Ramla school posters deemed 'inflammatory'
City files incitement complaint against local Arab high school following reports of provocative wall display. Mayor says posters 'challenge Israel's sovereignty', but head of school chain says translation of texts failed to reveal any wrong doing
The Ramla Municipality filed a police complaint against one of the city's Arab high schools for incitement against the State.
According to city hall, the municipality's Department of Education inspectors photographed Palestine flags alongside images of nationalistic texts and inflammatory drawings, displayed at the Atid High School in the city.
According to the complaint, one if the drawings showed fighters holding guns and the caption "No to violence" with the word "no" blacked out.
No to violence? (Photo courtesy of Ramla Municipality)
As for the flags, the high school walls did sport several Palestinian flags, but the flag the City claimed to be of Hamas, turned out to be a black-and-white print of the Saudi flag. The two bear strong similarities and both have a caption reading "There is no God but Allah."
Another drawing, deemed by the Ramla Municipality as incendiary, depicted the Palestinian flag and a text reading "We want peace, not war." Other drawings sported texts calling for the opening of the Rafah crossing "For Gaza's children," and a third read "No to war, yes to peace."
Other posters had religious texts written on them and turned out to have no reference to Israel or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
City Hall, it seems, also disapproved of the fact that the school had a poster of famed Palestinian poet Samih al-Kassem. Kassem's works, however, are included in the Arab literature curriculum approved by the Education Ministry.
Ramla's Department of Education began looking into the "grave incitement" following a report suggesting the school was displaying inciting drawings and wall writings, and that the school's staff considered them to be part of the educational activities.
Sketch found on a desk in one of the classrooms (photo courtesy of Ramla Municipality)
The department sent it inspectors to the school during the Passover break. They photographed and videoed the various displays and a City maintenance crew then took them down.
Ramla Mayor Yoel Lavi described the school's actions as "challenging the State of Israel." Referring to the foiled terror attack on Border Guard officers stationed at Shoket Junction in early April, which was carried out by a teenage Bedouin girl, Lavi added that "if the education system teaches its student with Palestinian flags and inflammatory posters in the background… there's no wonder we have such girls among us.
"This is a product of an educational system and a law enforcement system which fail to suppress this kind of things and does nothing against educators who lend their support to such incitement against Israel's sovereignty.
"I have no idea who of the teachers were behind this," he added, "but they most certainly did nothing to stop it. We dealt with it by filing a police complaint. We expect (the Education Ministry) that the teachers who looked the other way be fired."
The high school's principal said only that "we do not condone violence." Dov Solentzik, who heads the Atid Chain, said that "we are still looking into this. The translation of the slogans, as we've seen it, does not constitute incitement."
Nevertheless, Solentzik did express his reservations from the overall feel lent by the display: "the Israeli educational system finds Palestinians flags and drawings of people with guns unacceptable and out of place.
"We took the display down for starters and we're conducting a full investigation," he added. "We will not allow any expression of violence in our schools. It is utterly unacceptable."
