Friends, Family of Israeli-Arab 'Model Schoolgirls' Baffled by Ramle Stabbing Attack

Two eighth-graders at the Al-Jawarish School in Ramle never made it to class on Thursday morning. It’s a large school, with 680 students from first through eighth grades, and the teachers didn’t hurry to call the girls’ homes or find out where they might be. No one imagined that the two 13-year-olds had allegedly stabbed a security guard, wounding him lightly, at the city’s central bus station.

“We thought it was a regular absence of only a day; pupils do that sometimes, and they are good students,” a school source told Haaretz. “When we saw the reports, we understood where they had been instead of coming to class.”

According to the source, the school staff hadn’t noticed the two Israeli-Arab girls exhibiting any exceptional behavior. “One of them has a 95 average and the second, 80. They never miss school. But because they are good girls, we didn’t think anything special had happened. They came to school every day before today and sat in class. All the teachers are shocked.

“Our school promotes living together,” the source continued. “Every Tuesday, the students learn English together with the Jewish Reut School that’s next to us. The girls always attended the classes with the Jewish pupils and never had a problem with any of them. This past Tuesday, there was also a joint Jewish-Arab class. We are very angry because we are always talking to the pupils about the importance of coexistence and mutual respect, and what they did contravenes every value they learned in school.”

Neighborhood residents had a hard time believing what had happened. Immediately after the incident, the suspects’ parents were taken to the police station for questioning. Members of the Abu Amar family were having a hard time processing the events.

“I don’t know what came over her, we’re scared,” said Mona, the sister of one of the suspects. “She’s a good girl. This doesn’t make sense.”

The girl’s uncle, Ahmed Abu Amar, concurred. “I must say that if this happened in this family, it’s totally unacceptable; we have good neighborly relations with the Jews and we are shocked at what happened today. I can’t imagine any reason for her to do such a thing,” he said.

Ali Abu Amar, the girl’s aunt, speculated that the girls had seen videos encouraging attacks on social media and had been influenced by them. “Lots of young people see these things nowadays,” she said. “We know that they were not given that type of education at home or at school, so maybe the videos put ideas in their head.”

At the end of the street, at a home undergoing renovation, two Jewish men who live in the city are working with laborers from the neighborhood. “We don’t know how to react to what happened today because it doesn’t suit our atmosphere and the way we live,” said one of the workers. “Here we are working together as usual; we’re afraid that this will affect our lives, that people will be more suspicious of us.”