Editorials

...Furthermore, the situation of American Hispanics is different—they are concentrated not in one but in many distinct areas of the Commonweal: 356 country...

...Teachers and students become cynical and politicized...

...And this despite its avowed support for UN Resolution 242 which calls on Israel to withdraw from occupied territory...

...The results have been predictable: on one day a young Palestinian was killed by Israeli troops while reportedly trying to assault the Israeli military governor with a knife...

...Indeed, it has made it almost impossible for moderates in the Moslem world to say a kind word about the U.S...

...Begin was faced with a choice of a less-than-perfect peace or holding onto the occupied territory, and he has clearly opted for keeping the land...

...If you take account of the broken friendships, the strained family relationships, the hurt pride, there is no one among us who has not suffered some wound which we must try to heal in the days and weeks to come...

...Hispanic teachers respond, predictably, that this shows their bigotry...

...Elation is not called for, however...

...A second argument had to do with the child's sense of self-worth and pride in the language and culture of the home...

...If a resolution to this effect emerges in the Security Council, the United States will almost certainly veto it...

...No one wants to repeat the traumas of Canada and Belgium in the U.S...

...It may be that nothing can be done until two elections have taken place, one in the United States and one in Israel...

...Trudeau...

...Commonweal CHANCES IN THE MID EAST THE DEADLINE for Egypt and Israel to reach agreement on the terms for an interim five-year period of autonomy for the Palestinians living on the West Bank has come and gone, without success...

...On the one hand, this reduces the likelihood that maintaining Hispanic culture and endorsing the use of Spanish for certain public purposes would spur any destructive separatism...

...It demonstrates that the language of the family is no less a medium of learning than the dominant language...

...on the next day Palestinian terrorists in Hebron carried out an ambush in which six Israelis were killed...

...As Prime Minister Trudeau reminded his countrymen, "We have all lost a little in this referendum...

...20 June 1980: 357...

...Whatever political and territorial concessions, or renewed sense of solidarity and purpose, the Quebecois or Flemish have gained in their linguistic struggles, these victories have not overcome economic disadvantage...

...Recently a Federal Court in Trenton, New Jersey, upheld a state requirement that all bilingual education teachers be demonstrably bilingual...

...A major effort is under way in the United Nations to line up support for a Palestinian state on Israel's border...

...Children who speak Spanish face difficulties in school that are entirely irrelevant to the content of first-grade math and reading or to their ability to master them...

...Israel has been willing to grant only limited administrative powers...

...Somehow the deadlock in the negotiations must be broken...

...The almost inevitable result has been to focus attention on Israeli intransigence while diverting attention from the continued hard line followed by the Palestine Liberation Organization...

...But the situation in the Middle East is rapidly approaching a crisis stage, and a European initiative has much to commend it, if not in the UN then outside it...

...The problem is that this concern for acknowledging and reinforcing Hispanic culture generally has sometimes overtaken the original educational goals...

...Yet the American government has shown itself incapable of bringing the 20 June 1980: 355 pressure to bear on Israel that is needed, especially in an election year, and this fact has put the ball in Europe's court...

...Any educational policy that postpones this mastery makes children the stalking horses of a mistaken cause and asks for the heartache so eloquently defined by Mr...

...Because they cannot understand the teacher or the texts, their mastery is postponed, perhaps forever...

...Meanwhile the Begin government has been making things even more complicated by its policy of planting settlements in occupied Arab territory, even in the heart of the Arab city of Hebron...

...This will not be easy, but it must be done, and this means that ultimately the United States will have to bring the P.L.O...

...This would leave the United States and Israel isolated on the question of Palestinian rights, separated even from our allies, much as the Soviet Union was on Afghanistan...

...The right of the Palestinians to self-government must be recognized, matched by guarantees of military security for Israel...

...This has happened before, but this time there would be a difference: the Common Market European nations may very well join in approving the resolution...

...It seeks to impose itself and its citizens on another and alien culture, on a people with widely different traditions and history...

...If they do not as is too often the case, then they teach the Hispanic children in Spanish, sometimes right up to the sixth grade...

...This means that the present log-jam must be broken, and for this new initiatives are required...

...Obviously both arguments make sense in terms of the individual child's educational needs, but the second argument looks to the cultural morale and strength of the Spanishspeaking population as well...

...They prompt reflections on some coincidental developments in the United Stales...

...Some Anglo teachers in New York, for example, have called bilingual education a fraud...

...Those not directly involved with bilingual education may not see the need to affirm this apparent tautology...

...Egypt has been seeking a selfgoverning authority which would have real legislative and executive powers as well as voting rights for all Palestinians...

...somehow the Palestinians must be offered such a degree of autonomy on the West Bank and Gaza that they will abandon the rejectionist Arab governments and join the negotiations with Israel...

...Begin's initial effort to designate as his successor an opponent of the peace treaty with Egypt and a strong supporter of West Bank settlements is a bad sign...

...To continue the present policy is simply to encourage intransigence inside Israel and inside the P.L.O...

...In this setting, many children wind up semi-literate in both languages...

...THE LANGUAGE ISSUE The "non" of nearly 60 percent of the voters of Quebec to a secessionist proposal is good news for Canada and for her neighbors...

...The Israelis then expelled three West Bank leaders from the area, despite no proven connection with the attack, and Palestinian resentment ran still higher, even before the bomb outrages against the two Palestinian mayors...

...No such initiative can be expected from the Carter administration in an election year, and Prime Minister Begin seems determined to toughen rather than weaken his bargaining stance...

...Despite criticism at home and abroad, Begin clearly intends to continue the policy of planting Israeli settlements now, with the probable goal of annexation later...

...For many teachers and parents of students in our urban school system, the need is only too clear...

...So it makes sense to introduce math and reading and the rest of the curriculpms in their own language, and at the same time to teach them English, so that they can join their third-grade classmates in a common language...

...Our failure to face up to this fact is alienating the whole of Islam from the West in general and from the United States in particular...

...And soon the school becomes a linguistically divided nation—a little Canada or Belgium—with linguistically distinct classrooms instead of provinces...

...But the guiding principle should remain that the best interests of all Americans, whatever their native languages, are served by the early mastery of the one language that dominates our culture...

...On the other hand, it also reduces the likelihood of any genuine success in the economic and political life of the nation without real facility in English...

...There are many things that can be done to strengthen the linguistic and cultural heritage of Hispanic Americans, and bilingual education that is truly bilingual can at once meet the needs of the Hispanic community and the individual child...

...The issue will then be brought by Arab and third-world nations to the General Assembly where it would be approved overwhelmingly...

...The resignation of Ezer Weizman, the Israeli Cabinet's leading and lonely moderate, and Mr...

...The original argument for bilingual education was really unanswerable...

...The use of Spanish (or Italian or Chinese) in a school legitimates it to the child...

...All this is a clear reflection of the policy of Menachem Begin and his government...

...The United States says it favors "full autonomy...

...into the negotiating process...

...When asked by a New York Times reporter whether bilingual education works, a principal answers with a shrug: "It's the law...

...Israel fears that means an inevitable move toward Palestinian statehood which Israelis of almost all political persuasions abhor...

...The American State Department takes a very dim view of European efforts on the Palestinian question, seeing them as a ploy to ensure against an oil embargo and a move that undercuts our Camp David efforts, and State may succeed in heading off a UN resolution or in persuading our allies to abstain if the issue does come up in the United Nations...

...Eased entry into the dominant language has seemed less important than the maintenance of the mother tongue and its separate culture...

...Canada's wounds are the consequence of a language division bequeathed to it by history...

...Hard line or not, a solution must be found for the Palestinian problem...

...But if there is any hope at all of improvement at the moment, it probably rests on the moves being made by the West Europeans...

...With such a shift in emphasis, one might well pay less attention to whether the Hispanic teachers really speak English all that well...