A teacher-exchange initiative between Jewish and Arab high schools, a high school that takes students and teachers to do peacebuilding activities abroad, a call to give Arab teachers more tools to discuss the complexity of their identities—these were just some of the topics discussed at the Education in the Shadow of War, Looking Toward a Shared Future conference, which was held earlier this month at the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace at Givat Haviva.
Jewish and Arab educators took part in the conference, all of whom had chosen not to despair, despite the difficult year, and to continue educating toward a shared society. Speakers included Members of Knesset Naama Lazimi of the Labor Party and Yasir Hujeirat of the United Arab List, as well as leaders of various organizations devoted to education toward a shared society.
Shirin Natour-Hafi, who directs the Arab education department within the Ministry of Education, laid out a vision for Arab education not encumbered by the lingering effects of October 7.
“I came to speak about what can be done, and not about what happened and led to things not being able to be done. And I propose discussing the future, and not just talking through pain about what was,” Natour-Hafi told the audience. “This is a feminine quality generally. We women know how to move forward quickly, and I think that this is essential today as well.”
Natour-Hafi took on her position two years ago, after 12 years as principal of a high school in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Lod. Despite the difficulties facing Arab education in Israel, she believe that it is impossible “first to fix the injustices and then to move forward” but rather than progress serves as part of the righting of injustices.
“It saddens me that when I come to Knesset plenaries and meet with heads of municipalities, no one turns to me and says how to promote a strategic plan, how to build a bilingual lesson plan,” she said. “Actions speak louder than words.”
She said that principles in Arab schools have significant space and resources to bring about change, despite recent cuts to a budget meant to promote a five-year strategic plan in Arab society. “A principal in Arab society … receives resources from the Ministry of Education that have never existed in the Jewish school system,” Natour-Hafi said. “Additionally, each principal, Jewish or Arab, has the ability to change about 25% of the school day, together with the community. No one tells them what to do. They have autonomy through a flexible school day, through flexible school budgets, and through budgets of the five-year plan.”
The challenge for Arab educators as she sees it is holding multiple narratives, which sometimes contradict each other, in a respectful manner. “Does a school principal who belongs to the Arab sector of the Jewish state have the ability and the skills to say the right things when he expresses his narrative, without negating the narrative of the other? Yes. I think that is a very high-level skill, emotionally and socially, to say what I think and feel and to present my narrative, but while doing so not blocking and not ignoring the pain of the other,” she said. “That is a very high-level ability that today isn’t found in the education system. And I expect from those who work in an educational institution to know how to say the right things, to educate a generation of people who say what they feel and think, no matter who they’re talking to.”
“We need to speak not out of fear and weakness but out of courage, and to say the right things,” Natour-Hafi continued. “And I want to say what I propose, as someone who is proud to be responsible for the Arab school system, and I arrived at this position by right and not through charity. I am proposing partnership. I’m requesting to come out of this with the sense that there’s someone to talk to at the Ministry of Education.”
Natour-Hafi sees a need for a constructive dialogue that brings together Arab and Jewish identity and relates to the tensions between them. “Arabs in Israel want to live without apologizing for who they are,” she said. “With the ability to feel pain, to identify, and to accept the possibility to change their future themselves. You’re allowed to feel pain and to get angry, but there’s not legitimacy in racist education. No. As a parent, as a woman, as a Muslim Arab, I had the privilege to be in an environment not similar to me. And we have the obligation and the responsibility to get to know the other, and that’s what shapes us. For ourselves, and not just for others.”
Also present at the conference were principals of Jewish and Arab schools who chose to address questions of shared society during the school day. A group of principals discussed the challenges the war has posed to their work during a panel hosted by Miriam Awad Morad, who is involved in the five-year plan to improve education in the Arab sector.
Eli Suidan, principal of the Shalom high school in the northern Arab town of Sheikh Dannun, spoke about balancing his educational dilemmas with his personal dilemmas as a resident of Arab al-Aramshe, the only Arab town to be evacuated from Israel’s northern border. After moving to a hotel with other members of his community, he suddenly found himself responsible for the community on an unprecedented scale.
“We drove the students one and a half hours from the hotel to school everyday,” Suidan said. “After two months, people decided to return to Arab al-Aramshe, despite the evacuation order. The entire town returned. The challenge that I’m facing is parents bringing their kids to school via a road exposed to shelling.”
“The light at the end of the tunnel is that most of the kids come to school,” Suidan continued. “We’ve seen that even students who dropped out want to be at school and not to be shelled. It’s a safe place as they see it that provides them with security. It’s not easy to run a school like this with evacuees. It brings with it lots of problems, both emotionally and socially.”
Suidan’s school runs a joint project with Jewish students at the Ofek high school on nearby Kibbutz Evron. “Our students meet with students from Ofek and do a science project supervised by two teachers, one Jewish and one Arab, and in the end they’ve produced something to present to their families,” he explained. “It also includes a two-day seminar with an overnight portion during which the students talk about shared society. This year, because of the situation, we saw the need to do something different. There was a desire to pause coming from both sides. We invited an organization that hosted a conversation between the educators, and we proposed that next year there be an exchange of teachers, that teachers from Ofek will come to us, and from us to Ofek.”
Mandy Rabinowitz, principal of the Reali School in Haifa, shared about the complicated interactions between Jews and Arabs that take place at school. “Ultimately, here we have 1,800 encounters everyday. It’s a big school. Teachers don’t know how to respond. Ultimately, education doesn’t take place in conferences but in classrooms. During the war, there’s been a phenomenon of isolation.”
Rabinowitz said that he gathered the Arab teachers at the start of the war to ask after their wellbeing. He also said that 12 alumni of the school have been killed since the start of the war. Many teachers have also been called up to reserve military service.
Despite the war, he called for a return to the now-quaint concept of education toward peace. He said that students and teachers from his school take place in peacebuilding activities outside of Israel. “We’re dealing with complexity,” he said. “We’ll move things ourselves, because the state’s not there. We need to be the leaders, and then others will come.”
Dr. Shirin Majli Knaneh, a lecturer and principal of the Alkastel elementary school in Nazareth, spoke about the difficulty of discussing the ongoing violence with young students. She also presented the challenge of having to stop shared programs with local Jewish schools after those schools refused to continue. “The connection between schools is one of our assets,” she said. Encounters need to happen from a young age in order to strengthen society. And suddenly there’s a pause. In my eyes it’s a central challenge to think about how to renew what was.”
In his remarks, Yuval Dvir, principal of the international school at Givat Haviva, said that Jewish and Arab students are exposed differently to the events going on in Israel and in Gaza, and they’re not able to filter the true from the false. “There’s a difficulty in creating one complex story,” Dvir said. “If you don’t have a unifying story you lose the ability to form a community.”
An additional challenge is the asymmetry between Jewish students and Arab students regarding their desire to discuss the situation. According to Dvir, Arab parents instruct their children not to talk about what’s going on. “This challenge won’t disappear,” Dvir said. “There’s fear and trepidation. In the beginning people shared some posts and there was a difficult reaction. There are 140 students here who need to live together.”
Rim Zarik, director of the education department in the Arab town of Reineh near Nazareth, spoke about the fear of the war spreading to additional fronts. She’s concerned about the lack of protection from shelling at the town’s schools. “We started mapping out the shelters at the schools and we found a lack. In the beginning it was said you don’t learn if there’s no shelter there. We have three schools like that. But there’s no public shelters in the town. The state doesn’t take care of its Arab citizens. The missile doesn’t distinguish between a Jew and an Arab, and three children from Reineh were killed in the Second Lebanon War. This is the responsibility of the state.”
Another issue she brought up is the place of post-high school Arab youth, many of whom are aimless and turn to crime. “Don’t fool yourself that this only hurts the Arab community,” Zarik said. “This violence will get to every place in society if this doesn’t improve.”
She called on Israel to create an environment where Arab teachers are able to discuss their identities more openly.
“Teachers are afraid to speak freely, lest we be seen as enemies. It’s forbidden to speak about our identity because it’s threatening,” she said. “This continual taboo is leading to a regression. We need to give teachers tools to express themselves. This is an opportunity.”
