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Paper short abstract

Since 2017, some fifty Jewish and Palestinian families have been enrolling their children in the same public school. Willing to connect beyond fear and hatred, their goal is to break with Israeli educational apartheid and to bring forward a community-based strategy focused on peacebuilding.

Paper long abstract

The purpose of my research is to examine a socially mixed community engaged in a social reform project, composed of fifty Jewish and Palestinian families whose children are enrolled in the same public school, a very rare situation in Israel where education is ethnically segregated.

Drawing inspiration from theoretical approaches that present schools as innovative spaces (Bénéï, 2008) where alternative pedagogies can be developed (Leroy, 2022), and critically analyzing the concept of ‘community’ (Amit & Rapport, 2012), the aim of this research is to demonstrate – using qualitative ethnographic methods such as participant observation, interviews and discourse analysis – that while the demographic diversity of the school represents a major socio-political challenge, it also offers an opportunity to imagine a shared future.

The common goal of these families is to break with Israeli educational apartheid, which consistently generates socioeconomic inequalities, political polarization, divergent societal imaginaries and unequally attainable futures, and to bring forward a concrete community-based strategy focused on peacebuilding. Their emphasis on caring for the Other, and thus on connecting beyond fear and hatred, deals a symbolic blow to State policies directed at radical polarization through the creation of death-worlds (Mbembe, 2019) and demonstrates that educational sites, even in colonial contexts, are continuously reinvented and can become spaces of material and symbolic resistance.

Empirical evidence showed that while this project certainly federates antagonistic groups around local challenges of common interest, it also generates new forms of exclusion that jeopardize the egalitarian and inclusive community ideal to which they aspire.