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In societies experiencing intractable conflicts, civil society may seek conflict-management solutions that are not necessarily political or institutional. Israel, with a century-old conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, has various NGOs trying to bring both sides together in different ways. The present study focuses on four such NGOs: Merchavim, Hand in Hand, Abraham Initiatives, and Sikkuy-Aufoq. Drawing on their websites and publications as well as interviews with their Jewish and Palestinian directors, it offers a comparative analysis of their goals, strategies, collaborations, evaluation methods, difficulties, and aspirations. The findings point to similarities and differences between the organizations’ agendas, painting a picture of the key issues confronting efforts to build a shared society in Israel.

The introductory chapter begins by clarifying the rationale that led the editors to delve into this project despite the many challenges in this field of study. First, we outline the rationale that preceded our journey, while explaining the gap in the academic literature in this field. Thereafter, we address each of the four parts of this book. The first part deals with immigrant and immigrant-origin teachers. It reviews the social and linguistic challenges they face in geopolitical contexts in Israel, Europe, and the USA. The second part reviews the experiences of indigenous teachers as minorities in multilingual and bilingual schools. The third focuses on international minority teacher educators, and examines the pedagogical and cultural challenges they face as educators, instructors, and supervisors of pre-service teachers. The fourth and final part showcases ethnic minority teachers integrated into educational frameworks around the globe, highlighting the challenges and benefits involved. We conclude this chapter by presenting the potential contributions of the empirical evidence contained in this open-access book to the growing theoretical and practical understanding of the potential benefits and risks involved in these processes.

This chapter contributes to a better understanding of how minority teachers in majority schools experience their work and how their participation in such educational contexts helps shape their sense of ethno-cultural belonging and their sense of self-efficacy. Through comparative work, we gain insights into the context-specific conditions which might help support or undermine minority teachers’ inclusion. To do this we compared the reported experiences of Palestinian Israeli teachers working in two somewhat different educational contexts; the Hebrew speaking schools which serve the regular Israeli Jewish population and the bilingual integrated schools which offer the opportunity for the two populations to study under one roof in a society in which schools are mostly segregated. Both these educational contexts include Palestinian Israeli teachers in their faculty. Our findings point mostly at similarities in the way these teachers experience their work at the schools but also some notable differences have been exposed. Both groups of teachers’ express satisfaction regarding their work at the Hebrew speaking and the bilingual integrated schools. They are satisfied with their work and feel they belong to a very special ‘club’ a metaphor that affords them a strong and positive positioning within the school context.

Recess, the bus ride home, the school corridor and other grey areas are ambiguous for both teachers and students and fall under less institutional regulation. The purpose of this study was to examine the ways teachers would react when they encounter students’ informal political comments in the grey areas. We presented vignettes to 71 Palestinian teachers and 64 Jewish teachers in Israel and asked them what they would have done in a similar situation in their classroom. Teachers’ reactions were on a continuum ranging from avoidance and passivity to engaging in multidimensional mediation. Differences between Jewish and Palestinian teachers were found, and they reflect power relations between the Jewish majority and the Palestinian minority, which involve Palestinian teachers being more reluctant to engage in controversial public issues due to their minority status.

The current study examines the workings of a bilingual school for Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli students and its contribution towards the goal of educating for equal citizenship in Israel’s multic...

Higher education institutions worldwide are increasingly investing in ‘internationalisation’, although its meanings and measures differ significantly between contexts, countries, and institutions. This article analyses the implementation of internationalisation in three second-tier higher education institutions specialising in teacher training programmes in Israel under an EU-funded TEMPUS (Trans-European Mobility Programme for University Studies) project. We show how internationalisation is implemented at these institutions, where diverse motivations, power relations, and ideas intervene. We discuss the main themes that emerged through semi-structured interviews with the colleges’ leadership, supporting our findings with a content analysis of the colleges’ strategic plans. Our study provides new insights, revealing how the EU internationalisation agenda is interpreted locally in such settings, thereby highlighting the importance of the particular context in this process.