I looked for this article to better understand why many reasonable people have reacted with horror to the student positions at American universities regarding Israel's right to exist and whether the frame of "colonialism" is a justified view of the current conflict between Israel and Palestinians.
It's worth a close read.
One aspect of it gives me some pause: the justification it tries to give for ongoing segregation of Jews and Israeli Arabs in the public schools. This segregation is necessary, the author says, to preserve both groups' right to maintain their respective cultural identities.
If someone tried to justify ongoing segregation of American public schooling according to religion or race, I believe most Americans who believe in democracy would strongly resist that. (Such resistance wouldn't, of course, remove the obvious fact that such segregation is, in fact, becoming more widespread in the U.S.)
I realize that the Jewish/Arab cultural divide in Israel is historically very different than that between, say, Blacks and Whites, or Christian Nationalists and secularists in the U.S. But I wonder if this author's justification of ongoing segregation in Israeli public schooling could be applied to the issue of segregation of American public schools. Certainly the White, Christian Nationalist perspective in the U.S. is that the argument clearly applies to current conditions in the U.S.
Can a clear position be laid out that accepts this author's argument for the ongoing segregation of Israeli public schooling while also firmly rejecting the efforts of American Christian Nationalists to further segregate (or to allow the ongoing further segregation of) American public schools? I'm not sure.
