Arabs in segregated vs. mixed Jewish–Arab schools in Israel: their identities and attitudes towards Jews

ABSTRACT

In Israel, the majority of Jewish and Arab students attend ethnically-segregated schools. However, a new phenomenon has emerged in recent decades: ethnically mixed schools – either because they are intentionally designed to be bilingual and multicultural, or the circumstantial outcome of a demographic mix. The research compares the self-identifications of Arab students attending segregated schools and mixed schools of various kinds, and examines their attitudes toward Jews. The findings suggest that students attending mixed schools tend to define themselves in national terms, as social identity theory predicts. In addition, while Arab students attending circumstantially-mixed Hebrew schools tend to define themselves as Israelis, those attending multicultural and segregated schools tend to define themselves as Palestinians. The “Arab” self-definition is common to all research participants. Additionally, Arab students who identify as Israelis tend to have more positive attitudes toward Jews, but no significant correlation between Palestinian self-identification and negative attitudes toward Jews was found.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• multiculturalism
• ethnic relations
• schools
• social distance
• social identity

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Prof. Yossi Shavit, Prof. Anastasia Gorodzeisky, and Dr. Nir Barak for their helpful comments and support. I also wish to thank the reviewers for the helpful comments that improved the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The main research question of the study concerns the social identification of the Arab minority in Israel. Any term I use to describe this group as a researcher carries a political meaning and agenda that are inevitable (Rabinowitz 1993). Nevertheless, as the research will show, ‘Arab’ is the most common identification / component of identity, among most of the members of this group, therefore I use this term throughout the paper.

2 The Israeli school system consists of four tracks – Hebrew state schools, Jewish religious state schools Haredi schools (all three attended by Jews) and Arab state schools.

3 The term “mixed cities” is used here to indicate cities in Israel with a significant proportion of Arab residents in their population. Arab-Jewish cities in Israel are Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla and Jerusalem (Falah, Hoy, and Sarker 2000).

4 http://www.handinhand.org.il.

5 The 2000 intifada/second intifada describes a period of intensified Israeli-Palestinian violence – began in September 2000, and lasted for years. During the first month, many support demonstrations were held among Arab Israelis, in which thirteen Arab citizens were killed by the police forces.

6 I also collected data in 3 all-Jewish schools but, since this paper concerns Arab students, the data for Jews are not included in the analyses.

7 Students were asked whether each of their parents had attended university/college, allowing them to answer yes, no, or I do not know. A high rate replied that they did not know (25.4% on mother’s education, 29.7% on father’s education), which is common (Engzell and Jonsson 2015), as young children do not always know their parents’ level of education. Parents’ education is represented by a dummy variable indicating that at least one parent completed higher education. The complement represents “no parent did complete higher education”, as well as the “don’t know” responses. We also created a dummy variable representing the “don’t know” responses but found that its statistical effects do not differ significantly from those of “no higher education”. We concluded that responses of “don’t know” are more likely among respondents whose parents did not attend higher education.

8 In addition, a dummy variable indicating whether the respondent lives in mixed city was measured but had insignificant effect on the analysis therefore was omitted.

9 In order to measure standard of living, respondents were asked the following eight questions: Does a cleaning person worked in their home; Had they travelled abroad in the last two years; Whether their family had a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher, a dryer, air conditioning, and a tablet or PC. Responses were coded as 1 representing yes, and 0 representing no. Then I created an index that summarized the 1’s weighted by their relative scarcity in the sample and calculated for each respondent its average. That is, in the scarcity index of standard of living, each item was given a weight calculated as 1-p, where p is the proportion of households in the research sample who possess the item (Semyonov and Gorodzeisky 2004; Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein 2001).