Denies International Pressure Caused Move : Israel Reopens West Bank Schools

Israel reopened schools for Palestinian students in the West Bank on Saturday, after months of international criticism and calls to ease tension with the population in the occupied region.

Schoolchildren in elementary grades as well as teen-agers in their last year of high school were permitted to renew studies interrupted for much of the past 19 months. Israeli soldiers steered clear of schoolyards to avoid provoking stone throwers. Arab activists encouraged students to keep their noses in the books--at least in the classrooms.

The day passed without major incident. At recess, girls at the government school in Beit Sahur, a town in the shadow of Bethlehem, quietly ate sandwiches. Boys at the LaSalle Brothers School chased each other across a basketball court before a bell brought them back to rows of worn desks.

Students Attentive, Eager

Teachers said that students were attentive and eager, and the students themselves seemed uncommonly sober in their appreciation of the chance to get back to class. “We must apply ourselves to make up for lost time. We must keep studying no matter what,” said Ihab Abu Muhar, 17, a senior at the Roman Catholic-run LaSalle school.

As for the Arab uprising known as the intifada, a classmate, Maher Haraj, commented: “If the soldiers come by, it will be hard just to sit and look at them. Otherwise, demonstrations can go on only somewhere else--not in the schools.”

Nationalist graffiti scrawled outside the public girls’ school urged students to hold “a book in one hand and a stone in the other.”

Israeli officials had lectured school officials and parents for a week on the need to keep schools quiet. The reopening was accompanied by warnings that individual schools, at least, could face closure if trouble broke out.

“If you want to learn, you have the opportunity to do so. If you don’t, then that’s your choice, too,” said Brig. Gen. Shaike Erez, a top official in the military government.

Military authorities said that other high school grades would be restored in stages if all goes well with the initial opening for seniors.

About 200,000 of the total West Bank school-age population of 320,000 showed up for class Saturday. Schools run in refugee camps by the United Nations were also reopened Saturday.

The Israeli government insisted that pressure from abroad had nothing to do with the decision to reopen the schools and that their remaining open depends on the Palestinians themselves keeping students under control. Human rights groups and foreign government had joined in condemning the closures.

Praised by U.S. Senate

In a motion adopted Friday, the U.S. Senate praised Israel for deciding to reopen the schools but expressed “the hope that all schools will be open at an early date and will remain open, will not be closed or caused to be closed for political purposes and will be respected and regarded as centers of education.”

The Bush Administration had urged that schooling begin again as a way to create a climate of trust and set the stage for peace talks.

It is far from clear whether either side in the conflict views the reopening as a step toward conciliation. In leaflets distributed in the West Bank this week, underground commanders of the uprising urged students to keep schools free of unrest but to continue demonstrations and stone throwing elsewhere. Israeli officials saw the return to school as a victory for their policies of cracking down hard on demonstrations and stone throwers.

“As things quieted down a bit, the security personnel have decided to reopen on the assumption that things have improved and as a signal to the Palestinian Arab population that if they cooperate with us and keep the peace and tranquility, we will certainly cooperate with them,” said Binyamin Netanyahu, the deputy foreign minister and a member of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud Party.

Schools in the West Bank were closed in the first days of the intifada on grounds that they served as staging areas for harassment of Israeli soldiers and civilian vehicles. Schools in the Gaza Strip remained open for the most part; generally, the military administration in Gaza has kept social services functioning more smoothly than has been the case on the West Bank.

As the months wore on, Palestinian parents tried to set up their own schools. But the military government declared such classes illegal and, when they were discovered, raided them. The government considered the hidden schools an effort to set up an independent education system outside of Israeli control.

What of Children’s Skills?

Parents and teachers alike worried about the toll on the mental development of children. Would skills normally digested at age 6 be as well retained by a child who was 8? Would students in their teens, running rampant on the streets, ever happily return to the straight-backed discipline of the classroom?

“Now, we will need a number of years before we can catch up and get back to the same standards of education that we had before the closure. I am specifically worried about students who are up to 8 years old who have not spent time learning their alphabets and their numbers. It will take us sometime to get them back from illiteracy to literacy,” predicted Khali Mahshi, headmaster of the Friends School in Ramallah.

Arab universities have been closed since before the intifada began, and there was no word about their reopening.