A Glimpse of Hope Behind School Doors

Tami Dumai opened the doors Wednesday of the Arab-Jewish elementary school she runs in northern Israel, unsure that either students or teachers would show up.

It was the first day of classes since riots that began last week in the West Bank and Gaza Strip spread to Arab towns and villages inside Israel. Ten Israeli Arabs had been among the approximately 60 people killed in the riots. Protesters had blocked dozens of roads, vandalized cars and buildings, hurled stones and fired shots at police and civilians.

Across Israel, Jews and Arabs were wondering whether their always difficult relations can survive the violence. Dumai feared that the Arabs and Jews at the 3-year-old school--where Jewish and Arab educators team-teach Jewish and Arab children in Hebrew and Arabic--might abandon their experiment in coexistence.

But 84 students and all six teachers came Wednesday. At a staff meeting, Jewish and Arab teachers wept and “told each other how angry and disappointed and scared they were,” Dumai said in a telephone interview. Then they went to their classrooms and together helped their students cope with the recent events.

It was a rare sign of hope that Arabs and Jews may be able to rebuild relations shattered by the protests and the harsh response to them.

Many Israelis, badly shaken by the violence that struck even mixed Jewish-Arab cities such as Haifa and Jaffa, say they fear that coexistence may be impossible.

“The incidents of the last few days are the most severe ever to have taken place between Arab citizens of Israel and the state of Israel since it was founded,” said Matan Vilnai, Israel’s minister of culture, science and sports. Prime Minister Ehud Barak appointed Vilnai on Tuesday to head an emergency committee on Arab affairs.

‘Punishment’ for Riots Demanded

Ordinary Israelis have flooded the switchboards of radio talk shows, demanding that Arabs be “punished” for the riots. Local Jewish governments in the Galilee, where Jews are a minority and live in small settlements near Arab towns and villages, have called on the government to send more troops and launch a new drive to settle Jews in the area.

“I am living here for 36 years, and we never experienced anything like this,” said Leviah Fisher, spokeswoman for the central Galilee town of Carmiel. “We didn’t expect our neighbors to behave like this.”

Carmiel residents were trapped in their town for several hours Sunday because demonstrators from the neighboring village of Nahef blocked a road with burning tires and threw stones at the cars that passed by.

“Now I am a little bit angry, many people are angry,” Fisher said. She intends to stop shopping at the neighboring Arab villages where for years she has bought fruit and vegetables and eaten hummus in restaurants, Fisher said. “The feeling is that we have to punish them. I feel like I was betrayed.”

Israeli Jews felt their personal security was endangered by the outbreak of violence, said Nachman Shai, a member of Vilnai’s committee. It will take a long time, Shai said, to restore trust between the Jewish majority and the Arabs who make up about 20% of Israel’s population.

“These were not Iraqis or Iranians,” Shai said. “These were ‘our Arabs.’ People are wondering what happened to the relationship we worked very hard to develop for the last 52 years. We’ve seen a lot of demonstrations in Israel--everybody here demonstrates. But none of them included live ammunition fired on our police.”

Barak met for more than three hours Tuesday with Arab members of the Israeli parliament, who told him that the riots in Israel proper were more than just a show of solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The outbreak has ballooned into a protest about the poor economic and social conditions of many Arab Israelis, they told him.

Arabs Suffer Discrimination

Although Arab Israelis are citizens of the state, they have long suffered discrimination, and their communities generally have higher rates of unemployment and poverty than Jewish communities.

Barak promised the Arab lawmakers that police will use live ammunition against demonstrators only if an officer’s life is under immediate threat.

Haifa University professor Arnon Sofer, a demographer, likened the situation to Israel’s independence war of 1948, when Jews and Arabs battled for control of the roads to key areas.

“Woe to us if we do not ensure that all the roads are open, whatever the toll: by means of cannon, by taking thousands of prisoners or even by military rule,” Sofer wrote in the mass circulation Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot.

But Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s internal security and acting foreign minister, whom many Arab Israelis blame for what they see as the excessive use of force by police, said the nation must look beyond the riots and address the underlying problems of its Arab minority.

“I very much hope from this trauma we will move on to better integration and better understanding,” Ben-Ami told reporters Wednesday. “We have touched--both us and them--the most sensitive, raw nerve of chances for living together, chances of coexistence.”

At home in the Jewish town of Yuvalim in the central Galilee, Dumai, the principal of the Arab-Jewish elementary school, mused about how difficult it will be for Arabs and Jews to build new relationships.

“In the Jewish community,” she said, “there is a feeling of fear. There is a feeling that something has gone very wrong. Nobody understands what has happened,” she said, because few Jews know anything about the lives of their Arab neighbors.

“The Arabs have problems that the Jews have chosen until now not to go into,” she said. “We go into Arab villages to buy things, to go to restaurants. Maybe after all the emotions are less extreme on both sides, we should really start talking.”