150,000 Arab students in Israel lacking computers, electricity, or internet access are unable to connect to online remote-learning solutions and cannot secure their basic right to education.Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel has sent a series of letters to Israeli education and communications authorities demanding they provide computers and internet access so that some 150,000 Palestinian Arab schoolchildren stuck at home due to COVID-19 are able to connect to online remote learning systems together with their peers.
What is left unsaid is that haredi children have the exact same issues, so this is not an Arab problem but a problem of not enough resources.
Also left unsaid is that the Education Ministry simply doesn't have the budget to buy enough computers.
So when Adalah lists the shortfalls per community:
Municipality name | Number of missing computers | Number of computers allocated by Israel’s Education Ministry |
Nazareth | 5,000 | 1,868 |
Umm al-Fahem | 4,000 | 1,835 |
Qalansawe | 1,961 | 704 |
Chances are the Education Ministry is calculating the number of computers per household, not student, which is the most efficient way to spread around a limited number of devices.
The absurd part comes later in the Adalah report:
In addition, another 50,000 Bedouin schoolchildren living in unrecognized villages in the Naqab (Negev) region also lack computers as well as basic infrastructure such as electricity and internet access.
As we've seen, Bedouin have built hundreds of illegal villages, willy nilly, all over the Negev, without coordination with Israel. Israel has set up towns for them to move into with full infrastructure but most of them refuse to abandon their makeshift homes that they are using to stake a claim to state land.
Now Adalah is demanding that Israel provide electricity, plumbing and Internet to hundreds of illegal sites, some of them with only one family!
If they cared about education, they would ask that the Arabs move into the free housing Israel is offering where the kids can have the necessary infrastructure. Instead, they are using COVID-19 as an excuse to demand that Israel legalize their illegal communities.