Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘ariel’

A school in Ariel – yes, a “settlement” – has a program to help Arab students get into college in Israel… and amazingly, it gets high praise from everyone except Israel’s left:

The one-year program, which is financed by a new grant from the Council for Higher Education, offers math, English, Hebrew, computer and learning skills classes. Students who do well in the pre-college program according to criteria established by the college will be able to enroll in B.A. programs without taking the psychometric exam that is required of all potential university students in Israel.

Following the government’s decision to initiate a process for granting the College of Judea and Samaria the status of a university earlier this year, the college came under harsh criticism from individuals and groups of left-wing Israeli academics and political activists, who protested against granting university status to an institution they considered to be located on “a settlement in occupied land.”

The students, however, feel differently:

Traveling home on Monday afternoon from the College of Judea and Samaria, nineteen-year-old Majdi Karaki explained why he decided to commute a total of four hours a day, four times a week, from his home in the Ras El-Amud neighborhood of east Jerusalem to Ariel, where he enrolled this week in a special pre-college program for Arab students.

“Sure, some of my friends criticized me for my choice of school,” Karaki told The Jerusalem Post. “They asked me why I was going to study in the same college with Jewish settlers, but I just don’t care about what they say.”

[ . . . ]

Like others among the 300 Arab students currently enrolled in the college itself, however, Karaki said that a good, government-subsidized education, rather than politics, were his personal consideration when he decided to enroll.

“A friend of mine studies here, and I think this is one of the best colleges in Israel,” Karaki said.

“Arab students that come to study here are fulfilling a dream,” said Rifat Sweidan, who received a Masters in social work from Bar-Ilan University and is now the College of Judea and Samaria’s academic advisor for Arab students.

[ . . . ]

Cohen-Orgad also said that the college did not require its Arab students to hold Israeli citizenship. “The college’s charter says that it welcomes anyone whose deed or behavior does not counter the principles of Israel’s declaration of independence,” Cohen-Orgad said.

“The past four years have been very difficult ones,” he added. “But they passed without tensions between Arabs and Jews, and with an Israeli flag in every class and every lab.” Indeed, according to Sweidan, no Arab students have complained “of feeling racism or prejudice.”

Nobody’s arguing that the situation for Israeli Arabs is great. All agree that prejudice – in schools, in the job market – exists. But, in this example at least, it seems that there are people trying to actually do something to improve the situation… and then there are people attacking them for it. And they’re not the people you might expect.