Published: 29 June 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Manar Hayadre heads one of Israel's most complex educational institutions, a primary school of 330 Jewish and Arab students
A BRACELET ORNAMENTED with a Palestinian flag worn by a fifth-grader during last month’s military operation in the Gaza Strip almost caused a flare-up – even at a bilingual school in the Galilee.
“The flag piqued natural curiosity among the Jewish students,” the principal, Manar Hayadre, tells me in her office. “We could have told the girl to remove the bracelet for fear of what the parents would say, but we didn’t. And the truth is that when I got home, a few mothers called to ask what was going on.
"I’m not frightened by going to those places. It doesn’t mean that the student is against the state, wants the state to disappear or anything like that. The flag is an element of her identity, [so] let’s talk about it for a second. The next day we had a class on the subject of symbols.”
Would you have received phone calls from Arab mothers if a fifth-grader had come to school wearing jewellery in the shape of a Star of David?
Hayadre: “Of course not. It’s impossible to ignore the political-national context. We are in the State of Israel.”
So in this case, where are the partnership and the equality that are the school’s ethos?
“In the model we’re promoting, within the spaces of language and identity that we allow, the aspiration is for equality. To tell you that it exists 100 percent? Absolutely not. That would be a lie.”
That sort of candour typifies Hayadre, principal for the past three years of the Jewish-Arab primary school of 330 students on Kibbutz Eshbal, in the Lower Galilee.
