Their Schools Closed by Israel, West Bank Youths Attend Secret Classes

The young Palestinians and their aging mentor exchanged illegal information behind the drawn curtains of a private living room.

“The white dog is nice,” a teen-ager named Tamer said.

“The black dog is nicer than the white dog,” a colleague named Rima said hesitantly.

“The red dog is the nicest!” Hamed concluded, with an eager wave of the hand.

The three are high school students trying to keep up their English lessons in a clandestine school run by Palestinians in this hilltop town near Bethlehem.

For most of the past 17 months, Israel has kept all schools in the West Bank, public and private, closed on grounds that they would otherwise breed unrest associated with the Arab uprising.

Hidden Classes

In order to keep the 320,000 students from falling hopelessly behind in their studies, Palestinians are organizing hidden classes.

These have also been declared illegal, even though teachers and parents generally keep the students quiet so as not to attract army patrols on the lookout for such activity. Such is the concern for secrecy that a reporter spent months asking before being admitted to one of the classes.

Israeli troops recently raided college science classes in Ramallah that were being taught by professors from Birzeit University, which has been closed for more than a year. There was no indication from the government announcement of the raid that the students had done anything but carry on a normal course of study.

The United Nations, which operates 98 schools in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, complained recently that the Israeli government had prohibited its teachers from holding first- through third-grade classes in the homes of children as a temporary measure to keep them learning.

Not Issue of Security

Israeli officials do not base the banning of secret schools on the issue of security. Rather, they express concern that a separate system will arise outside their control, one in which Palestinian nationalism would be assumed if not taught outright.

Reading, writing and revolution are not in the authorized curriculum.

“We do not oppose a few parents teaching their children some lessons at home,” Shmuel Morad, the military governor of Nablus, said. “There has to be supervision by the proper authorities. It cannot be directed by politically oriented people of the uprising.”

As to the possibility of reopening the schools, Morad said, “There is no way to open schools.”

Israel’s insistence on keeping the Arab schools closed has drawn fire from international human rights groups and recently from a group of Israeli professors who see it as ironic that Jews, a people taught to venerate education, should deny education to others, even in the midst of a violent conflict.

“We are of the opinion that a step that may have been justified as a short-term emergency measure at the beginning of the uprising has become intolerable as a long-term measure,” the professors wrote. “It is crucial that acts done in our name should be consistent with our declared values.”

Palestinian educators are planning to circulate a petition among foreign diplomats in Jerusalem requesting that their countries halt educational exchanges with Israelis so long as Israel keeps Arab schools closed.

The United States has asked Israel privately to take “confidence-building measures” to try to ease tension in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but has stopped short of pressing for a reopening of the schools.

In the meantime, some Palestinian parents take pains to get their children to “popular schools,” with classes dispersed in homes, offices, mosques and churches.

For fear of being found out, children carry their books not in the customary knapsack but in plastic grocery bags topped with bunches of mint or grape leaves for camouflage. Tamara, an 11th-grader in Beit Sahur, recalled the day soldiers forced her to return home when they found English books in her bag.

“I said, ‘These are not rocks,’ ” she related. “They said, ‘It doesn’t matter, they are illegal.’ ”

Beit Sahur is a middle-class town with numerous teachers, and many of its residents are parents who want to see their children educated.

In other, more remote places, where learning would be a struggle in the best of times, education has come to a virtual standstill. For example, in Kfar Malek, near Ramallah, 8- and 9-year-olds spend their days not trying to fathom arithmetic but standing guard on hilltops to watch for roving Israeli army patrols.

With some embarrassment, street organizers in Kfar Malek admitted that little is being done there to further the children’s education. They pointed out that teachers would have to come from Ramallah, and are reluctant to do so for fear of being found out. Teachers are in the pay of the Israeli government while the schools are closed.

“We can’t get anyone to come teach, and we ourselves are not really very well educated,” said Mustafa, a village youth who has been in prison on four occasions for throwing stones.

Can Read Graffiti

Idle children in the main plaza demonstrated a peculiar result of the lack of education: They could read the nationalist graffiti scrawled on the walls of houses and stores but were hard-pressed to recite from an elementary science book produced by a local storekeeper.

Palestinian educators view such an imbalance in the learning of youngsters as one of many disasters visited upon the children.

“A whole generation could come out illiterate,” school counselor Rana Nashashibi warned. “We are witnessing an enormous drop in IQ scores. Nine-year-olds are really at 7-year-old levels.”

Nashashibi deals with children in the 7- to 11-year age group, a period regarded as important in terms of grasping concrete ideas and quantities and in the absorption of social norms.

“It’s possible that the children are learning a certain amount of independence and assertiveness that can prove valuable,” she said, “but they are not learning limits, moral norms and values. There’s a lot of aggressiveness. Who will teach that freedom stops when it annoys others? How will the children learn limits? Their behavior is becoming unpredictable.”

A mother in Beit Sahur described how her son, who is 10, was refusing to go to school until the Palestinians achieve their independence.

“I tell him,” she said, “that he’ll be of no use to our country if he does not study. He answers that the work in the streets is more important.

“Imagine! He uses words like ‘polarization’ and ‘collaborators.’ What about beauty and nature? What kind of childhood is this?”

Just then the son entered and listened to his mother’s complaint.

“My mother gets mad sometimes,” he said. “When we have a state, we will make her defense minister. No one would dare attack us.”