Neve Shalom/Wahat-el-Salam: A Case study of an Arab-Jewish school in Israel

The challenge that this school has undertaken does not have a clear counterpart anywhere in the world. In this paper I want to describe this experience and analyze it by putting its main features into broader contexts and perspectives. I believe that such an analysis may sharpen and clarify some basic issues that Israel has preferred to avoid. These issues are crucial for Israel and they are relevant to many contemporary societies struggling with the tensions between the need to promote civic equality and cohesion on the one hand and the recognition of ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural differences between its communities on the other.

I.       General

Most contemporary democracies do not have homogenous populations in terms of religion, ethnic origin, culture or language. In part, this pluralism is the result of changes in the political borders of modern states, when these encompass into one state more than one ethnic and cultural group. In part, this is the result of massive immigration, where indigenous populations and waves of immigrants together create a varied puzzle. In some cases, dominant majorities assimilate minorities into them. More often, the differences linger on and require some political accommodation between shared human and civic components of identity and other, more particular ones.

One of the most central areas in which this issue arises is that of public education, which is supposed to be one of the most important agents of socialization in any complex society. In a homogenous society, public education can be used without a serious problem to educate all youngsters and initiate them into their society. They will all get basic skills enabling them to cope in the world they will live in, coupled with an initiation into the cultural values of their community. Personal excellence and achievement, critical and creative thinking and loyalty to state, tradition and nation can all go together. All of this may become very difficult when the society served by public education is not homogenous. The difficulty grows if the relationships between the groups are not merely ones of difference but of competition and even acute conflict. The difficulty will be maximal if between the groups we have an active, unresolved conflict, which may deteriorate into an armed civil war, so that in a sense members of the groups see each other as enemies. This is the case regarding relations of Jews and Arabs in Israel.

The State of Israel was founded in 1948, after a prolonged conflict between Arabs and Jews concerning the future of the country. The conflict started in the end of the 19^th century, when Zionism started to act on the dream to establish a Jewish National home in the Jews' ancient homeland. The indigenous Palestinian population naturally objected. In 1919 the League of Nations created the British Mandate, affirming the purpose of creating a national home for Jews in Israel as a vindication of the right of Jews to self-determination. Arab opposition led to repeated decisions to divide the country into an Arab and a Jewish state. When the UN decided, again, on such a partition, in November 1947, hostilities erupted and the Arab states rushed in to prevent the creation of the Jewish state. The war that ensued is seen by Jews as their War of Independence, and by the Palestinian population as their Disaster (el Naqba). It resulted with a Jewish state – Israel – on an area larger than that assigned to it in the UN resolution, and with about 700,000 Palestinians who became refugees.[1] 150,000 Palestinians remained within Israel and gained its citizenship. In 1967, as a result of another attack by Arab states, Israel conquered the rest of the West Bank from Jordan, and has occupied it ever since. A series of attempts to resolve the conflict has not yet led to any negotiated agreement. Self determination for Palestinians and the future of the refugees are still central live issues in the region. The Oslo process, which started in 1993, gave some hope that the parties can reach a peaceful two-states-solution after all. In October 2000, this process collapsed, generating a period of growing violence in the region. At the moment, it is not clear what the future of the region is. While the international community still favors a two-state solution, important segments in both communities resist this solution claiming they should rule their whole homeland. Related, and more relevant to our concerns here, is the ongoing debate about the character of Israel itself. While some see the two states solution as a political arrangement giving both Jews and Palestinians their own nation-states, others see the Palestinian state as a nation-state, but claim that Israel should be made 'the state of all its citizens' – i.e. a liberal democracy privatizing all non-civic affiliations, or a bi-national state, recognizing the equal status of Arabs within it.

In the Declaration of the Foundation of the State of May 14^th 1948, Israel defines itself as a Jewish state recognizing full civil and political and social rights of all its citizens. The constitution that was supposed to have been enacted never materialized, and the courts have stated that the Declaration did not have the force of law. The regime established in the state was a Westminster-type democracy. The Jewishness of the state was presupposed, and arrangements protecting it were enacted on the basis of the clear Jewish majority in Israel.

In the period from 1948 to 1967 the Arab minority within Israel was small and demoralized. The devastating blow of 1948 left it without a leadership. Until 1966, most Arabs were under a military rule imposing serious limitations on their freedom of movement and work. Israel felt fragile and insecure, and the Arab minority seemed a potential fifth column to many of its political leaders. 1967 created two processes. The first was a growing increase in the liberty of Arabs in Israel, leading to their greater integration within Israel. The second was growing contacts between the Arab minority in Israel and Palestinians outside it, which led to strengthened connections between the two Palestinian communities.

Developments within Israel and in the region led to the higher visibility of tensions between democracy and the Jewish nature of the state. On the one hand, right wing religious zealots like Meir Kahane argued that 'Jewish' meant governed by Jewish law, and so Israel could not be both Jewish and democratic. He advocated that it should prefer its Jewishness over its democracy when necessary. On the other hand, many Arabs and some radical left-wing Jews agreed that democracy was not consistent with a Jewish state, and advocated Israel's giving up of its Jewish uniqueness.[2] A large majority of Jews within Israel insist that Israel should remain the nation-state of Jews, where Jews exercise their right of self determination. They also think that this is consistent with Israel's democracy and with its commitment to protect the human rights of all.

Since the 1980s, and especially in the human rights basic laws of 1992, Israel has enacted a variety of laws defining it as a Jewish and democratic state. That legislation has spurred extensive public debate. Many Arab leaders in fact argue that the Jewish nature of the state is not legitimate. One of these laws specifies that a party or a candidate denying the Israel is a Jewish and democratic state cannot participate in the elections. In the 2001 elections, the elections committee indeed decided that two central candidates should not be allowed to run, but the Supreme Court decided that the evidence showing their positions were not consistent with the Jewishness of the state was not strong and unequivocal enough to justify banning them. Some analysts argue, however, that the positions of these leaders clearly deny the legitimacy of the idea of a Jewish nation-state in Israel.[3] One thing is clear – these issues are not resolved, and both histories and desired directions are hotly debated.[4]

All of these were naturally reflected in Israel's educational system. One of Israel's first laws introduced mandatory education for all.[5] People can meet this duty to send their children to school by sending them to public (free) schools, to 'recognized but not official' schools, or to 'exempted' schools.[6] The public school system has three main 'sectors ' – the general public schools, the public-religious schools, and the Arab schools. In principle, the state was supposed to pay in full only for public education, and to supervise its content and level. Public financing of non-public education should have come with supervision of its level and its meeting the requirements of teaching some core curriculum of basic tasks and civics. In fact, there is quite a lot of public support of the other types of educational institutions, and the level of supervision is varied.

Education laws in Israel do not explicitly address ethnic or national affiliations, differences or narratives. The Arab sector is identified by the language of instruction. The religious-public stream has its own supervisory council to ensure that these schools meet the requirements of orthodox Jewish communities.[7] Despite this fact, the school communities in Israel are very segregated in fact. In part, this is because assignment to schools is based on residential areas. The duty to provide public education is imposed in part on the local authorities. Jews and Arabs usually live in different towns and villages, so the schools which they go to (especially at the level of elementary education and below) are segregated.[8] Mostly, this de-facto segregation in schooling between Jews and Arabs has not been challenged either politically or in the courts. When a case of this sort did get to the courts, the local authority tried to solve the issue by a combination of a neutral legal provision coupled with practical incentives that will maintain a balance. That effort has not fully succeeded, and the matter is now pending at the courts.[9] For my purposes in this paper, however, this case is the exception that sharpens the rule of unchallenged de-facto segregation. Usually, this separation is accepted and even advocated by most leaders of both communities[10]. The quest for equality and debates about the goals of education and the content of curricula mostly presuppose a continued macro separation between Jews and Arabs in schools (as well as high level of separation among Jewish sub-groups, mainly on the basis of religious attitudes) [11].

The initial policy decision concerning separation was made at the very beginning and was based on the depth of the differences between the communities, the decision to let the Arab community teach its children in Arabic, the reality of an unresolved conflict, and the expectation that a mandatory integration of all schools (and the adoption of Hebrew as the official language in the schools) will raise both insurmountable practical difficulties and vocal opposition.

In 1948, there were massive discrepancies between the education systems of different communities. The British authorities relegated education to the communities themselves. The old Jewish Yishuv had mainly ultra religious educational institutions of various sorts, with some modern institutions. The Zionist movement has created a line of Hebrew schools, both general and religious.[12] In any event, all Jewish children attended some extended schooling and were literate. These schools were all used when the state system was founded. In the Arab sector there was a great difference between cities and rural areas and between Christian and Moslem communities. Among the Christians, all boys and many of the girls attended schools. The situation was very different among the rural Moslem communities, a majority of the local Arab population.[13]

Despite a dramatic improvement in the status and level of Arab education in Israel since 1948, the gaps between this system and the Jewish one are still quite noticeable. In all measurable criteria, the record of the Jewish sector is better than that of the Arab one. The gaps are the result of complex reasons, including differential allocation of public funds, cultural differences, differences in pedagogical approaches, gaps in the educational background of the families, the size of families, and the social-economic level of the population.[14]

The initial policy re the content and goal of education was reflected in section 2 of the Public Education Law of 1953, which specified the goals of public education in the following way:

The goal of public education is to base education in the state on the values of Israel’s culture and the achievements of science, on love of homeland, state and the people of Israel, on the memory of the Holocaust and the Heroism, on training for agriculture and handicraft, on pioneering, and on craving for a society built on foundations of liberty, equality, solidarity and love of humanity.

The law recognized that non-Jewish schools may require modifications on their curricula, but this fact was not reflected in the section dealing with the goals of education. Only in February 2000, the long process of recognizing that this formulation was not suited to non-Jewish (and non-Zionist) groups in the population ripened into an amended section 2:

The goals of public education are:

1.      To educate a person who loves humanity, his nation, his country, a faithful citizen of the state of Israel, respecting his parents and his family, his tradition, his cultural identity and his language.

2.      To instill the principles of the Declaration of the Foundation of the State of Israel and the values of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state, and to develop respect for human rights, basic liberties, obedience to the law, the opinions and culture of the other, and to educate to strive for peace and toleration in the relationships between persons and peoples.

3.      To teach the history of the land of Israel and the State of Israel.

4.      To teach Jewish religion, the history of the Jewish people, Israel’s heritage and Jewish tradition, to instill the memory of the holocaust and the heroism and to teach respecting them.

5.      …

11.  To know the language, culture, history and heritage of the Arab population and other population groups in Israel, and to recognize the equal rights of all citizens of Israel.

Clearly, the new section 2 acknowledges the complexity of Israeli society in a way not apparent in the 1953 formulation. But again, the message is quite clear. Israel is not a liberal, neutral, state, privatizing all the non-civic affiliations of its citizens. It defines itself as a nation-state for Jews which grants full equal rights to all its citizens. And it requires that all its citizens will accept this characterization and be faithful citizens of the state. At the same time, it accepts that Israelis belong to different nations and ethnic and religious groups, and advocates toleration, plus an education that will encourage individuals and groups to affirm the non-civic components of their identities. Moreover, section 2 now accepts the special situation of Arabs as an indigenous group.

Mostly, the educational system in Israel seeks to meet its goals while teaching students in schools that are not integrated along ethnic, religious and linguistic lines. It is probable that this systemic separation has great advantages in terms of the effectiveness of education, but that it also extracts a heavy price in terms of the ability of public schools to promote civic cohesion, toleration, and knowledge of the facts and background of Israeli pluralism. In our context, that of the relations between Jews and Arabs, the structure of the educational system almost guarantees that Jewish and Arab students and teachers do not learn together. They do not know each other's culture, and they are not aware of the deep differences in the way they see reality and the history of the state. Naturally, neither Jews nor Arabs know the realities of the existence as seen by members of the other groups, their aspirations and their grievances. Against this background, the uniqueness of our test case school is easy to see. It is the oldest school in Israel in which Jewish and Arab teachers teach Jewish and Arab students together.[15] Moreover, the school is the only one in the country which is situated in, and inspired by, a voluntary Arab-Jewish village, committed to a life of equality and co-existence. The school seeks to implement one of the possible answers to the question of education in a state of ethnic conflict – it advocates integrated but non-assimilating education. This is a solution very different from the one adopted by the Israeli educational system in Israel and by most educational systems in similar circumstances. The test-case thus offers a good opportunity to investigate processes that are unlikely to unfold so clearly in other educational set-ups.

My study of the school itself included two ‘observational’ stages as well as reading the literature generated by previous studies of the school. It is a special project within a broader study of the question of how divided societies should seek to attain civic equality among their members and groups. In particular, I wanted to look into the question of whether and when civic equality is best achieved via integrated frameworks, and when it is better to pursue it through separate frameworks empowering the different groups. In the first stage, January to June 2000, a series of observations and interviews were conducted. A first draft was presented to the school community, and the plan was to finish the study towards the beginning of the academic year 2000-2001. But then the processes started by the Oslo accords collapsed, leading to the eruption of violence which has been going on till the time in which this study is written (summer of 2004). In October 2000, rioting in the Arab sector in Israel led to the death of 12 Arab and one Jewish citizens of Israel while others were injured. These events and processes have made Arab-Jewish relations in Israel even more charged than they had been before. Many in both communities have developed great skepticism towards the dream of co-existence presupposed by the Neve Shalom community. It seemed wrong not to find out how these events have affected the school. Consequently, another round of interviews was held in May-July 2003, which did reveal some massive changes in the way the school operates and is conceived of by those participating in running it.

The paper seeks to describe an exciting and courageous project. It also seeks to highlight some of the insights generated by this unique experiment and to see whether and how they can be implemented more generally within the educational system in Israel.

It is not easy to place this study within a particular theoretical framework, since there are so many candidates, each of them with its own allure. Pluralism, multiculturalism, democracy, citizenship, conflict-resolution, coexistence, rights-talk and equality are some of the prisms from which such situations have been discussed in general, and in the context of education.[16] In the studies there are different emphases on descriptions and normative analysis. There is a variety of methodologies and attitudes. These are issues discussed by political philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and educators. [17]

I have therefore decided to use the advantage of my being an outsider to most of these disciplines and methodologies, and frame my analysis by identifying a serious social and political problem, which may well be presented in a pre-theoretical way. In seeking to illuminate the problem and ways of dealing with it I will be agnostic and eclectic about theories and disciplines. My study is therefore designed to do two quite different things: It is supposed to help practitioners think about the problem and ways of dealing with it on the basis of the insights generated by the case-study. And it is an invitation to scholars to integrate the case study into theoretical discussions if and where they may think it is illuminating.

The problem that is at the centre of the case study is how Israel can build a sense of shared and common citizenship and partnership and membership in one political community between members of two communities – Jews and Palestinian Arabs – whose visions of the history of the state and its legitimacy differ radically, against the background of the fact that the political conflict between them has not been settled in a stable way. The problem would have been hard enough if the conflict had been settled. If that had been the case, the educational goal could have been clear: the needs of coexistence would have taken precedence. Whatever structural solution would have been adopted (in terms of integration vs. separation) would presuppose the identity of the state, the presence of an Arab indigenous minority, and the need to accommodate these in a stable democracy. This would not have been easy or trivial. Attempts to deal with patterns of prejudice and discrimination in other societies show that changes are very hard to make. But the direction could have been clear – reconciliation and equal dignity. Implementation would have required a careful and patient mutual recognition of conflicting narratives and weaving them into a shared new reality.

The crux of the difficulty of the Israeli situation is that the apparent stability of Israel is recent, and it may appear to some illusionary and reversible.[18] Moreover, forces on both sides act to change the reality. Thus there is no consensus among the major groups of Israeli society on either the reading of the past or of the direction for the future. Under these circumstances, it is hard to reach consensus even on that thin level of shared civics education affirming some civic rights and duties and acceptance of the political system of the rules of the game.

The school system in Israel sought to avoid this difficulty by creating separate school systems for the different groups, accepting their wish not to be assimilated into the dominant culture. Initially, the Arab school system was closely supervised to guard against Arab nationalist elements. Today, repression of the Arab national sentiments is regarded as both unacceptable and impossible, yet Israel insists on defining itself as a Jewish nation-state respecting the individual and collective rights of all its citizens. It seeks to impose that credo on all the population, including the Arab minority, but it does not come to terms with the (understandable) reluctance of that minority to do so. So on the one hand Israel has a law requiring all schools to hang the flag in schools, but the law is not enforced. This ambivalence inevitable is reflected in what is done and is not done within the educational system. Separation is conducive to keeping the groups distant and remore and ignorant of each other.

Many people identify this distance and ignorance as a major problem for Israeli society. However, ideas to change the situation address allocations and planning and patterns of discrimination but do not look at the separateness of the school system. The main attitude is that the problems of the relationships should be solved by improving the material lot of the Arab minority, without addressing the symbolic issues of its status within the Jewish state. However, advances in material well being will strengthen, not lower, the visibility of these symbolic national issues. Israel can ill afford to avoid explicit recognition and treatment of these issues.

Separate schools and lifestyles have helped Israelis think they can avoid this issue. NS creates a setup in which they cannot be avoided, The setup teaches us about the strengths and the limits of constructive ambiguity. At times the best way to manage a conflict is to seek to avoid it. At others, some clarity about its existence and the general contours of its resolution are necessary for any form of stable coexistence.

The school in NS-WS has made a decision to face these difficulties within An integrated school. The experiment may teach us a lot about the challenges met by those who try this route. In this study I seek to both learn how to make meeting these challenges there more effective, and on what we can learn from their experience to the educational system as a whole.

II.     Neve Shalom – A General Background

A.     The village

Neve Shalom/Wahat-el-Salam is a communal village in the center of Israel, explicitly founded as a community devoted to equal co-existence of Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. It was founded in 1972 on lands leased from the Latroun Monastery. The first family arrived in 1977. At present (2004), it is the home of 50 families and about 200 people. All families belong to the middle class, and the village has a disproportionately high percentage of academics.

Members are accepted by a membership committee. There is an effort to keep the number of Jewish and Arab families similar if not equal. In principle, there is full equality and rotation in running the matters of the community.[19] The community is committed to maintaining this equality in the face of the fact that the village is an island in a state in which Arabs are an indigenous minority living in a Jewish nation-state and experiencing a variety of patterns of exclusion and discrimination.

Mostly, the life of members is conducted outside the village since most members do not work in it. Thus, the attempt to create an island of equality within the village is bound to be incomplete, with the reality outside penetrating very deeply. Indeed, it seems that while members do persist in their commitment to equality despite great pressures, the internal dynamics within the community are far from simple and easy.[20] Naturally, the tensions within the village grow as the reality outside becomes more difficult and frustrating. A telling sign of the difficulties, which we will encounter later in the school as well, is the way the village deals with the Israeli holiday of Independence Day, preceded by Memorial Day. Independence Day is the day the state was founded. Unfortunately, this independence was attained in a bloody war with the Arabs in which many Jews (and Arabs) died, and which resulted in the dispossession of many Arabs and the destruction of a large part of their infrastructure in Israel. Proud, self aware Arabs are unlikely to celebrate Independence Day under these circumstances. If at all, they are likely to want to use it as a day of mourning. While Jews committed to co-existence are deeply aware of this difficulty, and would go a long way not to offend the sensibilities of the Arabs, many of them do want to celebrate the fact that Israel was founded as a Jewish nation-state, and mourn for the victims of that war. How does a small village handle this? It seems that the best that members could have done was to ‘privatize’ the day. Nothing official and general happens on that day in Neve Shalom. Which might be the only way to deal with an explosive issue. But one does not have the sense that we have found here a successful way of encouraging a balance between a shared human and civic identity and particular ethnic and religious ones. It seems that the village, at least, has admitted that resolving this issue in a substantive way was too difficult. Avoiding it was the best that could be done.

A dramatic illustration of these tensions was ‘imposed’ on the village when Tom Kitain, the oldest son of Boaz who was at the time the director of the school, died in a combat accident while serving in Lebanon in 1997. The tensions intensified when Boaz accepted an invitation to light a candle in Independence Day 2000 as a representative of the Bereaved Families. Many people in the community, both Arabs and Jews, felt that it was not proper for Boaz to do this without consulting the village. Many felt that no person seriously committed to co-existence should serve in the army, especially not in Lebanon. Others disagreed. They insisted on their right to be full members in the struggle for equal dignity for Arabs in Israel while maintaining their right to feel proud members of the Jewish people and to participate and contribute to the flourishing of the Jewish nation-state.

Naturally, these tensions affect the way the village deals with its school and other educational institutions. In addition to the pre-school and elementary school (in 2004 a growing high school started to operate in the village), the village runs the influential ‘School for Peace’, founded in 1979, which is devoted to hosting encounters between Jews and Arabs from Israel and the Occupied Territories.[21]

The village is small but dynamic. In the last 3-4 years it has successfully extended its population by accepting a number of younger families. It may well be that they will bring with them new perspectives of the prospects and desired directions of the Jewish-Arab rifts and that as newcomers they will be able to transcend to some extent the complications of personal residues that always make life in small villages so denting. This may also improve the ability of the village to manage its educational projects.

B.    The School[22]

In 1980, the village established its own preschool, but until 1984 the school age children attended schools outside of the village.[23] The Jewish children went to the neighboring Kibbutz school, while the Arab children studied in Ramla. In the mid 80s, however, the members have decided that sending their children to learn in separate schools outside of the community was not consistent with its nature. They thus embarked on their own school, committed to speaking both languages, learning both cultures, and celebrating the holidays of the three religions.

For about a decade, the school was based on the children of members only. The teachers and the directors, too, came from the village itself. The spirit of the school was identical with the spirit of the community. Naturally, it was a very small school. In addition, it was hard to keep a balance between Jews and Arabs. Thus in 1995 there were 8 or 9 students in each age group, and the ratio of Jews to Arabs was 30 to 70. When the students left for outside schools at the end of sixth grade, this was a devastating social blow to the other children and to the school as a whole. Children also did not want to stay till the end of the 8^th grade, since the size of the school did not allow them to realize to the full their social needs.

This has led to the dramatic decision to change the nature of the school and open it up to children from outside the village itself. In a gradual process starting in 1996, the school aimed at having two 20 student classes in each age group for the whole range of first to sixth grade, wishing to maintain a numerical balance between Jews and Arabs. By the year 2002 this goal was fully met.[24] The ‘outside’ children comprise about 85% of the students. We should note that not all of Neve Shalom children themselves attend the local school.[25]

Naturally, the symbiotic relationship between village and school has somewhat changed. The school needs to serve its student body and its parents, most of whom are not locals. It is not clear how this change has affected the school and will affect it in the future. Decisions about directing the school are still made in and by the village. However, in 2002 it was decided to change the convention under which directors came from the village, and seek external directors. This major change has not stabilized yet, so it is too early to speculate how it may affect the future development of the school.[26]

In the second phase, the school had to deal with issues that had not emerged before, such as criteria for admission of students and a much larger recruitment of teachers to suit the growing school. Rules of admission do not seem very clear. Parents are not expected to be committed to the ideology of the village or the school, but they do have to accept it. Admission is based on an interview, but there are preferences to taking siblings of children who are students, and to encourage the admission of many students from the same community outside the village so the social gains of the school will be present in after-school hours as well.

In the preschool stage, demand from Arab families is greater than the demand from Jewish families, since they find it harder to find suitable educational frameworks for their children.[27] In the school years, all the demand comes from middle class families. While Arab families prefer Neve Shalom because it is a quality school, without violence and drugs, which is not ‘just Jewish’, Jewish families usually come because they want to avoid the local schools in their communities, which do not provide the kind of quality education they want.[28]

The organizational structure of the school reflects its ideology. In each age group there are two integrated home classes. Each class has a principal teacher, and in each age group one of the principal teachers is Jewish, one Arab.[29] However, as will become clear below, there are many subjects taught separately on the basis of language or ethnic origin.  

The policy of equal repres