Life for Palestinian Students in Israel

Saree Makdisi writes about life for Palestinian students in Israel:

Even in Israel itself, Palestinian students-citizens of the state-face great difficulties, when compared with their Jewish peers.  The state provides 1,600 subsidized day-care centers, for example, but only 25 of those are in Palestinian towns.  Only 4,200 of the 80,000 Israeli children aged zero to three who attend day care are Palestinian, though had that number been in proportion to the actual population, it would have been closer to 20,000.  Israel invests more than three times as much in a Jewish student than it does in a non-Jewish one.  The state’s list of the 553 towns and villages granted top priority for education exclude all Palestinian towns inside Israel other than four villages.  There are 25 special art schools for Jewish children, and none for Palestinians.  And at the higher levels of its school system, Israel opens far more curricular tracks to Jewish students than to Palestinian ones.  As a result of all these forms of discrimination-and despite the fact that Palestinians traditionally place great emphasis on their children’s education, a fact attested to by the disproportionately large numbers of Palestinians among the Arab inteligentsia-a far greater proportion of Jewish students make it through high school, get accepted to university, and graduate.  Only 10 percent of Israel’s university students are Palestinian, for example, though proportionately speaking it ought to be double that number.  Only 3 percent of its Ph.D. students are Palestinian.  Only 1 percent of its university lectures are Palestinian. (Makdisi, 206)

Source

Makdisi, Saree.  Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.  New York: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 2008.