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ABSTRACT
Israeli teachers who teach Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seeking children find themselves struggling to accommodate these children against the background of a polarized environment. The strategies teachers employ to cope with this tension are shaped by the broader socio-political context and the hostilities directed toward African asylum seekers in Israel. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 22 teachers in different schools in Israel, we observed that in the absence of any official educational policy for the integration, teachers employ strategies of avoidance and de-politicization of asylum seeking. We argue that when it comes to the controversies around asylum seekers, Israeli teachers adopt strategies that are similar to the ways they have coped with the long-term Israel-Palestinian conflict. Based on this observation, the paper suggests the local socio-political context is crucial in understanding teachers’ attitudes, practices and responses towards asylum-seekers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Eritreans and Sudanese arrive to Israel to seek asylum. They are mostly not recognized by the state as refugees or asylum-seekers and dealt with under the ‘infiltrators’ law (Kritzman-Amir Citation2013). We choose in this paper to refer to them as asylum seekers, denoting their status according to the UNHCR.
2. See for example: Cohen (Citation2017), (Cohen Citation2018), Hanna (Citation2017), Levy (Citation2014), Muff and Bekerman (Citation2017), Reingold, Baratz, and Abu Chazera (Citation2013), Yogev and Michaeli (Citation2010).
3. For a more detailed discussion please see: Author2 et al, (Citation2010), McBrien (Citation2005), Szilassy and Arendas (Citation2007), Watters and LeBlanc (Citation2005).
4. Israeli society commonly refers to the Israeli-Palestine conflict as ‘the conflict’.
5. The numbers have decreased almost by half as a result of successful anti-migration policy including detentions, deportation and measurements for encouraging ‘voluntary return’. Today there are less than 36,000 asylum seekers still in Israel (Schejter and Tirosh Citation2017).
6. Municipalities have occasionally refused to enroll ASC into local schools, as seen in Kiryat Malahi in 2015, or have isolated them from native Israeli children by sending them to schools with unqualified staff outside their jurisdiction, as in the case of Eilat in 2011. Segregation between ASC and Israelis is also a common practice in pre-school pre-compulsory education in Jerusalem and other areas.