Dr. Dalia Fadila is working to improve life for Arabs inside Israel through education.
Dr. Dalia Fadila
This story is part of a series called “Israeli, Palestinian Women: The Only Way Forward Is Together.” The series highlights Israeli and Palestinian women about their connection to Israel/Palestine, and how they are working to improve relations, and promote equality and coexistence between both groups of people. See the links at the bottom of this article for each article of the series.
Dr. Dalia Fadila, born and raised in Tira, Israel, and still calls Tira home, couldn’t believe what she witnessed in her typically quiet community. Teenagers were out in full force, burning trees, breaking street light fixtures, and damaging businesses. It was a horrible sight to see, and Fadila didn’t feel safe for herself or her family for the first time in her life.
During and after this latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, the “Palestinian resistance group,” classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, there were reports of riots and chaos in mixed cities in Israel like Acre and Haifa — cities where both Jewish and Arab Israelis live. But Tira, a town in the center of Israel, is an all-Arab town. And the teenagers causing a ruckus were Arab teenagers.
“Those were our kids, those were our people, our younger generation,” said Fadila. “I felt the threat from within for the first time in my life.”
This type of violence in Israel has skyrocketed in recent years. According to The Times Of Israel, there were 96 homicides in 2020, a 50 percent jump in the murder rate among Arab Israelis in four years. Even though Arab Israelis (most of whom are of Palestinian descent) account for 21% of the population in Israel, they accounted for 71% of the 125 homicides in 2019.
People in the country play the blame game — blaming the violence on everything from organized crime and parenting to police devoting too few resources to this issue. Others blame a more likely source: poverty and inequality in the Arab community in Israel.
According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2018, the median monthly income for Arab Israelis was just a little more than half that of Jewish Israelis. In addition, the National Insurance Institute of Israel’s Research and Planning Administration (Israel’s Social Security Administration) published a report showing that, in 2016, 49.4% of Arabs in Israel were living in poverty – compared to 13.3% of Jews. Though that number has since dropped to 47.1%, poverty in the Arab Israeli community is still nearly double the national average.
Many people are working to improve life for the Arab citizens of Israel and advance Arab society. One of them is Fadila — an Arab Israeli of Palestinian heritage, a mother, founder of her own set of schools, and the first female dean of an Islamic college in Israel.
Early Life
At least ten generations of Fadila’s family lived in Tira, part of the “Arab triangle.” After Israel became a country in 1948, her family stayed, and Tira became an Arab Israeli town.
“My father and my mother never told us stories of anger and loss. Instead, they told us stories of change and growth,” Fadila said, “They told us stories of Tira changing over the last 70 years from a small farmer’s village into a city.”
Fadila said her family and her husband’s family, who are also from Tira and stayed post-1948, focused on preserving and remaining on their land and in their homes — which they were allowed to do. Soon after the country was established, Fadila said her family enjoyed what she calls the benefits of being part of Israel that included social security, national security, social insurance, and economic stability.
“It led the Arab community inside Israel from a place of struggle, from trying to survive daily under the British Mandate and from being fearful for what you have, because, during the 30s, they lived in a state of chaos. But after the establishment of Israel, especially towards the 70s and 80s, the Arab community in Israel started to enjoy the privileges. They enjoyed the advantages of becoming a citizen of the State of Israel,” Fadila said.
“No place is perfect, and no state around the world is perfect. And even the U.S., which is the torch of freedom and democracy, had its hard times, to put it as an understatement. But there has definitely been growth here for the Arab community.”
Fadila said she faced more of a “feminist” struggle during her life; she battled between her yearn for independence and hope to achieve her educational aspirations inside Israel while maintaining respect for the conservative and religious Muslim/Arab society where she lived. Fadila describes a pressure or tension where she had to learn how to balance being one of the first women in her town who could access higher education while proving she was not a “rebel” and remaining respectful to her very conservative Islamic community.
Despite the constraints of growing up in this type of world, she was raised in a progressive family, with a father who encouraged her to focus on being an excellent student, role model and to cultivate skills — like learning Hebrew and English — that would eventually help her go far in life.
Fadila attended Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University, a very religious, Jewish school, where she earned her first degree in English literature and her master’s degree in female minority literature.
She is among the very first in her community to achieve a Ph.D. in literature.
“I had to know how to stay part of my community, not be accused of pretending to be Jewish for the simple fact that I had a higher degree, go back and also balance that with my traditional roles,” she said. “It was not easy. It was very, very complicated.”
She also struggled with balancing her various, seemingly clashing identities as an Arab, Muslim, Israeli woman of Palestinian descent.
It was during her time earning her Ph.D. that Fadila had an awakening. At the time, her favorite professor, Michael Kramer, an expert in Jewish American literature who became one of her most incredible mentors, recommended she study Arab-American authors for her Ph.D.
Through her Ph.D., Fadila hoped to define who she was, learn how to make that definition acceptable, and expand the possibilities for other Arab Israelis.
She studied “Crescent” by a Jordanian-American writer, featuring an Iraqi American character named Sirine. Sirine works in a Lebanese restaurant and “hyphenates” her identity by fusing Iraqi and American cuisine. (Fadila relates the hyphenate to how Americans hyphenate their identities. For example, African-American, Asian-American, etc.)
After reading this story and beginning her Ph.D., it clicked. Fadila looked at herself as the subject, essentially viewing herself as Sirine, and realized like this character, she could embrace all her seemingly contradictory identities by hyphenating them. Fadila said Arabs in Israel haven’t yet mastered the hyphenated identity since Israel’s establishment, causing them to remain in a state of turmoil and confusion.
“I would like to present the identity of Arabs inside Israel, as a zone, as a space, where there’s an acknowledgment of the clashing variables,” she said. “There is this variable of being an Arab clashing with being Israeli, this variable of Palestinian heritage clashing with Israeliness, and there is also Islam, Christianity, and Druze, and being a woman inside this space too.”
“You need to acknowledge that, but unless you make some organizing formula from all of these clashing variables, and you understand that you are entitled to your own equation of what it means to be an Arab inside Israel, whether you see yourself as a Palestinian, whether you see yourself as someone of Palestinian heritage, you need to see your history, from a place of acknowledgment and growth and not from a place of loss and victimhood.”
“I wanted to bring light into the equation and show Arab Israelis they can use their past to create their present,” she said.
Fadila was determined to help Arab Israelis understand these concepts while becoming highly educated productive members of Israeli society — and it’s been an ongoing journey mostly involving investing in education.
Investing in education for Arab Israelis
Fadila was working to invest in Arab Israelis education before she even graduated college. In fact, during her time at the university, Fadila worked in the high school in Tira she had once attended. She says she worked to empower her students through English literature. But, unfortunately, her progressive teaching style was condemned by some in the community, including many fellow teachers. After a three-year battle, she was eventually kicked out.
Even still, Fadila’s multiple degrees were impressive enough to garner attention elsewhere.
The English education representative from the Ministry of Education reached out to invite her to teach at al-Qasemi institute, a religious Islamic and male-dominated college. She became the first female faculty member. Here, Fadila continued to ruffle feathers by the literature she chose to teach. She told the Times Of Israel that she was accosted by students and faculty for “attacking their Islamic values,” for some of the content she had them read.
One of the books her students read was “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by D.H. Lawrence, a coming-of-age novel about a daughter transforming into someone’s wife; she also explored Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” a story set in the 1960’s American South where two young African American women struggle with their heritage.
“These stories were dramatic enough for the students to protest that I was ruining their good Muslim morals. It wasn’t radical feminist literature. I was just representing two different models of life. Can you make a decision about why you wear a hijab? But I was shaking the status quo, and they couldn’t accept that,” Fadila told The Times Of Israel.
Despite the disapproval from many of Fadila’s counterparts, she was promoted to the head of the English department at the college (she says unlike most men in this space, the college president believed in women’s empowerment). Three years later, she became the dean of the college. During her time there, though, she struggled because of resistance she received from her male colleagues and their unwillingness to take orders from a woman, along with constant roadblocks from faculty members working to halt the change she was working to create.
“It was too suffocating to stay and try to lead big social change from the classroom,” she said. “I figured out I need to get out of the classroom to figure out how to lead change from outside to inside.”
“And then I realized I need to start from the place of investing in early childhood education and growing an alternative system.”
Here is where she got the idea for Q-Schools, or Quality-Schools — schools that enable marginalized communities to access high-quality, holistic, and humanist education from preschool to high school. Q-Schools specifically serve Arab children in Israel, and through English, students learn progressive values.
Q-Schools was established in 2007 and started as an English language program in the afternoon in Tira, Fadila’s hometown. Fadila’s hope for Q-Schools was to lead social change through investing in Arab childrens’ intellectual and personal skills. Over the past 14 years, Q-Schools has impacted over 18,000 students and 1,000 teachers and administrators. The schools operate in the center and north of Israel, in East Jerusalem, and since 2012, in Amman, Jordan. In 2014, Fadila also founded a new bilingual preschool for ages two to four in Tira. In addition, in 2021, Fadila opened two more kindergartens.
“People may not think so seriously of kindergartens, but for me, this is the building block of society. I say it’s the building block of society because, in the Arab community, early childhood education has been neglected for so many years as something not important,” Fadila said.
“My feeling was I need to focus my mission more on trying to create schools to create, not only programs but schools, where you create the right environment for Arab kids to grow into a better future. And that was my feeling. So it’s less of a political feeling and more of a social feeling.”
Creating schools for early education also helps Fadila’s feminist goals— to improve life for Arab women. She says in Arab society, women are mostly expected to stay home and take care of their children to the age of five, so she sees creating these schools as a social revolution. While young children are in school learning, their mothers can pursue education and employment.
Fadila also created the materials used in Q-Schools. She says the content used is gender, social, and cross-cultural oriented, so the Arab children who attend her schools learn to be excellent while understanding and respecting others. Q-Schools also created a Jewish/Arab Youth United Nations debate program, helping her students grow into “eloquent, leadership-oriented, and confident speakers.” She also connected Q-Schools with international partners that supported the children to travel to the United Nations in New York City and debate programs worldwide.
Aside from her schools, Fadila is part of many organizations working to integrate young Arabs and open up doors of employment and higher education for this population in Israel. And she says progress is being made. In the last two years, she’s become co-CEO for Atidna, an organization promoting integration of Arabs in Israeli society. She’s also involved in a five-year plan worth over $154 million to boost high-tech and science programs in Israel’s Arab community. Through that plan, Q-Schools is helping to mentor other public schools around Israel in English language development.
“We don’t want to only stay out of the system, we want to help the system, and this is why we created The Consultation and Strategy Institute inside the Q-School, where we’re helping mentor other schools,” Fadila said. “We worked with Arab schools, we had the privilege of working with Ethiopian immigrant schools, at-risk schools, different schools around the country, with Jews and Arabs, and here we come not as an Arab niche, but as a professional niche.”
Fadila said through her work, she sees the significant amount of budgeting being used to invest in Arab schools through the municipalities in Jerusalem and the Ministry of Education. In addition, she says that considerable funds are being used to support Arab men and women, making higher education accessible to Arab Israelis, and scholarships are being distributed.
“At this stage of my life, I will come to embrace complexity. And this is why I now can speak about it as part of the journey, and I think complexity helps us,” Fadila explained.
“You have two options when you live in a complex place as the place we are living in, either you’re lost in the complexity, and you’re overwhelmed by it, and you’re always frustrated, or you grow from it, and you see the opportunities in the complexities. I see my role as creating educational opportunities and educational solutions.”
Israeli/Palestinian conflict and being an Arab Israeli
While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict typically focuses on Jewish Israelis and Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, Arabs living inside Israel often face an identity crisis — especially when war breaks out.
Because most Arabs living inside the country are of Palestinian descent, Arab Israelis struggle during war, stuck in the middle of their concern for Palestinians outside Israel and their security inside the country.
“In times of conflict, your country is against your people. And this is difficult,” Fadila said. “It’s complicated to be in such a position where you identify with your people, but you also identify with your country. And you realize that you are within this country, and as long as this country is safe, you are safe. But you also want your people to be safe.”
Israeli Arabs also often face criticism from Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and outside of Israel proper — some who say to people like Fadila that accepting Israeli citizenship is a betrayal.
“I do not want to keep defining myself daily as the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Fadila explained. “As long as we as individuals – and we as a community – keep defining our identity as the conflict point between what it means to be Palestinian and Arab on the one hand and Israeli on the other, we will never be able to progress, not socially, not culturally, not economically, not in any way.”
Fadila said that after Israel’s creation in 1948, a line was drawn about what it means to be Palestinian inside the Palestinian territories and a Palestinian Arab Israeli as a citizen of the state of Israel. She says this is where she became more thoughtful about investing inside the Arab community inside Israel.
“It’s as if we [Arab minority] are on hold, waiting until there is kind of a resolution — a two-state resolution and Palestine is independent — and as if there is no legitimacy to whatever investment we have to do for our infrastructure, resources, economy, even cultivation of a kind of a culture of our own,” Fadila said. “If we want two million people inside Israel, Arab citizens in the state of Israel, raising our kids here to be excellent students in an Israeli schooling system and higher academic system — and to go on and be employed and be part of the workforce inside Israel — it is our responsibility to give back to this community.”
“And of course, I am looking for a solution. And, of course, I am for a just solution and a humanitarian solution. But, still, my career and whatever I do around education, development of resources, intellectual resources, and economic resources, I do it because I believe our community inside Israel is entitled to investment and unique investment of its own.”
“But to be stuck in a conflict that is unresolvable, at least right now, is holding generations and generations in a dark room, prisoners in a dark room telling them ‘Wait until whoever comes to solve the problem. You’re powerless unless it is resolved. And once it is resolved, we promise you will have enough employment, you will have this and this and this and this is not logical.”
In recent years, Israel has been described as an “apartheid” by many, especially people in the west. During the conflict, Israel was accused of “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians and even genocide. Fadila does not believe any of this is happening (especially as the Palestinian population has risen significantly since the creation of Israel.) But there is inequality — inequality she is working to combat.
Despite the inequality, Fadila said, approximately 50,000 Arab students are in Israeli academia, with Arab graduates of computer sciences hoping to be part of Israeli high-tech. Along with this, more Arabs are hoping to be part of governmental offices (the first Arab coalition was elected to the Knesset in 2021) and other crucial areas of Israeli society.
But those same people, she says, hear from Arab political leaders that the integration isn’t real and continue waiting until there is a “free Palestine.” She says it puts them in a state of confusion.
“This ends up feeding that percentage of the purposeless, unemployed, frustrated young people who at the first chance, go and destroy, destroy, destroy because they’re confused,” she said.
The Future
Through her work, Fadila is working to strengthen three areas for Arab Israelis. First, she wants to improve belonging or local citizenship, creating Arab Israelis who are proud of their community in Israel and invest in their community while also remembering their history and Arab roots and culture. Also, she encourages Arab citizens within Israel to raise their children to succeed and become proud of who they are and where they live. Lastly, she hopes to educate children to become part of improving the world through global leadership.
“I want my Arab community inside Israel to be prosperous, progressive, and safe. And I believe this can be achieved through education,” Fadila said. “I believe it’s time we say enough about victimhood, and we progress into commitment and social responsibility.”
“I’m not a victim. I don’t want to be a victim. And victimhood is against and in contrast to education. And you cannot be an educator if you still feel like a victim.”
“So I feel like I’m an agent of change. And I want each kid and young person and teacher at my school to be an agent of change.”
Previous articles:
Israeli And Palestinian Women: The Only Way Forward Is Together
Lama Abuarquob, Palestinian Activist, On Israel/Palestine: Hope Land Will Be For Everybody
