Israel threatens to close its only Jewish-Arab public school.
The Weizmann School in central Jaffa is the only school in Israel with a mixed Arab-Jewish student body. It has about 350 students, from preschool to sixth grade, with roughly equal number of Arabs and Jews, and serves a relatively poor section of the city. Parents and teachers at the school fear the school will shut down due to lack of support from the Tel Aviv municipality. The municipality and the Ministry of Education deny this, but they refuse to confirm that it will continue beyond the next school year.
Some comments from teachers: "This is a unique model, which can and should be emulated in other schools." "The policy of City Hall is to have no policy." "It will kill any attempt in the future to create integrated education."
The result of this uncertainty is the loss of Jewish pupils whose parents fear that the school might close. This may, in fact, be the intention, judging by one parent’s comment: "There are too many Arab kids in this school. It's a Jewish school after all, and it's important for us that it stays this way. No Jewish parent would agree for his child to be in the minority. Some are already running away because of the number of Arabs."
When Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, ran a story on the school’s uncertain future, readers wrote in with even more revealing comments: "Good riddance, let it close. Mixed schools and ‘coexistence’ only lead to assimilation, intermarriage, and sympathy with the cause of those who seek Israel’s destruction." "The fact that this is the only school in all of Israel when the Arab population is 20% says something. Maybe it should be closed down...it’s obvious that parents don’t want to maintain this arrangement and are fleeing this school for Jewish ones." Bear in mind that the "Arabs" at the school are all citizens of Israel and are supposed to have full and equal rights.
North America’s news media never discuss it, but Israel is a society pervaded by racism. The Israeli state encourages and enforces discrimination in education, employment, housing, marriage law and land ownership. So much for the myth of Israel as a progressive western democracy! It is, in reality, an apartheid state hiding behind a democratic façade.
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