Adalah is very pleased to announce that Hassan Jabareen, the Founder of Adalah, was named by Kol Ha’ir newspaper on 2 September 2007 as one of the fifty most influential people in Israel in the field of education.

The following text appeared in Kulbo. Adalah translated the text from the original Hebrew.

The list of fifty seeks to present the people who have the greatest influence on the education of Israel’s children. Like any list of this type, and like last year’s list, it is arbitrary to a considerable extent: someone else could have put together a different list – a similar or a completely different one. The Ha’ir network of local newspapers believes that the list presented here was composed in good faith and in sound judgment by people who are closely familiar with and involved in the educational system.

If the entire list is arbitrary, the rankings within the list are even more so. The person in 25th place, for example, could easily have been ranked 26th, and vice versa. The compilers of the list and those who determined the rankings simply wanted to provide an indication, in their view, of how much each of these people is making an impact on the system. Moreover, most of the participants do not represent themselves alone, but also, and perhaps primarily, represent their colleagues – people and organizations that together bear responsibility for a typical phenomenon, new or old, in the field of education; if they did not also represent others, they very likely would not have been mentioned at all.

The term ‘influential’ requires a clarification: the influence does not have to be a positive one. There are those who have a positive impact and there are those who have a negative impact, and the compilers of the list can only hope that those with a positive influence outnumber those with a negative one – we really did not count. And there are those who have had a mixed impact, both positive and negative. Each reader can judge for him or herself which way the scale is leaning and whether the verdict is already in.

Attorney Hassan Jabareen, General Director of Adalah

The lawyer who forced the Ministry of Education to include Arab towns among the National Priority Areas and almost caused 1,500 teachers to be fired is looking forward to the day when his organization will no longer be needed.

In recent years, the judicial system has made a very significant impact on what is happening in schools and on educational policy. Numerous important rulings handed down in recent years by the courts, and particularly by the Supreme Court, have decided issues of principle in educational policy that had for years been the focus of public and professional debates.

This occurred, for example, in regard to the question of integrating children with disabilities into the regular instead of the special educational system. For years, most of the children with disabilities had been automatically referred to special educational institutions, despite studies indicating the benefits of integrating them into the regular system and widespread public pressure by parents of these children – until the Supreme Court ruled on this matter. It happened again this year in the case of a policy the Ministry of Education had pursued for years, which in effect discriminated against schools in Arab towns and villages via the ostensibly neutral term ‘National Priority Areas.’ Following a petition submitted by the Adalah organization, represented by its General Director, Attorney Hassan Jabareen, and also due in no small part to the negligence of the Ministry of Education, the entire educational system was shaken and 1,500 teachers were almost fired.

For years, the state had composed a list of ‘priority’ communities, which are mainly located along the borders and in peripheral areas, termed ‘National Priority Areas.’ Through this designation significant benefits were provided to them in the fields of education and social welfare. In 1998, when Adalah’s petition was first submitted, not a single Arab community was included in this list. During the long years of hearings on the petition, the state added four Arab communities, so that it could not be accused of discrimination. However, at the beginning of 2006 the Supreme Court agreed with the petitioners from Adalah that the designation was discriminatory and ordered the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Welfare to cancel, within one year of the ruling, the definition of ‘Priority Area’ and the allocation of benefits deriving from it. Months passed and the Ministry of Education did not take action to resolve the issue. Finally, in late May of this year, the last possible date for firing teachers, local government leaders, realizing that they would not receive the budget supplement for priority areas, sent dismissal notices to around 1,500 teachers. The demonstrations by the fired teachers and threats by local government leaders to call a strike prior to the start of the school year created a nightmare for the Minister of Education. Had the Supreme Court not acceded to the ministry’s request to slightly defer the implementation of the ruling, it is not clear how the educational system would have endured this shakeup.

Hassan Jabareen established Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – in 1996 and has led the organization ever since. He received a B.A. in Law and Philosophy from Tel Aviv University and an LL.M. in Law from the American University in Washington, DC. He now teaches at the law faculties at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University. Since its establishment, Adalah has written numerous petitions tackling the right to equality in education for the Arab and Arab Bedouin populations in Israel. These have included a demand for the establishment of kindergartens and for the arrangement of transportation for Bedouin children in the unrecognized villages, a petition demanding that a Arab child in Lod be allowed to register in a Jewish school, and a petition demanding the cancellation of the appointment of a security services representative as the Deputy Director of the Arab Educational Division. Jabareen would certainly agree that the most successful day in the life of his organization will be the day when it is no longer necessary – when the strongly entrenched discrimination against Arab education disappears from the educational system. In the meantime, it seems that he still has a lot of work to do.