Education Ministry Instructed to End Discriminatory Budgets

December 1, 2008

Israel’s Supreme Court has given the Ministry of Education until next May to eliminate its discriminatory policy of listing National Priority Areas for special funding. The ruling follows a successful petition to the Supreme Court by NIF grantees Adalah: Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and Follow-Up Committee for Arab Education.

Adalah’s lawsuit followed the Israeli government’s designation of 535 towns and villages throughout the country as National Priority Areas. Despite the consistently lower socio-economic status of Arab towns, only four were designated under this program.  The priority areas received lucrative benefits in budgetary allocations for schools and kindergartens. Adalah successfully petitioned the Supreme Court on this matter in 2006, when the Ministry of Education was ordered to discontinue the policy within a year.

Discriminatory National Priority Areas mean overcrowded Arab classrooms.

This latest petition was presented as a motion for contempt of court and one of the two attorneys presenting the petition was NIF Law Fellow alum Susan Zaher. The seven-justice panel headed by Supreme Court President, Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch ordered the government to end the policy within six months.

The Supreme Court rejected the Ministry of Education’s claim that it was unable to implement the policy immediately due to budgetary considerations and was carrying out the Supreme Court’s order gradually over four to five years. In their ruling the Supreme Court judges described the Ministry of Education’s action as a “flagrant expression of its disdain for the decisions delivered by the court.”

The court ruling was widely covered by the Israeli media. Read more about this topic in Haaretz.