New $11m home for 410 pupils from Muslim, Jewish and Christian backgrounds
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
Monday October 22, 2007
The Guardian
There are some sentences rarely spoken in Jerusalem, a place forever struggling with bitter divisions between its Jewish and Arab neighbours. But yesterday in the newly built corridors and classrooms of the city's only bilingual school they were commonplace.
Jamie Einstein, 13, a bright Jewish boy with a long pony tail and his wrist in a plaster cast, talked happily about two of his Arab classmates, Moataz and Majd. "My two best friends, one of them is a Muslim and one is a Christian," he said. "For me it doesn't matter. What really matters is what they are like."
Now in the eighth grade, he has been a pupil at the school since it first started its experiment in mixed education a decade ago. Each class has both Arabs and Jews, boys and girls, all of Muslim, Christian or Jewish religion. Each class also has two teachers, one Arab, one Jewish, each teaching in their mother tongue. And the school itself is run by two co-principals, one Arab, one Jewish.
Yesterday, the teachers and their 410 pupils moved into their new $11m (£5.4m) building, funded in part by the late British Jewish philanthropist Lord Rayne. The specially commissioned steel and concrete building, with its airy classrooms, sports field, concert hall and sweeping passageways, represents their first proper facility and the latest effort to expand their vision of how a mixed school can thrive in a divided city.
It is not easily done. The Max Rayne school, sited between the Jewish neighbourhood of Pat and the Arab neighbourhood of Beit Safafa, is the only such school in the city. There are three others elsewhere in Israel - in Beersheva, Galilee and Wadi Ara - that are all part of the same organisation, Hand in Hand, which began a decade ago in the initial euphoria of the Oslo peace accords.
There has been opposition, though now dwindling, to the school, in part from neighbours anxious about noise and traffic, and in part from rightwing rabbis opposed to the mixing of Arab and Jewish children. The divisions in Jerusalem stand at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The city's future will have to be a central plank of any plausible Middle East peace deal.
Each child and parent has faced their own challenges. "Some of my friends outside school are fine about it," said Jamie. "Others say: 'What? You are learning with Arabs?' But after I explain they understand."
His mother, Tami Einstein, an art therapist who works in both east and west Jerusalem, has been involved with the school since it began. "I feel all schools should be like this," she said. "It should be normal to sit together. Jamie's friends are almost like brothers to him and now our families are very close friends. That was really the point."
At Jamie's barmitzvah last year invitations were printed in Hebrew and Arabic and his Arab friends gave readings. "Just because something is rare or difficult doesn't mean it's not going to work," she said. "Someone has to make a start."
Next to her was Nehad Ershied, an Arab Israeli lawyer and the father of Jamie's friend Moataz. "It's a bilingual school but more importantly it's multicultural," he said. Some of his friends were suspicious of his decision to send his child; he told them he believed it represented their only future.
"The real co-existence we have now is only in this school and the community that this school creates," he said. "Israel is a democratic state but in practice there is discrimination on many levels. But it doesn't mean we should give up and not try to implement co-existence."
The message is everywhere. One class of excited 10-year-olds sat before their two teachers for an Arabic class yesterday morning. On the board in front of them, their teachers had written the Hebrew words shituf peula and next to them in Arabic, ta'aoun - both mean "co-operation". Underneath, in Hebrew, was written: "Two are better than one."
The children observe Muslim, Christian and Jewish holidays, taking time off in recent weeks for both the Jewish high holidays and Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan. All three religions are taught and discussed.
One of the teachers of the three boys, Jamie, Moataz and Majd, is Angy Wattad, a Muslim Arab woman from northern Israel who a month ago started wearing a hijab. Before she did, she explained to her pupils what she was doing.
"I told them I was strengthening my belief. I told them that I would have a different look but from the inside I'm not changing," she said. "But I didn't tell the teachers, and some of them were surprised. But the beauty of the school is that we accept people the way they are." She is now one of four women teachers who wear the hijab in a staff that also includes observant Jews. In class the children discuss the history of their region, including the war of 1948, which Israel describes as the war of independence and which Palestinians refer to as al-naqba, the catastrophe.
"We teach everything and we discuss the issues and we accept it is possible not to agree with each other," said Amin Khalaf, a co-founder of the Hand in Hand mixed education project. "But we have to know both sides."
The children admit it is often difficult. "Some of it is quite hard - questions about the independent state and the naqba," said Tamar Borman, a 13-year-old Jewish pupil. "Sometimes we argue and sometimes we cry. But it's nothing too big. And if we don't face the problems we won't be able to solve them."
There is still much that the two co-principals, Ala'a Khatib and Dalia Peretz, hope to achieve. For now the school only teaches up to the ninth grade - children aged around 14. They are still applying for government permission to teach older children.
Waiting lists for the school are long and growing. Parents, who are mostly middle-class professionals, pay around 5,000 shekels (£600) a year for tuition, although scholarships are now available.
The talk is of opening many more mixed, bilingual schools in the years ahead. "This new building symbolises the legitimacy we are getting from the public," said Ms Peretz, a Jewish Israeli from a Moroccan family who is also the sister of the former Labor party leader Amir Peretz. "The school is making a psychological change in people's thinking," she added. "It should become a legitimate and well-known model for Israeli society."
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