Risking bombed bus routes, Israeli students return to school

JERUSALEM -- Filing past armed guards, high fences and surveillance cameras, Israeli students went back to school this week, wary of again riding the city buses that have been repeatedly struck by suicide bombers.

One Jerusalem high school is so buttressed with security that the students, prohibited from straying beyond its front entrance until the final bell, call it "the jail."

Palestinian militants, angered by renewed Israeli military targeting of their leaders, are promising to send more young men rigged with explosives into Israeli cities.

For many of Israel's 1.7 million students, that's particularly troubling. Except for students at a few schools that have private bus service, most must ride city buses. Hallway shrines to classmates killed in attacks grow larger. And graduates going straight into the army continue dying in clashes.

Under such stress, students can lose control. Some teenage boys say fistfights are sparked by arguments over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as much as rivalries or girlfriends.

"The summer holiday was a big relief; we got to stay home," said Yadin Miller, 16, whose parents are considering moving to England to escape violence, a poor economy and having to send their son to the army.

Miller goes to Jerusalem's Rene Cassin High School, built on a battlefield of the 1967 Mideast War when Israel captured the Arab sector of Jerusalem along with the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Buses pull up to the school at the spot where a suicide bombing eight years ago split open a bus during summer vacation and killed five people, shattering school windows and leaving the sidewalk strewn with metal and torn bodies. On Wednesday, two guards stood at the gate wearing pistols.

One of the arriving buses had bulletproof windows because it carries students who live in West Bank Jewish settlements that are often targeted by gunmen.

The school of 1,600 students has an experimental program to bring together its predominantly Jewish student body with others from Arab schools for seminars. The meetings have continued despite three years of fighting, but one Arab student who attended was killed in October 2000 by police who fired into crowds of Israeli Arabs during pro-Palestinian protests.

Underscoring the inequality of Israel's Arab minority -- about 20 percent of the country's 6.6 million people -- is the poor state of Arab schools. Some classrooms are in danger of collapsing, said Gadeer Nicola, a lawyer for the human rights group Adalah.

"It is an understatement to say they are in a bad situation," she said. In the late 1990s, the Education Ministry announced a five-year plan for closing the gap, Nicola said, but "until today, we got nothing."

In the West Bank, Palestinians also returned to school this week, and in some places had to dodge Israeli tanks to get to class. Others dropped their backpacks and hurled rocks at soldiers. One 17-year-old in the city of Nablus was shot and seriously wounded in the head with a rubber-coated steel pellet.

A principal there, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he'd been given instructions to keep students from cutting class to join stone-throwing clashes or demonstrations organized by militant groups, but said he's powerless to stop them.

The Palestinian Education Ministry this week ordered schools to take down posters glorifying those killed in the fighting, including suicide bombers, who are revered as martyrs. The pictures, many of which show young men posing with weapons, are seen by Israel as a means of inciting youths to join the ranks of militants.

But the principal said, "I can't stop a pupil when he hangs a poster of his brother or a friend who was killed by Israelis."

Back in Jerusalem at Rene Cassin, students also remember friends killed or wounded in the conflict.

"We've had our share of tragedy," said Vice Principal Orna Millo. "Our main problem is trying to figure out how to convince students that violence is not a way of life."

Adults and students alike often say they accept the dangers as just another part of life in Israel.

Riding a bus through the French Hill neighborhood -- which has been the target of many shooting and bombing attacks on buses -- 17-year-old Zvi Levine said he has no choice but to ride the route until he can drive. "I get my driver's license soon," he said.