Struggling to learn

Father wants his sons to get an education so they can do better than he, but their only option could be lessons in a goat shed

Mohammad, left, Ahmad, centre, and Mahmoud Daegala may not have a school to attend when classes begin this autumn.

JERUSALEM // Last year, Farid Daagala's three sons habitually ran away from school. The eldest, Mohammed, 12, hated the UN-run boys' school in the overcrowded and impoverished Shuafat refugee camp, complaining about violence among children and even against teachers.

So Mr Daagala, whose family lives in the Ras Hamis neighbourhood adjacent to the camp, has sought an alternative. But less than two weeks before the school year starts, he is worried his sons may end up on the streets instead of in classes. He has no money for a private school because he barely makes a living from collecting and selling discarded metal products. Also, seeking their education just east in the West Bank is out of the question because he fears it may provide Israel with an excuse to confiscate his family's Jerusalem identification cards and deprive them of social benefits.

He is pinning his hopes on enrolling the three in a free Jerusalem public school, which they are entitled to attend under Israeli law. But he has yet to have heard back from the municipality, and it is likely he never will. His sons may join the thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem whose school applications are rejected by Jerusalem. That prospect heightens the father's concern. "I want my sons to study and have a better life than mine has been," said Mr Daagala, 40, who left school at 16. "I don't want them to come to me afterwards accusing me of not having pushed them to learn."

Mr Daagala is hardly alone in his predicament. The public schools in East Jerusalem barely have enough room for about half of the 79,000 Palestinian school-age children in the area. Numerous other families - many of whom live in poverty - are forced to shell out hundreds of dollars every year to send their children to schools that are either partly publicly funded or private, or to those run by the United Nations, Islamic authorities or churches.

More than 9,000 school-age youngsters are not enrolled anywhere, many accounting for an estimated dropout rate of 50 per cent in East Jerusalem. Many public schools are in appalling conditions. In a bid to improve the acute shortage, the municipality converts houses into schools. In one such school in Beit Hanina, a neighbourhood in the northeast of Jerusalem, activists said pupils in a special-education class sit on a wooden plank placed over the length of a bath.

Classes are crowded, and children often sit three to a desk and climb over or crawl under the desks if they need to leave the classrooms because there are few aisles. Air-conditioning or heating is scarce. Some schools employ a "second shift", in which children begin learning at noon after those who arrived in the morning have left. In Ras Hamis, a neighbourhood of about 14,000 inhabitants that include Mr Daagala's family, parents have protested against the municipality's move to turn what they say is a former goat shed into a primary school for 800 children.

Jerusalem has postponed the opening, a step also prompted by parents' claims that the school is unsafe because it is located on a traffic-jammed road with no pavement, is adjacent to a metal factory that emits toxic chemicals and is across from a popular hangout for drug dealers. East Jerusalem is also one of Israel's poorest areas, with two-thirds of its Arab families living below the poverty line, compared with about one-fifth of the city's Jewish population.

Activists said the dire conditions of East Jerusalem schools are part of an overall discrimination and neglect of the sector by Israeli authorities. "It's part of Israel's policy not to invest in this area because the residents are Palestinians," said Tali Nir, a lawyer for the Jerusalem-based Association for Civil Rights in Israel. "Until the situation will get to catastrophic levels, no one will act to improve it."

Activists claim the discrimination is part of Israel's goal to push the Palestinians out to keep the city's Jewish majority and fend off their demand to regain East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Some 257,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, accounting for one-third of the population. Along with high birth rates, their numbers have also swollen as many Jerusalem Arabs living outside have moved back, concerned that Israel will revoke their Jerusalem residencies as it completes building a barrier separating itself from the West Bank.

Rights groups said Israel is increasingly confiscating the Jerusalem ID cards of Palestinians who move elsewhere and cannot prove their "centre of life" is in the city. This population jump has exacerbated the shortage of classrooms. Children now make up about half of the residents in the city's Arab sector, where the median age is 19. Activists, joined by some Arab and Jewish parliament members, have accused city and government officials of violating Israeli law and international treaties by depriving thousands of a free education.

The civil rights association recently petitioned Israel's supreme court to demand reimbursement for families paying tuition to enrol children in partly or wholly private schools. A municipality spokesman blamed the education system's flaws on inadequate available land on which to build schools and on insufficient government funds. The bureaucracy involved in expropriating land in crowded East Jerusalem, officials have said, is postponing plans to add 400 classrooms by 2012.

Arab Jerusalem's absent political clout has also undermined its school system. "East Jerusalem has no Arab representatives in the city," said Pepe Alalu, a liberal Jewish member of Jerusalem's city council who has tried to promote Palestinian residents' rights. "It's a matter of priorities. The Jerusalem municipality staff is Jewish and therefore prefers to solve the problems of Jews first." Abdul-Karim Lafi, who heads the union of parents' associations in East Jerusalem, said Jerusalem would be hurt by the Arab sector's school faults, which are contributing to increased unemployment, crime and drug-use rates.

He recalled a point he made during a meeting with Israeli parliamentary members two years ago. "I told them that in Israel, we hear talk about getting a computer for every pupil," he said. "Here we are asking for a chair for every pupil, not more than that." @Email:[e-mail]