Israel's Schools For Arabs

By CONSTANTINE POULOS

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Transcribed from the clipping

Jaffa, Israel (ONA) — In a crowded classroom in this city's Ajami quarter, Mrs. Eliza Malul, a Palestinian Jew born in Tiberias, was teaching Hebrew to a class of Arab children.

It is one of the little ironies of the new state of Israel that Arab children are today being taught Hebrew by Jewish teachers in schools which the Israeli Ministry of Education has re-opened in the Arab quarters of Jaffa, Haifa and Acre.

The schools are a part of the Israeli government's program for the Arab minority which remained within the borders of Israel after the fighting ended. According to figures given by the Ministry of Education, there are about 2,500 Arab children attending school in Jaffa, Haifa and Acre.

In Jaffa, where the Arab population before the war was more than 70,000, there are now some 3,000 Arabs. In Haifa, 150 out of 330 Arab students are of pre-elementary age; and in Acre, where it is 150 out of 300. Most of the teachers are Arabs, but in some schools the staffs are mixed, with Arabs and Isarelis teaching side by side.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping. Legibility fair; any passage that could not be read is omitted rather than reconstructed.

Context added by this archive

Wire feature (ONA) under a named correspondent. People of Palestine are called 'Arabs', 'Arab children', 'the Arab minority', 'the Arab population'; 'Palestinian' appears only as an adjective for a Jewish teacher ('a Palestinian Jew born in Tiberias'), which is itself worth noting for the vocabulary record. One ordinary person named: Mrs. Eliza Malul.

Cite this clipping

"Israel's Schools For Arabs," The Gazette and Daily, 28 June 1949. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1949-036. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1949-036