Photo by Zeevveez
A physically ugly blight on the neighborhood is the huge dumpsters, overflowing with garbage, that stand on or by the neighborhood’s streets. These are especially unpleasant and unsanitary in Baka’s commercial areas, specifically along Bethlehem Road’s cafés, shops, and produce stands. In many cities, garbage disposal bins are located inside buildings or underground. Perhaps it’s difficult to get the garbage out of sight because of the neighborhood’s history, its narrow streets, and its old stone structures. The owners of the businesses along Bethlehem Road have resisted changes that would cost them money, even though the overflowing garbage bins (and the rats) must be deterring potential customers. Garbage disposals are not only outside but they are part of people’s home too, and when they overflow or break it can be incredibly frustrating to deal with, luckily homeowners can visit this site to set a home warranty plan, but it is not as easy for a general garbage disposal that the residents all use.
One moral blight on the neighborhood is the underage workers, most of them Arab kids, that one sees working in the stores and on the streets. These boys, many of them well under 16, should be in school; their presence at workplaces is illegal and wrong.
The two blights presented themselves together one night this week when I attended a meeting of our neighborhood council’s environmental committee. One of the main items on the agenda was finding solutions to the garbage disposal problem. As we spoke, the floors of the community center where we were meeting were being mopped by an Arab boy no more than twelve years old.
When I called the community center staff’s attention to the boy, they replied that he worked in the building most weeknights. His father, a cleaner sent by a subcontractor, brings his son along to help out.
The meeting was not a particularly encouraging one. Some of the Baka residents who serve on the committee said that they’d worked extensively on neighborhood improvement plans that were ignored by the city government. Others noted that the city has little money to invest in garbage disposal, so the chances of getting rid of Bethlehem Road’s garbage bins are not good. So far, the owners of the street’s commercial establishments have shown no interest in discussing solutions.
I did my small part. When I got home, I wrote a letter to the community council’s director, Dorit Shitrit. I pointed out that having an underage boy cleaning the community center building at night is a violation of labor laws. Recent court rulings in Israel, I reminded her, have mandated that institutions that employ cleaning workers via subcontractors are liable if labor laws are violated-even though the workers are not directly employed by them. And I noted that if the neighborhood council expects citizens and businessmen to obey the law, it must first obey the law itself.
I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Ms. Shitrit the next morning. She thanked me for sending the letter and said that she’d taken the subcontractor to task for allowing the worker to bring his son to work in the community center on a regular basis. She assured me that she’d be watching to make sure that the violation did not continue.
It’s not much, but it’s one less blight on Baka.
Count me on the pro-blight side.
More precisely, if I lived in Baka I’d be bothered by the rats but not by the Arab kid working with his dad instead of sitting home watching TV or whatever. Illegal, shmillegal. It was a common practice in America too until the last few decades, and nobody seemed much bothered by it. In a lot of ways Arab culture is superior to present-dayJewish (Western) culture.
At least the Arab kid wasnt at home being indoctrinated by Hamas TV. Now thanks to your actions, he will sit at home and watch jihad shows, and the likelihood that he will work for a living instead of blowing himself up has been greatly decreased. A real accomplishment for the month of Elul. Even I as a right wing Jew have a hard time juxtaposing an Arab boy and dumpsters as part of the problem. This is the problem- you like the Palestinians as a concept, but you dont like them as individuals and associate them with garbage bins
“Now thanks to your actions, he will sit at home and watch jihad shows, and the likelihood that he will work for a living instead of blowing himself up has been greatly decreased.”
Or alternatively – and more plausibly – he will be able to stay awake and focused in school the following day, and so will get himself an education and be able to do something better with his life. There is a reason that labor laws in all Western countries (and many non-Western ones) don’t allow underage workers, and it has nothing to do with not liking the Palestinians as individuals – on the contrary, it is about preventing their exploitation and giving them the best possible opportunities. Haim did exactly the right thing for the boy in question.
On the problem of child labor in general, and international efforts to combat it, http://www.ilo.org/ipec/lang–en/index.htm. Those efforts deserve our support, not our scorn.
Or alternatively – and more plausibly – he will be able to stay awake and focused in school the following day…what exactly do you think he will learn in school? The joys of jihad?
I think your prejudice is showing through, Nimrod. Arab-Israeli schools teach things like math, science, literature, languages – all the things that they should be teaching and that children should be learning. There are problems, as we know, about Arab schools’ relative effectiveness compared with Jewish schools, but one has to have a very weird and perverted view of Arab life to imagine that their school days are spent learning “the joys of jihad”.
Avi Davis
Comment Email Print Save Share In 1920, H.G. Wells, in his masterwork, “The Outline of History,” described human history as a race between education and catastrophe. While the western world has progressively moved beyond the peal of that alarm bell, there are areas of the world where 80 years later it tolls as urgently as ever.
One of those areas is the Arabic world. Here education systems are riven with notions antithetical to the values of tolerance and understanding that are so intently promoted in the West. In recent years, the signal failures of those systems to reverse years of misguided teachings appear to be dooming the region to years of further conflict.
The most prevalent of those notions is anti-Semitism. Here government sponsored textbooks spout Jew-hatred on a level not seen since the 1930s in Germany. A recent report by CMIP (Committee for Monitoring the Impact of Peace – http://www.edume.org), a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in New York, found that of 58 children’s textbooks used in the Palestinian Authority, not one mentioned Israel by name and none offered a map of the region that included the existence of the Jewish state.
Palestinian textbooks never mention Israel by name, nor show a map including the Jewish state.In children’s textbooks (most of which are Jordanian or Egyptian in origin), Jews are projected as “cunning”, ” deceitful,” “disloyal” and “treacherous.” They are alternatively described as “thieves,” “wild animals” and “locusts.” The Jewish state is referenced as “Occupied Palestine,” “the Zionist entity,” and “a Jewish racist administration.”
The horrifying written examples abound. Take this translated quote from “Islamic Education for Fourth Grade, Part 2”:
Learn from this lesson: the Jews are the enemies of the prophets and the true believers.
Or this tendentious examination question from “Modern Arab History for Twelfth Grade Part 1”:
With an understanding of the racist and aggressive character of the Zionist movement, please summarize the similarity between Nazism, Fascism and Zionism.
Or this incitement to martyrdom in “Our Arabic Language for Fifth Grade”:
The Jihad against the Jew is the religious duty of every Muslim man and woman.
The PA has embarked for years on a transparent attempt to fuel hatred of Israel and Jews.Reviewing the plethora of material available through CMIP or the balanced reporting and translations of MEMRI (Middle East Monitoring and Research Institute – http://www.memri.org), it becomes patently apparent that Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has embarked for years on a transparent attempt to fuel hatred of Israel and Jews among the most impressionable members of his populace.
The Oslo Accords had recognized the vital importance of education in fostering peace the two peoples. In the Cairo Agreement of 1994, Israel and the Palestinian Authority agreed to “ensure that their educational systems contribute to the peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.”
A joint UNESCO- Palestinian institution known as the Palestinian Curriculum Development Center was established to implement this policy. It created a plan for a new education plan to begin in September 1999. Yet so far only token changes have been made to the Palestinian curriculum and most of the children’s textbooks still derive from Egypt and Jordan.
BY CONTRAST
Israel, on the other hand, has done much to promote the concept of peaceful co-existence. Study of Arabic culture and language begins in elementary school, and the works of Arabic authors and poets, even those hostile to Israel such as the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, has been included in the curriculum. Workshops, proposed by the Israeli Ministry of Education “to promote tolerance, understanding and peace” are regular events in Israeli high schools, and incitement against Arabs or Palestinians is bitterly proscribed.
Populations are not culturally prone to hatred — they are educated toward it. How one nation educates its children on the characterization of another will often determine the relations between them. Populations are not culturally prone to hatred — they are educated toward it. It is significant that studies conducted of former Hitler Youth, now in their 60s and 70s, have revealed that the anti-Semitism inculcated in their earliest years remains embedded in that generation’s psyche.
If that is true for elderly Germans, who today live in a society that is among the most liberal in western Europe, how much more so does it apply to Palestinians whose cultural vehicles from media to mosque are unfettered carriers of the anti-Semitic contagion?
The region is tragically destined to endure years of war and violence until Arab children are taught the values of peace. Those who are therefore quick to prescribe territorial compromise or negotiations as the stimulant for enhancing peace might pay heed to the words of President John F. Kennedy: “History has taught us that peace does not lie in characters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of people.”
Haim is correct–it is illegal to employ underage workers just as it is in the Old Country (where one needs parental permission to employ a kid under 16 and it is absolutely forbidden to employ someone under 14). If it were only a boy helping out his dad on an evening job–hey, no problem. But that’s not what it is–the Baka district is also home to other businesses which employ Arab youths, some as young as 8 or 10.
David, your heart is in the right place but these kids don’t go to school. They work as soon as they can get jobs–the odds are that their fathers have little education and don’t think their sons need any (this is a socio-economic issue in all cultures, not just Palestinian or non-Western cultures, btw–check out Appalachia or parts of the American south). If they are tossed from their jobs in Baka, sad to say, the next place you will see them is on the streets in a far more dangerous and less lucrative position hawking pencils or other nonessentials to drivers at stoplights, because their fathers believe they need to work.
This is in contradistinction to the upper and middle class Palestinian parents who pay for their kids to attend top notch schools in and around Jerusalem–these people are medical professionals, small business owners, etc. who understand the value of education.
These children aren’t working because they are Arabs–they work because their families are poor. I’ve also seen poor Jews whose kids go around begging right before the chaggim and Shabbat. I often thought that if I won the lottery, I would set up a system where we could pay poor children to stay in school–that way allowing them to bring a wage to help their families while also staying in school and breaking the cycle of poverty.
As I see it the issue is partly about enforcing the labor law which needs matching values/morality to go with it; why do those fathers feel that they need to take their sons to work?; is it a matter of survival?;why isn’t there a decent school for those kids to go to? And how about decent pay for their fathers?
The other part is funds for public health matters like cleaning up exposed garbage. If the city does not have the funds or the will it should anyway be mandated by the state. The state should kick in the funds, or some portion. Or maybe it’s not mandated.
It’s beyond aesthetics, but the sore sight does not inspire civic pride. Nor does it look good to tourists. In such a small country dependent on tourism the pervasive garbage problem it makes a bad impression.
I realize Israel is a young country. But in many ways it is very developed. It must be a matter of priorities.
Maybe less spent on hi tech weaponry and war-making would help with providing for Arab schools, civic jobs with better wages. That would depress the feeling of a need for jihad.
Statements about Arabs not wanting education for their sons and that relieving children from having to work would expose them to extremist rhetoric are blatantly prejudiced and inhumane.
Haim – What is Beit Lehem Road? Would a tourist understand that it is the way to Bethlehem and not the Bread House?
Shabbat Shalom
Herbert:
Haim lives in Baka. Baka is in (pre-1967) Israel. Arabs in Baka go to Arab-Israeli schools.
So either (a) you are claiming that this sort of material forms the curriculum in Arab-Israeli schools (in which case I would like to see your evidence); or (b) you are introducing a mass of totally irrelevant and prejudicial material for the sake of it. Which is it?
Great job. now the father will probably get hell from his sleazy employer, or even be fired. or maybe now the family won’t be able to buy that extra box of milk, or that extra loaf of bread.
will you follow that one up too, mr. watzman? it’ll take a bit more than a little letter, you know.
not everyone can afford living in trendy baka, mr. watzman. yes, it’s really sad that those “arab” (PALESTINIAN) kids have to work for a living, and live in a screwed-up place called east jerusalem, where the municipality invests a mere fraction of what your buddies in baka get.
it’s really sad that poverty and full education don’t really go together too.
but you know what’s sadder? it’s that so-called liberals like yourself can’t even realize how inherently patronizing they are.
did you think about that one when you wrote your letter?
“Statements about Arabs not wanting education for their sons…are blatantly prejudiced and inhumane.”
Read it again. It has nothing to do with some perceived anti-Arab prejudice–I thought I made it quite clear that it is a socio-economic issue found in the lower strata or many societies, not an “Arab” issue.
The fact that many under-educated parents value wage labor over education is an observable fact which has been commented upon in many contexts. Pointing this out as part of a discussion doesn’t merit being accused of “prejudice.”