School Integration? Not in Israel

The New Observer
January 21, 2016

Last week’s attempt by delegates at the Modern Language Association Convention in Austin, Texas, to condemn Israel for having racially segregated schools, has once again highlighted the US Jewish lobby’s hypocrisy on the topic.

An opinion piece in the LA Times newspaper by Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, titled “Why Israel’s schools merit a US boycott” revealed that Israel maintains two separate educational systems for its citizens—one for Jewish children and another for the Palestinian children.

This structure, he said, “reinforces the profound segregation of Israeli society in everything from matters of citizenship and marriage to housing rights.”

In addition, he said, Israel invests three times as much on a per capita basis in the education of Jewish children than Palestinian children.

“The consequences are obvious,” he wrote, “Schools for Palestinians in Israel are overcrowded and poorly equipped, lacking in libraries, labs, arts facilities, and recreational space in comparison with schools for Jewish students.”

Furthermore, he continued, “Palestinian children often have to travel greater distances than their Jewish peers to get to school, thanks to a state ban on the construction of schools in certain Palestinian towns.”

A November 2013 article in the Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post confirmed that Israel has racially segregated schools. The article, titled “Terra incognita: Is separate education working in Israel?” said that of the 2,008,100 students in Israel in 2013, the “percent of students studying in mixed Arab-Jewish schools is effectively 0.”

The article went on to quote Catherine Rottenberg, an assistant professor at Ben-Gurion University, as saying that “even though 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab, Jewish and Arab children rarely if ever get to know each other as they grow up. They go to separate schools, play in different neighborhood playgrounds…”

The Jerusalem Post article went on to explain that this racially-segregated school system is enshrined in Israeli law: “When the Knesset passed a Compulsory Education Law in 1949, it instituted a segregation of the education system into an Arab-only system for Arabs, and a segmented Jewish system of religious, secular, and other streams for Jews.”

The system was supposed to be “separate but equal,” but, as the Jerusalem Post article admits, “The prime minister’s special consultant S. Dabon told him in 1957: ‘What is the goal of Arab education? It can be assumed: education of its citizens benefits both the state and themselves, and so that they should not constitute a fifth column or active potential for surrounding enemies.’”

This school segregation even extends to the so-called “Falasha” or “Ethiopian Jews,” the Jerusalem Post article goes on to admit.

“We’ve even seen cases of schools that became almost entirely Ethiopian, or catered exclusively to the children of foreign workers,” it says.

The Israeli Ynet news service, in an article published only in Hebrew (but which can be translated using internet tools), announced that even kindergarteners in Tel Aviv attend racially segregated schools.

Ynet said that the city authorities had built a whole new set of preschools for black children after Jews threatened to keep their children at home rather than allow them to go school with the African non-Jews.

Israelis have, of course, the right to maintain their own schools and educational system. There is nothing wrong with this—and in fact it is a sign of a healthy community that wishes to maintain its own cultural and racial identity.

However, in America, all Israel-supporting Jewish organizations are firmly against segregated schooling, and always lead the attack on any whites who even dare suggest such a thing for Europeans.

For example, Jonathan Greenblatt’s Anti-Defamation League (which is supported by all official Jewish organizations in the US, religious and secular alike), has a special campaign devoted to attacking any last vestige of school segregation—even when it is simply the result of geographic isolation and a lack of nonwhites in a school district.

In a section titled “60 Years Later, the Legacy Unfulfilled,” the ADL website says that the “promise of equal access to quality education remains unfulfilled.”

As usual, the Jewish extremists try to blame whites for the obvious nonwhite academic and social failures, saying that “segregation” is the reason why “African American students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.” (This is obviously nonsense, as black behavioral problems have nothing to do with white people, but that is another topic.)

Therefore, the ADL said, in “recognition of the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, ADL has chosen to highlight this important data” by creating infographics which “serve as a reminder that there is still much work to be done” [in ending school segregation]. The handout is titled “Still Segregated, Still Unequal.”

In another article titled “Now More Than Ever: Why We Need to Address Inequity and Justice in Schools,” the ADL went on to say that “structural inequities in society also exist in our educational system. School re-segregation has resurfaced in a major way.”

The ADL therefore, it says, provides “anti-bias education” to promote “conversations with young people about the inequities in society.”

It is notable that the ADL—like all other US Jewish organizations, only complains about “educational segregation” when they wish to attack white people.

The ADL is, for example, silent about the approximately 107 colleges that are part of the “historically black colleges and universities” (HBCU) group—which are overwhelmingly black.

The ADL also did not see fit to condemn the US Department of Education when it declared the last full week in September as “National HBCU Week”—but one needs no imagination to guess the ADL’s response if the Department of Education even mentioned celebrating a “national white colleges and university” week.

Yet, at the very same time, the ADL and all other Jewish organizations in the US fanatically support Israel—and its racially segregated schools.

 

The ADL has a special section of its website devoted to explaining to its supporters how to defend Israel. Titled “Israel: A Guide for Activists,” the ADL page provides detailed instructions on every aspect of the Jewish state, and how to answer accusations made against it.

In addition, the ADL—and all the other organized Jewish organizations—sets up formal visits to Israel, and engages in lobbying on behalf of the Jewish state.

The Jewish lobby’s blatant hypocrisy on this matter, combined with the understanding that the Jewish lobby only opposes “segregation” when they can attack white people, reinforces the reality that they apply one set of rules to themselves, and another set of rules to whites.