most of those who support it either wear it with pride, subscribing to an ideology of Jewish supremacy, or at least defend it, believing it to be the least of all evils. There are a few people who maintain that Arabs citizens of Israel are equal in every way to their Jewish counterparts, denying that discrimination exists, but these preposterous claims are easy to refute, almost to the point of absurdity. What is far more insidious is the commonly-professed claim that the State of Israel cannot possibly be racist against Arabs, or anyone else, because it includes Black Jews. Israelis are said not to harbor any racial hatred towards dark-skinned people, and the conflict with the Palestinians is framed as purely political, only a struggle over security. Hasbara videos distributed over the internet feature images of Ethiopian Jews being aided by native Israelis, to show that they have been embraced by the rest of the populace, and pictures of Ethiopian Jews dressed up in IDF uniforms, to show that they have successfully integrated into society, and that they, too, support the war on Arabs. Let’s say that for the moment we ignore the abominable racism meted out to non-Jewish (and non-Arab) people of color in Israel, from Filipina foreign workers to refugees of genocide from Darfur. Let’s say that we only focus on the people of sub-Saharan African descent that are also Jewish citizens of the state, the Ethiopian-Israelis. Obviously, it takes time to integrate an immigrant population into a neo-liberal high-tech economy, especially an immigrant population that had previously supported itself with non-industrial agriculture. But most of the Ethiopians immigrated to Israel over 20 years ago, and they are still the weakest socio-economic segment in Israeli society. Why is that? One of the reasons for this disparity is that Ethiopian children are consistently ghettoized by the Israeli school system. For the past several years, Ethiopians in Petach Tikvah, one of Israel’s biggest cities, have started off the school year in September with angry protests in front of City Hall, demanding an end to segregation in state-sponsored schools. It should be obvious that only by integrating Ethiopian children with all the others will they receive an education that is on par with everyone else. But there are those who do not want them in the classroom, claiming that they will bring down the school’s educational standards. If Israel is color-blind, then why does the government continuously cave into these racist demands? -- Peter Myers Australia website: http://mailstar.net/index.html |
Archives‎ > ‎