It’s a Sunday morning at Beersheba’s Hagar School, and the second-grade children
are actively engaged in a math lesson. They sit around small clusters of tables
and work in pairs or seek out the help of the teacher for the task at
hand.
While the class of around 25 pupils looks pretty much like any
other of its kind countrywide, what sets this group of children apart and makes
this school unique, especially in the South, is that half of the children are
Arab residents of Beersheba and half are Jews, even though it’s almost
impossible to tell who is who.
“We are not two communities, we are one
community, and it’s called Hagar,” states Hagit Damri, executive director of the
Arabic-Hebrew bilingual school, which started as a kindergarten in 2007 and
opened its doors as an elementary school at the end of 2009.
The school,
which currently extends through third grade only but will eventually expand to
highschool level, has some 140 children enrolled in its framework, including a
pre-school for children as young as one.
“The school is a part of the
Hagar community, and most of the children who learn here have parents who are
involved in our community, too,” explains Damri, who was among the institution’s
founding parents. The school was set up by a nonprofit organization of the same
name, made up of Jewish and Arab parents, teachers, community organizers and
other concerned residents of Beersheba who hope to create successful relations
and equal opportunities for Arabs and Jews in the Negev
region.
Accredited by the Education Ministry, the school relies heavily
on the parents’ participation and on donations from outside to fund many of its
extracurricular activities.
“We have many people in the area involved in
this community. Not all are parents – some are students – and we try to get
together once a month for activities and picnics, we celebrate the holidays
together, and it’s a very strong community,” says Damri.
Despite its
distinct ideology and commitment to coexistence, Damri and her staff are not
blind to the challenges of making a school of this kind work against the
backdrop of ongoing rocket attacks in the region, suicide bombings throughout
the country, threats of war and growing racism from both sides.
“We do
not live in a bubble,” acknowledges Damri, who says she is familiar with a
recent Macro Center for Political Economics poll on Israeli youth showing that
interaction and trust between Arabs and Jews are at an all-time low. “We live in
Israel, and there will always be different things happening that will create
difficulties, but that is why it is so important for us to continue to create
this space so that there can be dialogue – dialogue between parents and the
teachers.”
She adds, “With the children, it is a little
different. They are still young, and we want to protect them and teach
them how to be empathetic to each other’s suffering, even if it is something
that did not happen to themselves or their family. At Hagar, we teach them to
respect others without losing their own story and identity.”
AS THIS
story goes to print, the situation in cities and towns, including Beersheba,
around the Hamascontrolled Gaza Strip continues to escalate. Over this past
weekend, more than 120 rockets fired from Gaza rained down on the South, with a
handful hitting Beersheba. This action follows similar rocket attacks two weeks
ago – in which one fell directly in a neighborhood not far from Hagar’s
kindergarten – and ongoing actions that send residents fleeing into bomb
shelters and sealed rooms.
On Sunday, both the kindergarten and the
elementary school – which are located on two different sites – were open for
classes. Unlike solely Jewish schools, which are now closed for the Pessah
holiday, Hagar has a slightly different school vacation calendar to accommodate
Muslim and Christian festivals as well.
“We are open today because
according to guidelines from the municipality and the [IDF] Home Front Command,
schools with shelters or protected areas can carry on as usual,” explains Damri.
“At the moment, it is not like Operation Cast Lead, where the school was closed
for a month.”
During the last Gaza conflict in 2008-2009, tensions within
the Hagar community grew to an all-time high as the children and parents were
forced to stay home and could not get their frustrations out in the dialogue of
which the school is so proud, according to a report the school filed to one of
its US funders.
“In the months following Israel’s war with Gaza, the Arab
and Jewish communities of the Negev have faced an escalation in violence and
hatred, which threatened the delicate balance and achievements of those who wish
to see a future of peace in Israel,” asserts the school, which was seeking
additional funding to conduct workshops to help parents and staff come to terms
with what had happened in Gaza.
The report continues: “In order to cope
with the latest outbreak of violence, we must continue to promote coexistence by
strengthening Hagar’s initiative. These are tense moments for the Hagar
community, but we are confident that we will be able not only to deal with the
tension but also eventually overcome it by educating a new generation of Jews
and Arabs – a generation for whom violence is simply not an option.”
Two
years on, this is exactly what the school and its community have done, says
Lauren Joseph, Hagar’s director of development.
“We were a different
community back then; we were still new in terms of our members, and it is
important to remember that most of the parents did not grow up in this
coexistence environment,” she explains, adding that today, thanks to workshops
and other interactions, the parents have learned how to hold back and not blame
each other for what is happening around them.
“They realize that in order
for their children to grow up and have success in a framework such as Hagar they
need to behave differently,” says Joseph. “Our community is in a completely
different place now, and we are much stronger than we were back
then.”
Damri says that the testament to this was the parents’ reaction
two weeks ago, when all of Beersheba’s schools were closed and families across
the city were forced to head for shelters at 5 a.m. after rockets fell in a
residential neighborhood.
“Parents were sending each other texts and
e-mails to check up on each other without our encouragement,” she describes.
“One mother, an Arab woman, sent an e-mail urging her Jewish friends to talk
about their feelings, and she created a dialogue for everyone who was stuck at
home in shelters with their children.”
“What you must understand is that
we are now part of a community,” says Damri. “I have both Jewish friends and
Arab friends, and when a rocket falls, I have no idea who out of them might be
hurt – a rocket does not decide who it falls on – and then I have to send out
messages to all my friends to make sure they are okay.”
KEEPING THE
adults focused on Hagar’s goals might be the key to the school’s and the NGO’s
success, but what about dealing with the fears and anxieties of Arab and Israeli
children who have just spent the night in a bomb shelter or sealed room?
“When
they came back to school, we got the children to talk about how they were
feeling,” says Hagar’s Jewish first-grade teacher Ma’ayan Elimelech. “We
did not try to hide any of the facts, and we explained to them that there are
always bad people on both sides and that bad people are bad
people.”
Amarat Zbedat, the school’s Arab first-grade teacher, adds that
“all the children were scared, but we told them that we were a good example of
how people who are different can be friends.”
Damri says that her own
child, who is in first grade, asked what was happening and understands that
there is a conflict.
“However, we have taught him that a conflict is
about exchanging views,” she says. “He knows how important it is to hear what
the other side has to say, and that the solution should be found with words and
not with war.”
She continues: “We have 95 families in the school and 96
opinions; not all Jews agree with each other, and not all Arabs agree with each
other. There are arguments here all the time, but as a community we have learned
not to ignite the situation, and as parents we all realize that the our main
goal is education and not politics.”
According to Damri, “all the
parents, Jewish or Arab, want a school that will provide a good education for
our children and we are trying to do this together, so overall it is not very
complicated for us.”
She adds, “The conflict around us and the violence
only strengthen why this school is so important. A child who is brought up in
Hagar is not just a slogan of coexistence, it is real friendship, and I hope
that we are giving the children the tools they need to deal with all people who
are different and hold different beliefs from them. Our generation failed to
find a solution because we did not have the chance, like these children, to meet
each other, but maybe their generation will succeed.”