COLUMN ONE : Israel Tries Teaching Kids Peace : Schools nationwide have launched classes to prepare students for life in the new Mideast. But emotions run high and old fears die hard, even among the young.

Red-haired Ariel Weiss embarrassed his young friends as they debated about Israelis making peace with their neighbors.

“I don’t mean to sound racist,” he told his classmates, setting his jaw defiantly. “But even if I grow up in a generation of peace, I won’t tell my children that an Arab is like a Jew. I think we should treat the Arabs like humans, but don’t trust them too much.”

Ariel’s comments brought groans from his fellow 14-year-olds. But some sympathized.

“There are people who are opposed to peace,” said Inbar Kalmonovitch. “Some people think it is good that we get to know the Arabs, but for others it is frightening, because there are still murders, there are still wars.”

Hadar Gonen nodded. “It is confusing,” she agreed. “On the one hand, we’re signing peace agreements. Then, on the other hand, people are getting killed.”

Ariel, Inbar and Hadar are part of an experiment under way in every grade of Israel’s public schools: More than a year after the Israelis signed their historic accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Ministry of Education is trying to teach young people what peace will mean for Israel.

Officials, principals, teachers and students are finding the task complex and painful.

After months of preparation, including special workshops for teachers and pilot programs in handpicked schools, it has become clear that explaining Israel’s efforts to make peace is, in some ways, more difficult than explaining the need to go to war.

Consider the experience here at Alumim middle school in Ramat Hasharon, a wealthy Tel Aviv suburb. It is an airy, well-appointed school; the parents of many students are highly educated professionals. But the Arab-Israeli conflict has deeply scarred even these relatively privileged, pampered Israelis, said Principal Ilana Dan.

“You must understand,” she said. “All our lives, we were taught that we have enemies and that Arabs were our enemies. During the Gulf War, Scud missiles fell in this neighborhood. Houses were destroyed. People were hurt. Our children were frightened. For months after the war, many of them were afraid to go home after school.”

And when it comes to discussing peace, “everybody in Israel, including the students, has . . . very set opinions,” said Sara Harel, one of the ministry officials who helped to develop the half-million-dollar education program. “We think that the role of the schools, in this instance, will be to help children form their opinion from knowledge and to confront other opinions which are different from theirs.”

Even that seemingly modest goal has raised a storm of criticism from Israel’s political right, which views the peace education program as a dangerous propaganda exercise by the government. Opponents see it as an effort to prepare Israelis for the abandonment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and for the ceding of land to the Palestinians.

“The issue here is not teaching the values of peace. That is not what the government is doing,” said Yechiel Leiter, a spokesman for the Yesha Council, an organization of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Settlers support peacemaking as a value rooted in the Bible, Leiter said.

“But what they are teaching in the schools is this particular government’s vision of peace, when more than half the country believes that what they are pursuing will lead to war,” he said. “This is done in the worst Bolshevik fashion. It is an almost Soviet-type re-education of the public.”

Aware of the sensitivities involved, Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein chose to make the teaching of peace voluntary. He decided to do this through the “theme of the year”--an annual program that each school is encouraged to teach in addition to the routine curriculum.

In the past, the program has tackled less explosive issues, such as the environment or democracy. The theme for 1994-95 was industrialization, until Rubinstein replaced it in January with “The Peace Process: Israel in the Middle East.”

But no sooner was the new theme announced than a Jewish settler in the West Bank filed a petition with Israel’s Supreme Court to block the program. The petition argued that the peace program would actually teach schoolchildren to hate Jewish settlers.

That suspicion was bolstered because Rubinstein, a member of the left-wing Meretz Party in the coalition government, is an ardent supporter of making peace with Israel’s neighbors.

The court threw out the petition and upheld the ministry’s right to teach the subject. “The court examined the material that we had prepared for the schools and praised us for being evenhanded and balanced,” Rubinstein said. “We include the whole spectrum of political opinion in our presentation.”

He was determined to tackle the sensitive issue inside the nation’s classrooms, Rubinstein said, because he believes that “we couldn’t turn a blind eye to what was happening. We don’t want the schools to be excluded from public debate. Controversy is not harmful to our education system.”

But some school administrators acted as if the ministry had tossed a grenade into their laps, Harel observed. “There are schools which prefer to deal with industrialization,” she said dryly. “It is easier.”

Harel said that some religious schools--the state runs both secular and religious schools--have refused to teach the subject. Others teach it but are supplementing government materials with materials written by settlers groups criticizing official peacemaking efforts.

Harel defended the ministry’s cautious approach to the issue, noting that Israel at least is trying to educate its children for the new world that seems to be emerging in the Middle East. “I wonder what the Jordanians and the Palestinians are doing about this issue?” she asked pointedly.

The answer, at the moment, is nothing, Jordanian and Palestinian officials acknowledged.

The Palestinian Authority, which is governing the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, only this fall took over responsibility for education throughout the West Bank. Officials of the authority must deal with myriad problems, ranging from school overcrowding to a shortage of textbooks--and they have little money.

The Palestinians so far have not addressed the problem of how to teach the benefits of making peace to pupils raised on the fiery rhetoric of resistance against the Israelis and the occupation, said Naim abu Hoummus, minister of education.

In Jordan, Minister of Information Jawad Anani said the government has not yet begun to deal with changing the curriculum, which still identifies Israel as the “Zionist Enemy.”

In contrast, in Israel, “most schools are teaching the theme in one way or another,” Harel said. “Many of the religious schools add the subjects of love of the country and the dignity of man, and de-emphasize the political process that is going on.”

At Kol Mevassert, an Orthodox high school for boys outside Jerusalem, Principal Yaacov Kruger is proud of his school’s decision to participate in the discussions of peace.

“On all issues, there is a deep divide here in this country,” Kruger said. “Most of our students come with a very set idea about peace. They have been indoctrinated in their homes and in their youth movements. So we felt here in the yeshiva that it was very important to let students hear all the sides.”

Twenty percent of his students, most of whom live on campus during the week, come from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Kruger said. They feel directly affected by the government negotiations with onetime enemies.

The subject of peace remains so sensitive that it was not left to classroom teachers to deal with, Kruger said. Instead, Amos Kliger, the head of the yeshiva, conducts a freewheeling discussion with students about the peace process once or twice a week.

The Education Ministry has allowed great leeway to schools to teach the topic as they see fit, said Dalia Goren, who has directed the theme projects for four years.

“No doubt about it, this subject is very, very controversial,” Goren said. “The reaction we got from the field initially was, ‘Why don’t you wait until we see if the peace process works?’ We replied that if we don’t deal with it in the school system, the children will be left with what they see on television.”

Goren said the ministry issued three guidelines, which it insisted must be followed:

* Much of the information must be based on actual texts of agreements.

* All opinions across the Israeli political spectrum should be discussed openly in the classroom.

* The principle of observing the rule of law in protest and debate must be kept.

“These issues are so emotional that we don’t really expect objectivity from the teachers or the students,” Goren said. “We are talking about being fair and about making the children aware of the options.”

Programs range from elementary students pasting white paper doves on bulletin boards to Alumim students sponsoring sophisticated debates.

Dan said she is easing her school into the program. Workshops for teachers came first. Then a small program was launched with the 15-year-olds. Only next month will the program be expanded to the whole school.

The daily lives of her 610 pupils, ages 12 to 15, require a go-slow approach, Dan insisted. For many children, the Scud missiles that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein rained down on Tel Aviv and its surrounding suburbs in the 1991 Gulf War were only the most horrible manifestation of Arab hatred for Israel that they had experienced, Dan said.

Born into a nation treated as a pariah by all its neighbors--where one popular folk song is “The Whole World Is Against Us”--the children who are teen-agers now grew up regarding the conflict between Arabs and Israel as inevitable and unending, educators said.

The peace treaty signed with Egypt in 1979 was seen as an anomaly that produced only a “cold peace,” not a reconciliation between peoples or true acceptance of Israel, they added.

But the signing of the accord with the Palestinians--and the signing this year of a treaty with Jordan--set off alarm bells for educators, Dan said.

“We felt that our children will live in a different Israel and that we have to prepare them. But it was difficult, we didn’t know how we were going to do it.”

The ministry’s program, which is being coordinated with the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, provided the framework the school needed, she said.

The Van Leer Institute, a private think tank specializing in political and social issues, devised a program to provide high schools and middle schools with a weekly news service. An institute team combs Hebrew and English-language newspapers, then prepares packets of headlines, stories and political cartoons for hundreds of schools.

The packets are divided into categories: on peace between Israel and the Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, between Israel and Jordan, and between Israel and Egypt, and on current events inside Israel.

Schools receiving the packets form committees of student editors. The young people decide which stories to display on portable bulletin boards designed by the institute.

At some schools, that is as far as it goes. Students are left to gather before the boards and argue among themselves about the contents.

At Alumim, the group that includes Ariel, Inbar, Hadar and a dozen other students supplements the boards with class lectures and debates. “If they hear (about the peace process) from fellow students, it is easier to take,” Hadar said of her classmates.

She said that arguments sometimes erupt over materials posted on the bulletin boards. “But that’s OK,” she said. “Arguments make it more interesting.”

And recently, the children noted, they were able to supplement their debates about peace with a living example of its benefits: A Jordanian student spent a day at their school.

“There was a boy who crossed from Aqaba with his mother on a foreign passport before the peace treaty was signed,” Dan said. “He was interviewed on Israel Television, and they asked him what he would most like to do here. He said that he wanted to meet children his age. So we invited him.”

The Jordanian student visited Alumim on Oct. 20, one day after an Islamic suicide bomber killed 22 people on a Tel Aviv bus. The bombing was so traumatic that psychologists were called in to deal with students’ fears that day.

But the visit went on as planned.

“The children were very excited,” Dan recalled. “They said: ‘It was such an awful day yesterday, but we are ready. We have to do this. We have to start getting to know each other.’ ”

She paused for a moment and shook her head in wonder.

“I was very proud of them,” she said softly.

* JERUSALEM BOMBING: Bus driver refused to pick up terrorist, saving soldiers from suicide blast that injured 13. A18