Israelis Fail to Alter Views on Arab Rights

A little over three years ago, the results of an opinion survey taken among Israeli high school students stunned the nation and created what press reports at the time described as panic in the educational system.

Sixty percent of youths in what has long been portrayed as the only democracy in the Middle East said that Israeli Arabs, who make up about 17% of Israel’s population, are not entitled to equal rights with Israeli Jews. Nearly half the youths were ready to diminish the rights that Israeli Arabs already enjoy.

Combined with the election to Parliament at about the same time of Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose anti-Arab platform is openly racist and anti-democratic, the survey spurred Israel’s Ministry of Education into action.

Jewish-Arab Meetings

The ministry sponsored meetings between Jewish and Arab students, who are normally educated in separate schools here. Virtually every gathering of teachers suddenly included a speech or discussion on coexistence. And Education Minister Yitzhak Navon declared that “education for democracy” would be the keynote theme for the next two school years.

Those years are past now, and a repeat survey among a new group of 15- to 18-year-olds has provided a yardstick by which to grade the ministry’s and the nation’s efforts.

According to the new survey, Israeli high schoolers now have a slightly better opinion of democracy in general than they had three years ago. But when it comes to supporting equal rights for Arabs in practice, their attitudes have changed very little.

“All together, the message is that Israel still has a significant, substantial political, civic and educational problem concerning attitudes to Arabs within a democratic context,” said Alouph Hareven of Jerusalem’s Van Leer Foundation, a private research institute that supported both the 1984 and 1987 surveys. Hareven coordinates a program on coexistence, known as “To Live Together,” that the foundation has developed in cooperation with the Ministry of Education.

“The picture is full of lights and shadows,” said Yitzhak Shapiro, Navon’s chief of staff and the man who organized a new unit in the ministry to deal with education for democracy. But Shapiro conceded in an interview that “the main attitudes concerning Arabs are about the same” as they were three years ago.

When the results of the latest poll were made public late last month, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who was prime minister at the time of the first survey, said they were shocking.

More than three out of four students, asked if they preferred the present system or what amounts to a dictatorship of “strong leaders who will not depend on (political) parties,” opted for the existing parliamentary democracy. This was up from two out of three in 1984.

But well over half still said Israeli Arabs are either “not entitled” or “certainly not entitled” to equal rights with Israeli Jews; and depending on the way the question was asked, anywhere from 42% to 58% said that existing Arab rights should be narrowed.

Nearly half the high schoolers said that Israeli Arabs should not have the same freedom of movement as Jews; 53% said their voting rights should be limited; 58% said they should not have the same access to important government jobs, and 52% said their rights to criticize the government should be less than for Jews.

Both Hareven and Shapiro emphasized that there were some encouraging signs in the latest survey.

The proportion of young people who said they would vote for Kahane, for example, dropped from 11% to 6% in the latest poll. And the percentage of those who said they believe that most Israeli Arabs are loyal to the state increased from 13% to about 30%.

Even in these areas, however, there were cautionary notes. While the number who said they would vote for Kahane dropped sharply, the percentage who said they basically agree with his ideas remained at about 30. And a similar percentage said they support the existence of vigilante groups dedicated to avenging Arab attacks on Jews.

The attitudes of Israeli high school students toward Arabs are particularly important because virtually all Jewish boys and about half the girls will be drafted into the army almost immediately on graduation. Many will spend at least part of their army time in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip or West Bank, where the army rules over 1.4 million mostly resentful Palestinians.

To be sure, the problem of anti-democratic and anti-Arab attitudes among Jewish young people is not the problem of the schools alone.

“We cannot restrict our teaching of democracy and coexistence to the classroom,” Navon commented a few days ago. “Young people also learn in the street and from the media, and they hear public figures.”

Navon was particularly critical of “public figures, among them ministers, deputy ministers and the heads of public institutions,” who openly advocate policies to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza and the West Bank for neighboring Arab nations.

He did not name any names, but Yosef Shapira, a minister without portfolio, and Michael Dekel, a deputy defense minister, have recently urged the “transfer” of Arabs out of Israeli-ruled territory.

Nevertheless, the schools are seen as the front line in the battle against racism here. Until 1981, according to the Education Ministry’s Shapiro, who is a former teacher and high school principal, “no one thought that education for democracy and for Jewish-Arab coexistence required any special effort.” He said, “It was thought of as something that would come naturally as part of the educational process.”

What triggered a change of heart, he conceded, was the political rise of Kahane. The right-wing rabbi nearly won a seat in the Knesset, or Parliament, in the 1981 elections, and this, Shapiro said, “caused very deep concern among the general public and especially among educators.”

Zevulun Hammer, who was then the minister of education, started speaking frequently about the need for a new approach, Shapiro said, and “he gave a legitimacy to educators to deal with this field.” The Van Leer Institute was enlisted to create some experimental programs.

Practically, however, the ministry official said, “very little was done” until the double shock of the 1984 election and the first poll of high schoolers.

If nothing else, educators here have learned that reversing the trend in the attitudes of young people is not a one-shot problem.

“You cannot do it by any episodic program,” Hareven said. “A single textbook, or two hours, or a lecture, or a single seminar will not change it.”

Larger Effort Needed

To the Education Ministry, the lesson of the latest poll is not that it has been approaching the job in the wrong way, or that the task is impossible. Rather, it is that it will take a larger effort and more time.

The budget for the “education for democracy” program, which began at 250,000 shekels (about $170,000), has already more than tripled. And it is expected to go up again in the next fiscal year, which starts in April, 1988. This comes at a time when the government budget generally, and particularly the Education Ministry’s share, has been cut sharply under an austerity program.

Navon said that courses in democracy and coexistence will be made compulsory in teacher-training colleges, and funds for meetings between Arab and Jewish students, as well as between religious and non-religious youth, will be increased.

The survey of high-schoolers showed that in some areas their hostility toward Arabs is almost matched by their hostility toward ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are seen as trying to impose their life style on the secular communities around them.

Shapiro said the ministry is forming teams of specialists who will go immediately to schools in any area where there is an outbreak of racial strife or a terrorist incident in hopes of cooling passions and putting developments in proper perspective.

“With the poll or without it, one thing is very clear,” Shapiro said. “Education for democracy and coexistence has to be a permanent component of education in Israel--like Zionism, or the Hebrew language.”