Visionary educator Dalia Fadila, Presidential Medal of Honor winner, drowns at 51

Dr. Dalia Fadila, a groundbreaking educator in the Arab community who received the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor last year, died from drowning at a Herzliya beach on Friday.

Fadila was unconscious when she was pulled from the water. Passersby, including a nurse, performed resuscitation efforts until paramedics arrived. However, she was declared dead at the scene.

According to the Ynet news site, the 51-year-old was at the beach with her husband, but she was swept away. The report said her husband only discovered what had happened when he noticed the ambulance on the beach.

Born in Tira, Fadila built educational networks and initiatives “in places where others had already given up,” President Isaac Herzog said at the award ceremony in December 2022.

She was the CEO of the Atidna movement, which Herzog described as “[promoting] a vision of a common society, respect and mutual guarantee between Jews and Arabs to build the future generation of the State of Israel.”

In 2016, she told The Times of Israel of her vision for the future.

“Fully educated kids, with something to lose, will be more positive towards themselves and the state. They will also have the skills to work better for their rights and to compete for jobs. That’s a much softer revolution than an intifada,” she said, “and in the long run, more sustainable.”

Educator Dr. Dalia Fadila, photographed in Tira. (Courtesy)

Fadila was the founder of the Q Schools educational network, which taught English to Arab schoolchildren in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan.

“From this vision, I took on many challenges and started the English studies, and at first everyone laughed,” she told the Calcalist financial newspaper in an interview cited by Ynet. “But I thought about how these children could grow into leaders.”

Last year, she was honored by Herzog for her work as a “groundbreaking educator and visionary, for her work to advance Arab society and build bridges between Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel.

“Her persistent efforts to develop and make high-quality education for Arab-Israeli society, anchored in its own proud identity; and the wealth of opportunities she has opened up for women and young people, who, thanks to her, see themselves as active partners in shaping their own fate,” the citation read.

At the Jerusalem ceremony, a former student described how thanks to Fadila, he had participated in a march at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and that her organization had shown him that “we Arabs of Israel — Muslims, Christians and Druze — have a place and a partnership” in Israel.

In 2016, she told The Times of Israel that despite growing up in a progressive household, she suffered within the confines of the wider conservative and religious community.

“For many years I felt suffocated,” she said. “I thought I should have some freedom — freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of development. Some choice of becoming and being able to dream of becoming someone I wanted to be.”

Out of the sense of repression, she says, her feminism was born.

“To become a feminist, first you have a dream,” she said. “Then there is an obstacle in front of that dream.”

Read more: Maverick educator seeks to change Israeli Arab world from within

Fadila told Calcalist in 2018 of the many battles she had faced along the way.

“I started as a teacher at Tira High School and thought that I was changing the next generation of Arab society in the State of Israel. I was wrong. I was fired, I fought and came back but then I moved on,” she said.

“Even in my undergraduate studies I wanted to change, I thought it was wrong that the men sat in the front and the girls in the back. Here too I fought for years, but I was defeated,” she said.

“But after many years I became the academic director of the Al-Qassimi College of Engineering and Science,” Fadila said.

“I was given a gift — a college that was collapsing and about to close, a college of engineers,” she said. “And I decided to take the risk and it was the best risk in my career at that time. This college became a school for engineers in civil engineering, complementary medicine, dental technicians and more and more.”