Week 36: Education Funding and Policy Online Gathering

On September 7 we learned about discriminatory education funding in Israel. We were joined by Botrus Mansour, director of Nazareth Baptist School. Botrus is the author of Looking from the Precipice: Reflections from Nazareth of a Palestinian Christian Evangelical and When Your Neighbor Is the Savior.

More about our guest:

Botrus Mansour is director of Nazareth Baptist School. Botrus is the author of Looking from the Precipice: Reflections from Nazareth of a Palestinian Christian Evangelical and When Your Neighbor Is the Savior.

The Nazareth Baptist School (NBS) was established as a primary school in 1935-1936 school year by Rev. Hanna Beshoti, pastor of the Baptist Church in Nazareth and supported by the Southern Baptist Mission in the United States. When the Second World War erupted, the school was closed. NBS was reopened by the Baptist Convention in Israel after the end of the war and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1949. Fuad Haddad, a local Nazarene, took on the position of Principal and General Director from 1991 until 2004. Botrus Manosur is the current General Director of NBS

.You can learn more about the Nazareth Baptist School on the website: https://www.baptist.co.il/

Mr. Mansour is also involved with Come and See: The Christian Website from Nazareth: http://www.comeandsee.com

Activism Time

Kumi Action is at:
https://kuminow.com/educaitonfunding/#kumiaction

Take a photo of your school, or a shelf of books in your school library. Use a marker or Photoshop to black out about half of the school/books and share it with the text “We’d miss this much of our education if our school was a Palestinian school in Israel.” Post it in your school library and halls, etc.

Or send a book about justice (any book would do, but you could send Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour) to the Ministry of Education and suggest in a note in the cover, “Since you find it difficult to do the right thing and fund Palestinian schools properly, I thought you should read this book. You can then add it to a school library somewhere in Israel. It is needed.” 

Take your school/library photos and photos of your books and inscriptions and post them to social media along with your messages. Include a link to this page of the Kumi Now website along with the hashtags #EducationFunding, #KumiNow, and #Kumi36.

And here is the Israeli Ministry of Education contact info:

Address: 2 Dvora HaNevi’a Street, Jerusalem 9510402
Email: info@education.gov.il
Tel: 1-800-25-00-25
Fax: 02-5602390

From the Presentation/Chat

It’s from 2017, but “Palestinian Youth with a special focus on Jerusalem” from PASSIA is very informative: http://passia.org/media/filer_public/4c/ae/4cae6026-4599-41c3-93c2-2d9f4d854b11/palestinian_youth-_english.pdf

And Ir Amim recently published “The State of Education in East Jerusalem: Discrimination against the Backdrop of COVID-19”: https://www.ir-amim.org.il/sites/default/files/Education%20in%20EJ%20Report%202020_Discrimination%20Against%20the%20Backdrop%20of%20COVID19%20sep2020.pdf