Bilingual Schools in Israel

Bilingual integrated Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel are a bold and innovative initiative by a relatively small group of people who seek to make a difference in the education of children living in an area characterized by an intractable conflict.

The first bilingual school was created in 1984 at the Neve Shalom Village outside Jerusalem, the only integrated Palestinian-Jewish village in Israel to date. The Center for Arab-Jewish Education in Israel, a nongovernmental organization, was established in 1997 to create a fully egalitarian, bilingual educational environment. Its main aim was described as raising youth who acknowledge and respect one another while at the same time retaining loyalty to their own ethnic/cultural heritages and identities. The center has opened four schools in Jerusalem, the Upper Galilee, Kfar Karah (the only school to be established in a Palestinian village), and Beer Sheva.

In accordance with worldwide trends, the bilingual integrated Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel seek to implement a totally inclusive dual-language program. Dual-language programs integrate students from two language backgrounds for content area instruction in both languages. The goals of this model include high academic achievement in two languages, development of bilingualism and bilingual literacy, high levels of self-efficacy, and positive attitudes across cultures. The five bilingual integrated schools serve a population of more than 1,000 students.

The schools are recognized as nonreligious and are supported by the Israeli Ministry of Education. For the most part, they use the standard curriculum of the state nonreligious school system, the main difference being that both Hebrew and Arabic are used as languages of instruction. These schools confront what Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy have characterized as a Type 1 monolingual society: one in which a sole language (Hebrew) is recognized and associated with the national identity while another language (Arabic), though officially recognized as a second language for education and public use, has been marginalized.

The limited research conducted around the integrated bilingual schools has regularly pointed at the challenges involved in educating children together while actively trying to sustain their separate group identities.

The first qualitative study done on these schools was conducted by Grace Feuerverger; the data show the schools potentially opening a space for reshaping pedagogical processes and making it possible for the participants at the schools to become “border crossers” and thus challenge the limitations created by hegemonic domination. Ruth Gavison examined the schools' approach toward Jewish and Palestinian historical narratives and shed light on the multiple obstacles they confront in their attempts to create a sense of common citizenship. Jane Glazier looked at how children in one of these schools developed what she calls “cultural fluency,” or the ability to step back and forth between cultures. Glazier uncovered the practices [Page 224]teachers implemented to promote cross-cultural interaction and learning. Zvi Bekerman has conducted the most comprehensive research on Jewish-Palestinian bilingual education. He has examined the connection between power relations in Israeli society and the difficulties of creating a truly bilingual educational program for Jews and Arabs in Israel. He demonstrates how the different social realities of Jews and Palestinians influence the families' motivation to send their children to the Jewish-Palestinian schools and how the different status of Hebrew and Arabic in Israeli society influences each group's motivation to acquire the language of the other. He finds that the practical importance of Hebrew language acquisition is clear to Arab children and to their families. Jewish parents generally hope that their children will learn Arabic, but there is no apparent price that the children will pay if they fail to acquire the language.

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