Against integration

It transpires that the Ministry of Education knows how to demonstrate diligence and efficiency when it so desires. For example, the head of the ministry's Northern District, who expressed firm opposition to opening a school for the sciences in Dabburiya with the explanation that "establishing it will harm the existing school."

The explanation in itself, like the other explanations in response to the lawsuit filed by Dr. Elias Chacour, the archbishop of the Melkite Greek Catholic community in Israel, and Aas Atrash, the principal of the school for sciences and the association for the promotion of education and culture in Dabburiya, is reasonable. A private school really is liable to weaken the public school.

But these reasons were not given in a vacuum. In light of the Nahari Law, which requires local authorities to budget independent schools; with ultra-Orthodox education doing as it pleases without proper supervision and without meeting the demand for a core curriculum; and with prestigious schools for the sciences, arts, anthroposophy, democracy and whatnot cropping up in well-established Jewish communities - these reasons are hollow and hypocritical.

Ester Hellman-Nussbo, the Nazareth District Court judge who early in September dealt with the school's request to order the Education Ministry via an interim injunction to transfer the discontinued budgets, and decided to turn down the request, relied on previous decisions regarding the network of Chabad kindergartens and Noar Kehalakha - which ruled that private schools should not receive an additional budget. But because the budgeting of private schools is by law in the hands of the education minister, in practice the minister actually budgets most of them. At most, as in the case of the schools in Petah Tikva that excluded the Ethiopian children, the minister threatened to discontinue the budgeting. He threatened, but failed to carry out his threat.

Amazingly, in Dabburiya the ministry cut the budget immediately, both because it was afraid of redundancy with an identical school in nearby A'ablin, and because it felt like doing so. The Arab public justly concludes that the establishment demonstrates a strong arm toward the weak. But the case of Dabburiya is evidence of a far more serious phenomenon: the double talk of the Israeli establishment and society when it comes to Arab citizens.

In recent years two ostensibly contradictory tendencies have been developing among the Arab public, which in fact coexists peacefully: On the one hand, nationalist-isolationist politics and the demand for autonomy based on the rights of a nation in its homeland are becoming stronger. On the other hand, a large group is bypassing the failure of long-term government neglect in the area of education, and through private means (the churches, the Islamic Movement and various non-profit organizations) is providing its children with high-quality education, mainly in technology and the exact sciences.

The State of Israel should be rejoicing. Without investing a penny it is getting citizens who can contribute far more to society than others in whom it invests billions. But although the government calls on the Arabs to integrate and become part of the country, the outstanding students who study pharmacology and medicine become integrated because we need them desperately, whereas the others - the high-tech workers, engineers, et al - knock on doors and are rejected for false security-related reasons. No more than 3 percent of them succeed in penetrating the public networks, and even fewer the private ones. Integration, which is likely to improve their economic situation and moderate extremism, is being prevented in all fields.

And when the establishment behaves in such a way, is it any wonder that society feels free to keep the Arabs out? In Upper Nazareth, for example, groups of national religious Jews are organizing, with the encouragement of Mayor Shimon Gapso (the representative of Yisrael Beiteinu who returned to the Likud because his party did not support the construction of an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood as a "barrier" between Upper Nazareth and Kafr Kana) and with the help of government ministers and yeshiva heads, to engage in vigorous activity against the sale of homes to Arabs. Those coming to the neighborhoods of private homes in the city are a strong Arab populace of doctors, lawyers and other academics, which could contribute a great deal to the quality of life in the city, but Gapso and the activists are spreading hysterical warnings against the "takeover by hostile factors."

The ethnic-purification reaction to the purchase of homes by Arabs in Upper Nazareth and other non-mixed cities - a purchase that clearly stems from civic and economic reasons - is the real answer of Israeli society and the Israeli establishment to the integration of Arabs. Instead of understanding the change in the Arab minority and turning it into an advantage, Israel once again prefers to turn it into a destructive double-edged sword.