St. Louis Jewish Light · 13 November 2002
CP-2002-127
Israeli school breaks stereotypes
JESSICA STEINBERG
Transcribed from the clipping
JERUSALEM (JTA) – A 6-year-old student runs into Ala Hatib's office at the Jerusalem Bilingual School to tell the principal that he hurt his back, with half the sentence in Hebrew, half in Arabic. Hatib chuckles at the bilingual jumble. “I see it every day, every minute, every hour,” says Hatib, who joined the school as co-principal this summer.
But what still surprises him is how quickly he has become attached to the school and its ideals. After a Jew and an Arab founded the nonprofit organization in 1997, the organization established its first school in the Galilee in 1998 and the Jerusalem school a year later.
Bilingual skills form a major component of the school curriculum – all subjects are taught in both Arabic and Hebrew by Arab and Jewish co-teachers – but what most attracts parents is the educational opportunities of a multicultural school in a city that is holy to several religions.
“We want our son to grow up without stigmas, without stereotypes,” said Rema Jebara, a Muslim whoseson is in the second grade. “For us, it was important for him to go to a liberal school where he can say what he wants to say and accept others who are different from him. I want the school to help sculpt his personality.”
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.
Context added by this archive
JTA wire feature. The article's own sharpest line is further down the page and is not in the excerpt: 'Israeli flags fly outside the school... However, as an Israeli school supervised by the Education Ministry, Palestinian flags are not allowed.' Two ordinary people named, one of them a Palestinian parent speaking for herself.
Cite this clipping
"Israeli school breaks stereotypes," St. Louis Jewish Light, 13 November 2002. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2002-127. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2002-127
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2002-127.
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