Attack on bilingual school

AN ARSON attack targeting first-grade classrooms at a Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem sparked a wave of condemnation yesterday as months of racial tensions in the city showed little sign of abating.

The attack took place on Saturday evening at the Hand-in-Hand bilingual school which is a rare symbol of coexistence in a city fraught by division which has seen growing friction between Jews and the Palestinians, who live in annexed east Jerusalem.

Scrawled on the walls were offensive anti-Arab slogans in Hebrew reading “Death to Arabs” and “There’s no coexistence with cancer,” police said, describing the attack as a “very serious incident”.

Nadia Knane, the school’s headmistress, said one of the first-grade classrooms had been badly damaged by the fire, and said the attackers had tried to set light to the second classroom but it didn’t catch.

“After I saw what was written, I realised it was not just a fire. They wrote ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘Kahana was right’ – words which have a lot of meaning,” she said.

Meir Kahana was a virulently anti-Arab rabbi whose Kach party was banned over incitement to racial hatred but whose ideology still inspires loyalty among Jewish extremists.

“The school had been targeted several times in recent months but every other time was outside the school. This is the first time it was inside,” the headmistress said.

Hatam Mattar, head of the parents’ committee, denounced it as “a barbaric attack” and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni also went to the school in a show of solidarity.

Late on Saturday, Education Minister Shai Piron released a statement denouncing the attack as a “violent and despicable incident”. — AFP