ECCD services for Arab Children Current situation

Background

Palestinian citizens of Israel comprise approximately 20%, or a little over 1 million of Israel’s population. Palestinian children citizens of Israel comprise 25% of all children living in Israel. This national minority is discriminated against on a number of levels, through laws as well as government policies. This discrimination is affecting all spheres of life and creating huge gapes between the Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel. Poverty is only one example: 60% of Arab children are living under poverty line.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are not a monolithic group. They live in a variety of cities, towns and villages throughout Israel, including the unrecognized villages, mixed cities, and Palestinian villages, and within secular and a variety of religious communities (Muslim, Christian, Druze).

The state, to date, failed to provide meaningful or effective programs to eliminate discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Generally we should be aware that:

a) The absence of a written constitution, basic law or ordinary statute that explicitly guarantees the right of equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel diminishes the power of this right. It thereby prevents the Palestinian minority from attaining equal rights.

Israel still lacks a written constitution or a basic law that constitutionally guarantees the right of equality for all. Further, there is no regular law which protects the right of equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Although Arab MKs have submitted many bills aimed at guaranteeing this right for Palestinian citizens of Israel, all were dismissed by a majority of the Knesset. Although ordinary statutes do provide protection for the right of equality for some segments of the population such as women,[1] through the Women's Equal Rights Law, which declares total gender equality, no statute relates to the right to equality as a constitutional right.

b) Ordinary statutes that protect the right to equality for women, such as a 2000 amendment to The Women's Equal Rights Law – 1951,[2] which prohibits all forms of discrimination against women, whether intentional or de facto, and the 1993 and 2000 amendments to the Government Companies Law - 1975, which mandate affirmative action for women and Palestinians citizens of Israel, are not effectively implemented in the case of Palestinian women.

c) Another significant problem with the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (in addition to numerous other laws, including the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation) is the protection it affords to the Jewish majority, through its declaration of the state as a Jewish and democratic state.[3] This declaration undermines the equal rights of "non-Jewish" citizens of the state and can be interpreted as justifying the giving of preference to, and implying the superiority of, the majority in various fields. [4]

The exclusion of the right to equality from the Basic Laws, as well as Israel's self-definition as a Jewish state, empowers the state to carry out an unreasonable policy of "reasonable discrimination." [5] The origin of this concept is that discrimination on the basis of national belonging is legitimate, part of the government's policy, and part of the "constitutional" structure of the state as "Jewish and democratic."

Although the state policy impacts all citizens and all spheres of life, however the most affected groups in our society are women and children as demonstrated below:

Palestinian women citizens of Israel face the harshest consequences of this discrimination – as members of a national minority group, and as women in the Israeli society – and as women living in a conservative and traditional society. In this paper I will concentrate on ECCD services.

Health: The Health Insurance System in Israel

In 1995, the newly enacted National Health Insurance Law made health insurance both compulsory and universal. The law introduced principles of equality in terms of access and availability of services. National health fees are determined by salary or income level. According to the law, every insured person is entitled to a “Health Services Basket,” which includes diagnosis, consultation, medications, hospitalization, supplies and medical equipment. The Ministry of Health and the sick funds are responsible for providing services included in the basket. Although Israel has one of the most comprehensive health care plans, the health basket does not provide coverage for health services that are specifically relevant to women, such as authorized abortions and contraceptives. The failure to meet women's unique health needs discriminates against girls and women and undermines their right to health.

Israel’s failure to supply free and accessible contraceptives is a barrier to women’s control over their bodies and to practice family planning and puts them at high risk of unwanted pregnancies and unnecessary abortions. In 2003, The Israel Association for the Advancement of Women’s Health completed a survey on contraceptive behavior among women in Israel. The survey revealed that women with higher incomes were more likely to use contraceptives. About 6% of the participants reported that they ceased using contraception due to financial costs. A further 30% stated that birth control pills were expensive.[6] In research conducted in Kufr Manda, a Palestinian village with one of the highest unemployment rates in Israel, 55.6% of women reported that the number of children in their families was not as they had planned or desired. The researchers concluded that failure to provide free access to contraceptives made women choose cheap and less effective methods of birth control. For example, 10.8% of women got pregnant while using IUD. This was attributed to the use of IUDs that are least expensive.

The average fertility rate among Palestinian women citizens is 3.8% compared to 2.3% among Jewish women.[7] The average spacing of children among Palestinian women citizens is 2.8 years compared to 4 years among Jewish women. Higher fertility rates generally correlate with early marriage, lower levels of education, less access to family planning services, poverty and lack of awareness, all of which Israel has failed to address comprehensively.

One important method to promote access is the provision of health clinics and hospitals in Palestinian communities. Notably, Nazareth is the only Palestinian community with hospitals and these three hospitals are non-governmental hospitals, primarily operated by churches. Palestinians living in other areas must go to hospitals located in Jewish or mixed localities. Social restrictions on women’s mobility, as well as limited public transportation options limit their access to medical treatment.

Although the law provided equality, which was a great step forward, de facto Pregnant Arab women visit the health clinic less than Jewish women and this due to different reason:

• Poor infrastructure in Arab villages.

• Missing transportation

• Social barriers on women independent travel

• Load of responsibilities in the families (large family, child marriage etc)

• Language barriers.

• Lack of awareness

• Lack of investment in campaigns addressing the Arab population.

Health care for mother and child after birth is also equal according the law; de facto, we witness similar problems due to similar reasons.

According to the Israeli Ministry of Health, the overall rate of infant mortality in Israel for 2003 was 4.96 per 1000 births. [8] The rate of infant mortality for Palestinians was 8.63% compared to 3.63% in the Jewish community. The overall rate of stillbirths in Israel was 1.07 per 1000 births. Among Palestinians, the rate was 1.47% as compared to 0.91% in the Jewish community. In 2003, the child mortality in the Palestinian community decreased by 8% compared to 10% in the Jewish community. The highest child mortality rate (13.3%) was registered in the Bedouin community in the Negev. Israel needs to address those factors that lead to increased mortality rates, including poverty, access to resources and access to health care.

Education in ECCD

In Israel, for historical background, ECCD educational services fall under the responsibility of tow ministries:

The Ministry of Industry Trade and labor

The Ministry of Education.

The Ministry of Industry Trade and labor: ages Birth - 3

Under the Ministry responsibilities falls the following:

• Support working women and provide subside in Nurseries and home nurseries fees.

• Set the rules for payment in the nurseries and home nurseries

• Approve the Nurseries and provide them with license.

• Supervise the work in the Nurseries.

• Supervise the home nurseries.

According to the law each working women could receive subside in accordance with the family income given she is working women and her child is visiting a recognized nursery.

According to the Ministry, of the 1,665 daycare centers, which have recognition, only 31 centers operate in Palestinian villages equaling 1.86%. They provide service for only 1700 Arab child that is 2.1% of the total children in that age. Another 2500 Arab children aged 0-3 attend publicly subsidized house care programs.

Although Palestinian children constitute 25% of the total number of children in Israel, they constitute only 5.25% of the 80 thousand children in Israel attending subsidized daycare centers and house care programs. The lack of sufficient daycare centers in Palestinian villages discourages many women from participating in labor force, since most of them cannot afford a private babysitter.[9]

This situation create list of problems such as:

• Lack of suitable development appropriate supervision.

• Missing of suitable infrastructure

• Lack of special consideration o Arab NGO’s working to advance ECCD.

• Lack of professional supervision on the caregiver training.

Ministry of education: 3-5

Let me begin with a positive remake related to the late appointment of prof. yuli tamir as Minister of education which could be an opportunity to make some changes in the ministry of education.

Background:

The Ministry of Education (MOE) severely under-funds schools for the Palestinian minority in Israel. Israel does not regularly release official data detailing how much it spends in total on each Palestinian compared with Jewish student, which "… indicates the weakness of its commitment to real improvements in the Palestinian educational system in Israel."[10] However, statistics published in 2004 reveal that combined public and private investment in Palestinian school students stood at an average of New Israeli Shekels (NIS) 862 per student, compared with NIS 4,935 per Jewish student for the academic year 2000-2001. Over the same period, public investment totaled on average NIS 534 per student for Palestinians, compared with NIS 1,779 per Jewish student.[11] Thus, while the these figures show that private investment in Jewish students greatly outstripped that in Palestinian students, the government spent over three times as much on each Jewish student as on each Palestinian student. This under-funding is manifested in many areas, including the poor infrastructure and facilities characteristic of Palestinian schools[12], crowded classrooms[13], few teaching hours relative to Jewish students, the lack of support and management professionals in the Palestinian educational system in Israel, and poor Arabic textbooks. This environment creates a negative experience for students, academically, emotionally and socially, and leads to phenomena such as academic under-achievement and high drop-out rates.

The MOE retains centralized control over the curricula for Palestinian schools and Jewish secular schools. The State Education Law sets the educational goals of the state educational system, which emphasize only Jewish history and culture; mandatory subjects for all students who take the matriculation examinations at the end of high school include, for example, Jewish religious texts. Palestinian students are thus denied the opportunity to develop a positive cultural and national identity.

ECCD services for Arab children

Two recent legislative measures are potentially effective legal tools for raising education levels for all in Israel. However, both are being implemented in a discriminatory manner vis-à-vis Palestinian citizens of Israel.

A 1984 Amendment to the Compulsory Education Law-1949 lowered the age of compulsory education from five to three years old, and required that implementation of the new amendment be fully achieved by the end of 2000, subsequently delayed until 2008. Due to the MOE's discriminatory allocation of budgets for kindergartens, state funding for preschool education for three- to four-year-old Palestinian children remains minimal: although over 25% of children in Israel aged three and four are Arab, only 66.5% of three-year-old Arab children were enrolled in kindergartens in 2002-2003, compared with 100% of Jewish children.[14] In 2004, the Supreme Court rejected a petition which demanded that the MOE establish preschools for approximately 300 Palestinian Bedouin children in their villages to ensure their right to free education, in accordance with the Compulsory Education Law.[15] The children involved were from two Bedouin villages in the Naqab in the south of Israel which the government does not recognize, both of which lack any educational framework for children of this age.

The Long School Day Law-1997 (amended 2004) was passed to increase school hours for students in towns and villages with low socio-economic status, and to encourage mothers in these areas to work out side their homes. The long school day is available for only 10% of the school children in Israel, or 140,000 children. The generally poor state of school infrastructure, buildings and facilities in Palestinian towns and villages further hinders the implementation of this law in Arab schools. Budgetary constraints, to which Israel attributes the partial/delayed implementation of these laws, cannot continue to relieve the MOE of its obligations under them. The implementation of the laws should prioritize the economically and educationally disadvantaged Palestinian minority in Israel, to help close the educational gaps between Jewish and Palestinian students.

The shortage of kindergartens and daycare centers, and the non-implementation of the long school day in Palestinian towns and villages, reduce the engagement of the Palestinian women, traditionally the primary care-providers for children, in the labor force. Their low rate of engagement in the labor force impacts negatively on Palestinian women's standard of living and degree of independence.

Further more the Arab children are marginalized from all reform effort given in Jewish schools as an example I present you with a subject which is dear to me that is Gender equality:

In the report presented to CEDAW Israel states (p.86) that in recent years "sincere efforts" were made to remove messages containing gender stereotypes from textbooks used in Palestinian schools, in line with efforts previously made in the Jewish educational system. However, the report goes on to cite the 1999 State Comptroller Report, according to which the MOE lacked the means to extend the project of removing stereotyped messages into the Palestinian educational system. As a result, textbooks used in many Palestinian schools still contain gender stereotypes. A committee set up by the MOE to examine gender stereotypes in school textbooks in Israel concluded that 60% or more of the textbooks examined in the Palestinian educational sector include the wide use of gender stereotypes, and that this indicates that gender stereotypes are more common in textbooks in the Palestinian sector than in the Jewish sector.[16] Therefore, the MOE's failure to remove gender stereotypes from textbooks in the Palestinian sector constitutes discrimination against Palestinian female school students, since the need to eliminate these stereotypes has been identified and they have been removed from textbooks in Jewish schools.

Other issues such as children with special needs recreation program enrichment programs needs further presentation.

[1] See also The Prevention of Sexual Harassment Law - 1998, and The Equal Rights for People with Disabilities Law - 1998.

[2] The Women's Equal Rights Law - 1951, Sections 1 and 6.

[3] Section 1(a) of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. The Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation provides constitutional protection for every Israel national or resident to engage in any occupation/employment. Section 2 provides: "The purpose of this Basic Law if to protect freedom of occupation, in order to establish in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," available at: www.knesset.gov.il.

[4] See, e.g., Justice Kedmi in H.C. 6698/95, Qa’dan v. Israel Lands Administration, et. al. He ruled that the value of a Jewish and democratic state may supersede the right to equality.

[5] Hassan Jabareen, “Comments on the Unreasonableness of the Attorney General's ‘Reasonable Discrimination Policy’,” Adalah's Newsletter, Volume 1, May 2004, available at: www.adalah.org.

[6] According to the EUROHIS survey, the percentage of Palestinian women ever practicing oral contraception is 24.9 compared to 49.4% among Jewish women. 5% of Palestinian women reported current use of oral contraceptives compared to 21.2% among Jewish women.

[7] Supra, Note 3.

[8]Ministry of Health http://www.health.gov.il/news/news.asp?ID=235.

[9] Boulos, S. (2003, July) The Integration of Palestinian Women in the Israeli Labor Market: Obstacles and Suggestions for Solution, Haifa: The Association of Civil Rights in Israel.

[10] Human Rights Watch, Second Class: Discrimination against Palestinian Children in Israel's Schools, 2001, p.49.

[11] Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), New Survey – Investment in Education 2000/1, Press Release 3 August 2004 (Hebrew). According to the Mossawa Center – The Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of Israel, only 3.1% of the MOE's budget was allocated for Palestinian citizens of Israel in 2001. From State Budget for Fiscal Year 2001, Government of Israel 2000, cited in Mossawa Report, The Arab Citizens of Israel: Status and Implications for the Middle East Conflict, Shira Kamm (et al.) Mossawa Center 2003, pp.13-14.

[12] A study commissioned by the Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education in Israel found that, for example, of the 6,300 classrooms surveyed, as many as 6.5% were completely unsuitable for productive learning and instruction. In addition, the physical facilities themselves are also laden with health risks, such as asbestos and other hazardous substances.

[13] From primary to secondary school levels, average class sizes are larger in Palestinian schools than in Jewish schools, with an average class size of 27 pupils per class in Jewish schools compared with 30 pupils in Palestinian schools. Source: CBS, Statistical Abstract of Israel 2004, Table 8.11.

[14] CBS, Children in Kindergartens and Day Care Centers - 2001/02, Press Release 4 August 2004 (Hebrew).

[15] H.C. 5108/04, Ismail Mohammed Abu-Guda, et. al, v. Limor Livnat, Minister of Education, et. al. submitted by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

[16] Report of Committee to Examine Gender Stereotypes in School Textbooks in the Educational System in Israel, March 2002, pp.27-28. (Heberw).