On their Way Somewhere: Integrated Bilingual Palestinian-Jewish Education in Israel

Abstract

In 1972, Fr. Bruno Hussar founded the first (and still only) intentionally mixed Palestinian–Jewish village in Israel. The aim was to set an example of coexistence in practice for groups living in what has come to be known as an area of intractable conflict (Bar-Tal, 1999). The village’s name is Neveh Shalom/Oasis of Peace (Feuerverger, 2001). In 1984, three years after the first integrated Protestant-Catholic schools opened their doors in Northern Ireland (McGlynn, 2001), an integrated school started functioning in this village in Israel. The school served the local population that, even today, is rather small (totaling sixty families). The school was an exotic educational undertaking serving an unusual mixed community that never developed into an attempt to influence the wider, almost fully segregated educational system in Israel (Nir and Inbar, 2004). Fifteen years later and totally unconnected to these previous developments, two friends—a Palestinian (citizen of Israel) and an American Jew (also citizen of Israel)—started what, at that time, seemed like an impossible (and in the eyes of some consulted experts, undesirable) grassroots movement toward the creation of integrated bilingual schools in Israel. This time the objective was to serve the “regular” population and not those people who already had very clear ideological commitments toward cooperation and coexistence, such as the population in Neveh Shalom.