Day 7: From Pain to Hope

Today is a day that brings hope! We packed up and departed from Galilee this morning and headed southwest to a town named Misgav to visit a school. Not just any school, but a very special school that is working on bringing peace to Israel, two students at a time. The School is named Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel. It is a bilingual education school that brings students from Arab villages and Jewish villages, and puts them in classrooms together to work on learning both Hebrew and Arabic, as well as parts of each others cultures and traditions. It was an incredible place to see. For many reasons, but most especially for the fact that peace is happening and it is possible. There is not doubt that it is a struggle, which they named, but it was not and will not be a deterrent for the people who are working at the school, and for the families that choose to take a stand for peace and send their kids to the school. There are a lot of problems a bilingual school may encounter. This has clearly been an issue in the LAUSD school system, so you can only imagine how much more complicated it gets when you add a national conflict that has been going on for many years into the mix. Some of the problems that they have faced is the need to develop a brand new curriculum that will work for any student, coming from any background.

Choosing holidays for example, can be a very challenging thing. Between the Muslim, Jewish and Christian holidays there would be no school! So they take a few holidays from every tradition, and try to balance it out for each community. The one holiday that I found to be most exciting and fascinating was what they call the “Feast of Feasts”, which celebrates Christmas, Hanukkah, and the Islamic New Year together. To carry out these plans they have an extra large staff, one Hebrew speaking teacher and one Arabic speaking teacher in ever classroom, as well as two co-principals.

These schools have been in existence for going on twelve years, and have had tremendous success with every class, yet it is getting harder to keep the class sizes balanced with a 1:1 ratio of Hebrew and Arabic speaking students. The students pay a large social price, because they do not return to the neighborhoods of their classmates in the evenings, yet we were assured that sleepovers still occur. This school clearly is going against the main stream of thought in Israel and Palestine, but it is working to build bridges between the two communities. The strength of the staff and the students to be so brave and strong brought me great comfort after days of confusion and questioning. The principal, Orna Eylat, who spoke with us, ended by talking about the way they teach about the history of the state of Israel. She said that the students will write a new chapter in history, one they will call “From Pain to Hope”, and they will live in a place where peace is not only possible it is celebrated.