ABSTRACT
Looking back at the development of the Israeli education system up to 1968, Israeli policy makers tended to speak in self-laudatory terms: after all, within two decades after the War of 1948 and the incorporation of the Palestinians and the new Jewish immigrants, almost all Israeli children were attending elementary school, irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, gender, or length of stay in the country; and almost all Jewish youngsters were receiving 12 years of schooling, as were about 50 percent of Israeli Palestinian youth. In addition, university attendance was growing. Ubiquitous inequality, separation, and segregation seemed to them unavoidable, temporary exigencies that would eventually disappear, as the system developed.
