Hooligans lit the fire in the first-grade classroom with a pile of textbooks. But textbooks apparently don’t burn very well. The classroom was destroyed, and the one next to it damaged, but that was all.
It was a Saturday evening, so the custodian called the principal at home to report the fire. When the principal arrived at the school, it wasn’t just the blackened remains of arson that made her sick. It was graffiti sprayed on the walls that truly turned her stomach: “No co-existence with cancer.” “Death to Arabs.”
The principal was an Arab, and her school was the rarest of things to be found in the heart of Jerusalem: a school whose students were 50 percent Arab and 50 percent Jewish. And on this dark night, she was in mourning.
“My first thought was, ‘Our dream is finished.’ Surely NO parent will want to send their children here anymore.”