Jennifer Fendrick

CULT 320: Final Research Paper

ARABS IN THE ISRAELI EDUCATION SYSTEM

While a great deal of attention has been afforded to the ongoing conflict between
Israelis and their stateless Palestinian neighbors, the status of Israels 1.6 million Arab
citizens1 is often overlooked. This paper will discuss how Israels primary and secondary
education system, which separates students according religious affiliation, serves to
perpetuate, and indeed exacerbate, preexisting divisions between Arabs and Jews inside
the Israeli state.
Furthermore, while Arab and Jewish schools are separate, they are far from equal;
Arab schools are consistently underfunded and overcrowded. As long as Arabs are
denied access to adequate schools, they have little chance of emerging from the lower
rungs of society that they currently inhabit.
The paper will begin by exploring some of the reasons behind Israels segregated school
system. Then, the paper will provide a brief overview of the current Israeli primary and
secondary school system, including the curricula. It will also describe the issues of
discrimination in budget allocation, lack of in-school support services, and so forth.
Finally, it will try to assess the impact of these educational policies on Arab students in
terms of dropout rates, employment prospects and other indicators.

1 In this paper, unless otherwise noted, the terms Arab and Palestinian are used
interchangeably to refer to Arabs or Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.

There are many reasons for the disparity in the Arab-Israeli education systems.
The inequalities that exists between the Arab and Jewish sectors have their origins in the
British Mandate period: in 1935, for instance, only 20% of Muslim students between the
ages of 5 and 15 were enrolled in school, versus 80% of Christian and Jewish children.2
This divergence remained after, and was even exacerbated by, the emergence of the
Israeli state. One of the problems lies with the Israeli Ministry of Education, whose
policy towards Arab education remains unclear. When the Israeli parliament, known as
the Knesset, formulated the State Education law in 1953, they did not consider the
education of their Arab population. In fact, the government of Israel did not begin to
formulate any concrete policies in this regard until the early 1970s.3 This is one reason
that the Arab education sector consistently lags behind its Israeli counterpart.
Another reason for the disparity lies in the fact that human rights, including a
right to education, are not formally enshrined in Israeli law. According to the Human
Rights Watch report, Israel lacks any bill of rights or formal constitution.4 Instead, the
governments powers are defined according to a series of Basic Laws enacted by the
Knesset, or the Israeli parliament. Of these Basic Laws, only two expressly address civil
liberties: the 1992 Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation, which establishes the right to

2 Volansky, Ami. The Israeli Education System. The International Encyclopedia of

Education (2007), p. 14.
3 Podeh, Elie. History and memory in the Israeli educational system: The portrayal of
the Arab-Israeli conflict in history textbooks (1948-2000). History & Memory 12.1
(2000), p. 78.
4 Human Rights Watch. Second Class: Discrimination Against Palestinian Arab
Children in Israel's Schools (2001), p. 160.

choose one's occupation, and the 1992 Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, which
provides that [a]ll persons are entitled to protection of their life, body and dignity.5
From Politics and Policy Making: Although the two education systems are separate, the
Arab sector is not independently budgeted; its allocations come from various divisions of
the Arab Education Department.6
According to Human Rights Watch, the curriculum is developed without input
from Arab Israeli educators. Despite the fact that Arabs have a higher incidence of
mental retardation than Israelis, there was no Arabic-language curriculum for special
education until the year 2000. The curriculum for Arab students includes Hebrew
language class, where they are forced to study Talmudic scholars (Jewish experts on the
Torah). According to a Human Rights Watch report on Arab-Israeli education, The
hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university function like a
series of sieves with sequentially finer holes. At each stage, the education system filters
out a higher proportion of Palestinian Arab students than Jewish students.7
Since the mid-1960s, there has been a growth in pan-Arab consciousness that has
affected many of the Arabs living in Israel. This has led to a deepening of the identity
crisis among many Arabs in Israel. Arabs living within Israels borders have always been
torn between an allegiance to the state of Israel, on the one hand, and a loyalty to Arabs
on the other. However, this sense of alienation has become more acute in the last few
5 Human Rights Watch. Second Class, p. 3.
6 Haim Gaziel. Politics and Policy-Making in Israels Education System (Portland,
1996), p. 98
7 Coursen-Neff, Zama. An Update on Discrimination Against Palestinian Arab Children
in the Israeli Educational System (2005).

decades, and many Arab students are simply less receptive to learning Hebrew and
studying the Torah than their parents were.8
In terms of resource allocation, the differences between the two sectors are vast.
For instance, fully three-quarter of all Jewish primary schools have libraries; only slightly
more than half of Arab primary schools also have a library.9
To understand the plight of the Arab education sector in Israel, it is important to
understand the nature of education Jewish students receive as well. Nurid Peled-Elhanan,
an Israeli professor of Language and Education at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem,
became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation following the death of her thirteen
year-old daughter in a suicide blast. She argues that the textbooks used in the Jewish
Israeli sector serve to further marginalize Palestinians, and are designed to prepare the
children for military service.
For her book, Palestine in Israel School Books, she studied Israeli civic, history,
and geography textbooks, and found that Palestinians (and Arabs in general) were
consistently represented in a very bad lightor, often not at all. In all the history
textbooks she studied, she notes that she did not find a single face an Arab or a
Palestinian represented in any of them.10 That is to say, one might find photographs of
terrorists, wearing scarves around their faces, or of the figure of a Palestinian man
pushing a plow, his face obscured by the primitive-looking contraption in front of him.
8 Al-Haj, Majid. Education, Empowerment and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel
(New York, 1995).
9 Human Rights Watch, Second Class, p. 90.
10 Nurit Pedel-Elhanan. Palestine in Israeli Books: Ideology and Propaganda in
Education (New York, 2012), p. 90-91.

However, not a single, identifiable face can be found in any of these textbooks. This
serves to dehumanize Arabs in the eyes of Jewish Israeli children, some of whom will
grow up to formulate education policy themselves one day.
This is especially remarkable considering the fact that Arabs make up twenty
percent of the population of Israeli. Peled-Elhanan observes that one fundamental role
of education is to assure that the groups preferences be every individuals preference, its
enemies his or her enemies.11 In textbooks, as well as in general discourse, Arabs are
often referred to in terms of the Palestinian Problem, something which she found to be
highly disturbingespecially in light of the fact that, only sixty years prior, Hitler spoke
of The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Arab villages are shown as
shantytowns, while Jewish cities look clean, modern, and European. In these students
one finds, for the most part, a captive audience: most of what they learn about history,
they learn in textbooks. The majority of them go on to serve in the army upon graduating
from high school, where many of them encounter Arabs for the first time. And when they
do, they only know about them in terms of the violence, primitivism and non-progress
they learned about in school.12
The consequences of the disparities in the education systems are considerable. By age
fourteen, for instance, the difference in dropout rates is already considerable: 0.3 percent
for Jewish students versus 7.4 percent for Arab students. By age seventeen, 10.4 percent
of Jewish students have dropped out of school, compared to 31.7 percent of Arabs.13 The
11 Pedel-Elhanan, Palestine, p. 14.
12 Ibid., p. 69.
13 Human Rights Watch, Second Class, p. 111.

effects of discrimination in education are manifest in the unemployment statistics:

according to Human Rights Watch, in 1999 more than 42 percent of Arabs between the
ages of twenty-five and thirty-four were neither employed nor in school, compared with
about 24 percent of Israeli Jews of the same age.14 This gap may be attributable, in part,
to the effects of liberalized economy on the labor market: since the 1980s, successive
Israeli governments have increasingly adopted neoliberal economic policies. Many
scholars, such as Manuel Castells, have argued that these policies have only served to
increase the level of economic inequality within (and between) countries.15 Others, such
as Dani Rodrick, contend that reduced trade barriers make the demand for unskilled
workers more elastic: The services of large segments of the working population can be
more easily substituted by the services of other people across national boundaries less
protection for fewer people than ever before.16 However, while economic factors no
doubt play a part, in this respect, political and cultural considerations seem much more
apropos.
In many ways, Israeli society is one of the worlds more productive: for instance,
between 1999 and 2003, Israel ranked third in the world in number of scientific papers
published; as of 2007, the overall unemployment was around 8%.17 However, these
numbers belie the fact that a significant portion of Israels population is trapped in a
14 Human Rights Watch, Second Class, p. 69.
15 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Fourth World, The Global Transformations
Reader: An Introduction to the Globalizations Debate (Cambridge, 2005), p 430.
16 Dani Rodrick. "Has Globalization gone too far?" The Global Transformations Reader.
An introduction to the globalization debate (2000), p. 379.
17 Volansky, Israeli Education, p. 2.

permanent underclass. And without access to a proper education, they will remain there
indefinitely.
Israel is not the first, or only, country to represent non-westerners unfairly in
education systems. As Alain Gresh writes in his article for Le Monde, many educators in
the west see the world in terms of a Manichean divide, separating the civilized north from
the uncivilized, barbaric south. This perception traces back thousands of years: for
instance, in Herodotuss The Histories, the battle of Thermopylae is recast as fight
between slavery and freedom, with the Greek city-states fighting for freedom against the
Persian hordes, who want to continue their barbaric, slaving ways. Twenty-five hundred
years later, the film 300 popularized this academic view of history. What many
westerners either dont know or ignore is that the first universal declaration of human
rights traces back to Cyrus the Great, a Persian emperor. According to Gresh, his sixth
century Cyrus cylinder called for the abolition of slavery and encouraged religious
toleration, among other things.18 As mentioned above, Israeli has yet to ratify a bill of
rights, and in fact still lacks any formal constitution at all.
In The Origins of the Modern World, Robert Marks also discusses the significance
of a Eurocentric historical narrative on the contours of the modern world. The concept
of the rise of the West, he writes, provides both a rationale and a storyline that purports
to explain not just the modern world, but why it is defined by primarily European
features.19

18 Alain Gresh, The West's Selective Reading of History. Le Monde Jan. 2009.
19 Marks, Robert B. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological
Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century (Oxford, 2011), p. 3.

This binary worldview is clearly reflected in Israels education system, which prides itself
on its humanist orientation while cutting a significant portion of its population out of its
history books. Public education plays a significant factor in the shaping of social
consciousness. Israel, in denying Arabs access to the same level of education afforded its
Jewish students, is all but guaranteeing that future generations of Arabs will remain
impoverished and increasingly alienated from the rest Israeli society.

Bibliography
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