Gideon Levy :This Pastoral Palestinian Community Built a School of Its Own. Now Israel Wants to Demolish It
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t’s exactly 12 noon. A little boy bursts out of the teachers’ room holding a heavy iron bell and rings it. The chime of redemption? Not quite. Immediately afterward the doors of the five classrooms open and dozens of boys and girls spill out of them. Schoolbags on their backs, most of them wearing corona masks, they walk in a line down the slope of the verdant valley to their homes – in tents. One “privileged” boy has a ride waiting for him: a mule that’s tied up nearby. He’s from one of the neighboring pastoral communities.
Since the start of the school year in September, the lives of these Palestinian children from the village of Ras a-Tin, east of Ramallah in the West Bank, have been transformed beyond recognition. Until then they had to walk more than seven kilometers each morning to school in the closest village, Mughayir, and then take the same route home – about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) back and forth in the heat and the cold, in the wind and the rain, and sometimes also in the face of settlers’ attacks along the way. So in late August the community decided to act: It would build its own school.
With the aid of the Palestinian Education Ministry and GVC, an Italian-based European Commission aid organization, the miracle occurred. Residents built a simple brick structure of six rooms – five classrooms and a teachers’ room – covered with a tin roof, situated on a gravel mound. This was the primary school of the village of Ras a-Tin.
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The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.
The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.Credit: Alex Levac
It’s a very touching sight. The simplicity of the white building; the small, Spartan classrooms that contain only a few children’s work tables, chairs and a whiteboard; the sparkling eyes of the teachers, the enthusiasm of the pupils; the principal who came here after administering a similar institution in another shepherds’ community. Previously most of the children were frequently absent from school, or dropped out altogether, because of the ordeal of the daily trek, but now the attendance rate is high.
This week pupils in the new school learned about equations with an unknown variable.
The real unknown, however, is whether and when the dream will be shattered and the school demolished. The fear is that this heartwarming vision will be a short-lived one, because the occupation authorities won’t let it last. Israel’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, has already issued the demolition orders; the bulldozers are on the way.
First, personnel of the Civil Administration tried to prevent the building’s construction, then they began to confiscate equipment and furniture. Now they are preventing the town from hooking up the teachers’ bathroom to some sort of plumbing infrastructure, in a locale that’s not even connected to the main water or power grids. Inspectors from the Civil Administration show up regularly to make sure no one has connected the plumbing in the meantime so as to make it possible to flush the toilets in the teachers’ bathroom. That’s how far this evil has gone.
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A classroom in Ras A-Tin.
A classroom in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac
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An expert opinion written on behalf of the Israeli human rights NGO Bimkon – Planners for Planning Rights by architect Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, which was submitted to the court last month states that the school has tremendous importance vis-a-vis the lives of these pupils.
“For some of them, it is their only possibility to participate in the education system, as it is close to their home,” he wrote. “The school makes it possible for all the children in the community to exercise their basic right – the right to education: for those who never attended school, for those who have dropped out, and also for those who previously had to make their way to a distant school across difficult terrain and who were frequently absent. Demolition of the school will deprive these children” of this opportunity.
According to Cohen-Lifshitz’s document – which will also be submitted to the Supreme Court, following a district court ruling that the school’s demolition can go ahead – in numerous other cases in the West Bank, ways have been found to avoid demolition of a school that has been built without a permit, and special directives to that effect have actually been issued by the military government, citing “regulations authorizing the establishment and exemption from permit for an educational structure.”
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But such exemptions, of course, apply solely to Jewish settlements, not to the other residents of the region. Cohen-Lifshitz emphasizes that the land on which the Ras a-Tin elementary school was built is privately owned and that the Palestinian owner gave the go-ahead for the structure’s construction. In addition, under the Mandatory-era regulations that apply in this area, a school may be built on agricultural lands, even though there is of course no chance they would ever receive a building permit from Israeli authorities in Area C of the West Bank (under exclusive Israeli control).
Cohen-Lifshitz went on to describe what the typical school day would look like should the children be required to return to attending their former school in Mughayir. . “Here we should try to imagine little girls and boys, in the first grade, who need to leave home at 6 A.M. to reach school on time for their first class. These children end their school day at 1 P.M., but will arrive home only at 4 P.M. Their school day thus lasts 10 hours, only half of which is devoted to learning,” the document says, he wrote on behalf of Bimkom.
In the period of the coronavirus pandemic, this predicament is even more acute, as online learning is virtually nonexistent in a community lacking electric power, not to mention computers and internet.
About 300 people, around half of them children or adolescents, live in Ras a-Tin, where their parents make a living raising sheep and growing wheat and other feed grains for them. It is situated next to the Kokhav Hashahar settlement’s rock quarry, itself a gross violation of international law, which forbids occupying forces to mine natural resources in an area under their control. Kokhav Hashahar is located on the ridge opposite.
We are perched above the Jordan Valley. On the surrounding hills settler outposts and mobile homes sprout up like poison mushrooms after the rain. The Israeli residents’ aim is identical to that of the Civil Administration: to strangle and force out the pastoral Palestinian communities in the vicinity and shunt them to the Jericho region – in a reprise of their expulsion in the early 1970s from their previous habitation in the South Hebron Hills.
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A maths class in Ras a-Tin.
A maths class in Ras a-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac
Israel does not recognize its existence, but the community of Ras a-Tin is relatively well kept, consisting of a group of family tents spread across the hills above a valley where wheat fields bloom after the first rains of autumn. The grain is stored in nearby caves that function as natural granaries. But Israel is out to destroy this way of life.
The abuse here is long-standing. Iyad Hadad, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, shows us some documents and testimonies that he took from the residents of Ras a-Tin back in 2009, when the campaign to expel them began. The mukhtar, or headman, of the community is Ahmad Ahadishan Kaabana, and we’re sitting with him now on a gravelly area in front of the new school, which is neither a yard nor a playground.
“Free Palestine” declares a sign in childish handwriting pinned to the door of a classroom. Unlike other schools in the Palestinian Authority, they’re afraid to fly the Palestinian flag here. It is evident in only one classroom, on the floor in a corner, leaning against the wall, folded and ashamed. Maybe also frightened.
“We don’t dare hang up even a drawing of a tree here, so you want us to hoist a flag?” says the principal, Nura Azhari, who lives in Ramallah. Before coming here, she ran a school in another shepherds community, near Beit Liqya, west of Ramallah. There, too, a demolition order hangs over the school.
There are 22 “challenged” schools like this across the West Bank at present, under threat of being torn down at any time. Mapping carried out by Bimkom for 260 routes that run between 130 communities like Ras a-Tin in Area C and the schools their children attend, shows that accessibility is poor and difficult. For more than 80 communities, the route to school is longer than two kilometers; for 48, it’s longer than five kilometers, which often must be traveled on foot.
Ras a-Tin residents haven’t felt secure for even one day since moving here in 1971, Kaabana tells us. “They have us in their sights, they don’t leave us alone.”
Several times they have been moved from one place to another, and sometimes they are forced to leave their homes temporarily to allow training exercises by the Israel Defense Forces. They are not permitted to dig wells; they must bring containers of water at high cost. No one even dreams of being hooked up to the water and power grids.
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The school principal, Nura Azhari.
The school principal, Nura Azhari.Credit: Alex Levac
When the children attended the school in Mughayir, they were sometimes bused by the PA, but no more than two or three times a week. The situation became more acute during the past two years because of attacks on the children by members of the settler outposts. So the community decided to build its own school, close to home. The revolutionary idea was implemented quickly, because the PA promised to help if land could be made available – and that was contributed to the community by its Palestinian owner. Afterward the mukhtar heard about GVC, an NGO that helps build schools in disadvantaged areas around the world, and the dream of the school materialized.
Construction began on August 20. Eleven days later, on August 31, Civil Administration forces showed up and confiscated construction equipment, bricks, rods and cement. The next day they returned with an order: “Final order for cessation of work, and demolition,” issued by the “subcommittee for construction supervision of the Supreme Planning Council.” The work continued, however, and skeleton of the structure was in place by September 3.
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Buys studying in a classroom in Ras A-Tin.
School children in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac
Civil Administration personnel returned and confiscated the tin sheets that were intended for the roof. They also took the opportunity to make off with four pallets of bricks, 30 chairs and 12 tables. The community’s race against time reached a peak of intensity – three days later, on September 6, the school year was supposed to start.
At first, the pupils sat on the floor surrounded by gray, unplastered walls and no roof over their heads. On September 10, the Israeli forces returned and expropriated more tin sheets, which were already serving as a roof in place of those previously impounded. The forces also took 12 more tables that the PA had provided. In the following days, empty olive oil containers were used as tables.
The Civil Administration hasn’t actually confiscated anything since, but on three occasions teachers and pupils arrived in the morning to find all the furniture from the school strewn on the ground outside. The perpetrators might have been settlers, perhaps the Civil Administration: In Ras a-Tin, people believe there is total identification of the latter with the former, and collaboration between them all.
Administration personnel returned on September 20, this time only to photograph the site. They also came back last week, to do more photography and to check that the toilets were not connected to the water supply. Each such visit of course gives rise to more fear and dread among teachers and pupils alike.
A spokesperson for the unit of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories issued the following response to a series of questions from Haaretz this week: “A petition concerning the allegations [of the residents] was received in our office. The response to the petition will be made to the court, as usual. We emphasize that the Civil Administration’s supervisory unit carries out activities of enforcement against offenses relating to planning and building, this as part of its duty to preserve public order and the rule of law. The enforcement activities, like the confiscations of equipment carried out in the place mentioned, are executed in accordance with its powers and procedures, and also subject to orders of priorities and operational considerations.”
During the period of the coronavirus epidemic, pupils only are at school for four hours a day. The classes are coed and mixed: First, second and third grades are in one classroom, and the same holds for the upper grades too. All told, there are 50 pupils, 30 girls and 20 boys, six teachers, a secretary and the principal. Now it’s girls, who previously hardly attended school because of the distance and the dangers involved in going, who constitute the majority.
Principal Azhari says that with all the fears and anxiety caused by the demolition order, the changes from the period before the school existed have been dramatic. Parents tell her proudly that their children suddenly know a little English. And math. And literature. And suddenly they want to learn. As for the teachers, the principal says, they can’t wait for each new day to dawn so they can come to the school.
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