Arab school principals ‘obstructing national service’
Students who volunteer to work in state-backed program face strong opposition, report says
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
Arab high school students who volunteer to serve in the country’s national service program must battle against the objections of their own principals — and those of the Arab community schools they are supposed to serve in.
According to a report in the Hebrew daily Maariv on Sunday, students who attempted to perform volunteer service in schools were instructed to not interact with the children they were supposed to be helping. Teachers were likewise ordered to not involve the volunteers in lessons.
The discouraging attitude comes from school principals and the heads of regional authorities — despite the fact that they themselves are employees of the state, the report said.
Israel’s Arab population is exempt from compulsory national service, but individuals may volunteer to either serve in the army or in a national service program that provides teaching and nursing assistance staff.
Students can sign up for the program during their final year of high school and then begin serving after they leave school. However, regional coordinators among the Israel’s Arab population reported that they have been turned away by many schools after offering to help sign up students for the program.
Fadal Salalha, a coordinator in the Shivyon Hevrati nonprofit organization that aims to assist Arab volunteers for national service, told Maariv that when he approached various schools about the possibility of taking in volunteers to help out in classes, he encountered objections from the school principals.
“Some of them refused to take any volunteers because they object to the idea of national service as a matter of principle,” he said. “Some of them excused themselves by saying that the head of the local authority where the school was located objects to the idea and they didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Aside from the benefit that the volunteers have to offer by assisting in the school, Salaha also pointed out the egregious contradiction inherent in the situation.
“Both the school principals and the heads of the local authorities are civil servants,” he explained. “It would be appropriate that someone in the education or interior ministry give an opinion about the fact that employees of those ministries object to national service in the state from which they get their wages.”
The trend has become such a problem that the chairman of the National Service Administration, Sar-Shalom Jarbi, recently sent a letter to Education Minister Shai Piron asking him to look into the matter and ensure that volunteers are able to function within schools effectively and safely.
The anti-volunteer sentiment was also expressed by MK Jamal Zahalke (Balad) during a conference last month of the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee, a body that coordinates the activities of Arab organizations in Israel.
Young Arab men and women who did national service would be boycotted by the community, he predicted, and would not be able to find marriage partners. Zahalke claimed Israel was encouraging Arabs to serve the state in order to weaken their identity and make them assimilate into broader Israeli culture.
Arab citizens may volunteer to serve in the IDF, a practice that has divided the community. Incitement against Christian Arab volunteers and those who back them has increased in recent months.
Despite the reported reluctance to accept volunteers in schools, the administration said the number of Arab volunteers has doubled in the last two years, with 3,000 currently serving in the program.
