No School in Umm al-Khair

Tariq Hathaleen, an English teacher from the village of Umm al-Khair in the southern West Bank, stood in a field a kilometer from the village school on Sunday morning, facing a crowd of some 50 children. “Good morning,” he said, getting their attention. “Good morning, teacher,” they responded together in Arabic-accented English.

A week before, on April 13th, Tariq’s students tried to return to class for the first time since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran six weeks earlier, only to find that residents of the adjacent settlement of Carmel had laid razor wire across the path to their school, as Jewish Currents reported at the time. Adults from the village called the Israeli police, but Israeli soldiers arrived instead and shot tear gas toward the children.

A week after the confrontation, the path was still blocked. So, on Sunday, Tariq and others gathered by the new razor-wire fence to establish “the Umm al-Khair Freedom School”—a protest against the fence and political education rolled into one.

Even before the six-week closure, children in Umm al-Khair had only gone to school three days per week, for about four hours a day; Israel’s withholding of Palestinian Authority tax revenue has left the PA unable to pay teacher salaries and other expenses. “Education in Palestine has become basically nothing,” said Hanady Hathaleen, a village resident and mother of a student at the school, who is studying for a master’s degree in child development. (The residents of Umm al-Khair are members of an extended Bedouin family that was displaced from southern Israel in 1948, and all share a surname.)

In the field on Sunday, Tariq taught the Umm al-Khair children about the idea of a right to education, and the history of groups who have been denied that right. What the occupation “seeks is a generation that fails, a generation that cannot read, cannot write, and cannot communicate its cause to human rights institutions,” a representative of the Palestinian Education Ministry, Ayed Jundi, told the students.

The children sang songs with a music teacher, including one that they had adapted to describe their village: “Umm al-Khair is our home / Oh joy of all our eyes.” Their song ended with a verse about Hanady’s husband, Awdah Hathaleen, the 31-year-old village resident and English teacher at the school who was shot and killed by a settler in July. “Awdah is a star in our night / [His] love is always with us,” the song concludes. Awdah and Hanady’s five-year-old son, who started kindergarten at the school in the fall, was among the children teargassed the previous week.

Tariq taught the students the English phrase “open the road,” which came in handy when three balaclava-clad soldiers, along with the head of security of Carmel and a representative of the South Hebron Hills settler regional council, appeared on the other side of the razor-wire fence, guns slung over their shoulders, chatting amongst themselves and filming the children. Umm al-Khair and Carmel are just meters apart, separated by a chain link fence; Carmel’s suburban houses loom over the makeshift one-room tin homes of the village. The settlers and villagers are well-known to each other: When Khalil Hathaleen, head of the village council and father of two daughters in the school, shouted across the fence to the Carmel security chief and the regional council representative, he addressed them both by their first names. “You are responsible for everything happening here,” he yelled.

Although the Israeli military has proposed an alternate path for the children around the razor wire, the new path is much longer, and would require the children to walk near the caravans of a new settler outpost that extends the Carmel settlement. It’s a replay of what’s been done elsewhere in Masafer Yatta, the group of Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills to which Umm al-Khair belongs. In the early 2000s, the nearby village of Tuba was cut off from the road linking it to the village of Tuwani, where the nearest school is located, when the settlement of Maon expanded to connect to an outpost. For nearly 25 years, the children of Tuba have had to choose between walking ten kilometers each way to reach the school, or waiting for military escort, which is often hours late; children have faced serious violence on both routes.