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IPFS News Link • Israel

Israel's army and schools work hand in hand, say teachers

• jonathan-cook.net

The task for Israeli pupils: to foil an imminent terror attack on their school. But if they are to succeed, they must first find the clues using key words they have been learning in Arabic.Arabic lesson plans for Israel's Jewish schoolchildren have a strange focus.Those matriculating in the language can rarely hold a conversation in Arabic. And almost none of the hundreds of teachers introducing Jewish children to Israel's second language are native speakers, even though one in five of the population belong to the country's Palestinian minority.The reason, says Yonatan Mendel, a researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, is that the teaching of Arabic in Israel's Jewish schools is determined almost exclusively by the needs of the Israeli army.


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