Hope Flowers School AL AMAL CHlLD CARE CENTER - THE HOPE FLOWERS SCHOOL PEACE & DEMOCRACY  POB 732  Bethlehem, Palestine * Via Israel Home     Hussein Issa Press Home of Peace Education in the Middle East This is our goal at Al Amal, to infuse our children with the importance, beauty and necessity of peace. Hussein Ibrahim Issa

EL KHADER, West Bank, Dec. 19 — Even as it withers, the pink-and-white Hope Flowers school here on Bethlehem's outskirts is drawing at least a handful of Israelis and Palestinians together, if for a troubling reason. The school was founded 18 years ago by a Palestinian refugee, Hussein Issa, who hoped to teach the importance of coexistence and democracy — along with Arabic, English and Hebrew — to Palestinian children. But the joint field trips held with Israeli schools ended with the start of the conflict more than two years ago. The collapsing Palestinian economy bit into tuition payments. The roadblock erected by the Israeli Army on the only route to the school halted the school bus. And for many Palestinians, the enduring conflict made the idea of coexistence seem increasingly Pollyannaish, if not disloyal.

Then, before dawn on Tuesday morning, Israeli forces arrested the principal, Ibrahim Issa — the founder's son — and accused him of harboring two terrorists. Mr. Issa's family said he was duped by a man who claimed to be renting an apartment for innocent purposes.

Desperate pleas from the family to contacts at the American Consulate in Jerusalem halted the demolition of the Issa home near here, though not before an Israeli bulldozer destroyed the garage and gouged out the garden. Some Israelis with ties to the school from before the conflict have been badgering the Israeli government for news of Mr. Issa; some have been checking on the family and offering support. "Oh, boy, those people were great," said Benjamin Waxman, who visited Hope Flowers just before the conflict began in September 2000. "First of all, they were nice, extremely nice. Secondly, what they were trying to do was to run a school where they teach people that coexistence is possible, the Zionists aren't the enemy. It's refreshing." He wanted to set up a computer lab at the school, but the conflict intervened. Mr. Waxman's interest — and his reception at the school — were particularly striking because he is an Israeli settler, living in Efrat, just a short distance from Hope Flowers but far across the deepening Israeli-Palestinian divide. On Monday, two Democratic members of Congress, David E. Price of North Carolina and Jim Davis of Florida, visited the school. "I was quite impressed," Mr. Price said in a telephone interview. He met with Mr. Issa, 28, and said he was "baffled and dismayed" by the news of the arrest. Mr. Price's church in Chapel Hill has sent at least one volunteer to help at Hope Flowers.

Hind Issa, 52, the widow of the founder of Hope Flowers, said the school's goal was to "decrease the suffering of both peoples."

"Even now, we are convinced of the need for a peace process," she said. "Violence hasn't led to results for anyone." During that conversation, in the family home on Wednesday, a Palestinian just released from the same prison where her son Ibrahim was being held telephoned to convey a request: Because Mr. Issa, an engineer trained in the Netherlands, had been taken away in his pajamas, he asked that his family send warm clothes and his medicine, for an ulcer and allergies. Eventually, an Israeli friend of the family helped deliver the clothes and medicine across the army checkpoints. The Israeli asked not to be identified for fear of being criticized for helping a jailed Palestinian. Capt. Sharon Feingold, an army spokeswoman, called the raid on Tuesday morning a "pinpoint operation based on intelligence." She said the soldiers had found what they were looking for — a commander of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the violent group affiliated with Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction, and another militant from that organization. Ghada Issa, Ibrahim's sister, said that her brother rented an apartment to a stranger two days before the army arrived and that the stranger had said he was a night guard in Bethlehem. "Ibrahim was deceived," she said. Ami Isseroff, an Israeli software consultant and a friend of the Issa family, has been sending out e-mail alerts about their predicament to friends on Internet sites devoted to dialogue about the conflict. In an essay he posted at the Web site www.Mideastweb.org , Mr. Isseroff lamented what he called a lack of due process. He reported that it took a day even to find out where Mr. Issa was being held.

When he visited Hope Flowers in 1999, Mr. Isseroff was amazed to see an Israeli flag painted on an outside wall, beside the other flags of the world. Even before the conflict, such seemingly trivial recognitions of the adversary's nationhood were rare.

Israeli soldiers removed the roadblock outside the school just last week. But today the school was shut down because of a curfew imposed on all of Bethlehem. Israeli armored vehicles clanked through the streets, occasionally pelted with stones thrown by children. From a high of about 500 children in 1998, enrollment has fallen to about 120 now. Mr. Issa's friends say he was considering borrowing against the school's bus to pay the monthly operating costs of about $7,000. The Israeli flag was gone today from the mural; there is a blank white spot directly below the flag of Iraq. Ghada Issa, 25, said that an offended painter had covered it up, and that because of the Israeli closings, the family had not yet hired someone to restore it.

Another Israeli flag can be seen on a poster of "Flags of the World" in the school's entrance way. Nearby hangs an article from The Jerusalem Post of Jan. 26, 1999, before the conflict began. It describes how, on most Tuesdays, third graders from Hope Flowers joined with counterparts from an Israeli school to learn about agriculture. Suleiman Salah, a 5-year-old kindergarten pupil at Hope Flowers, wandered through the empty grounds today as the school's guard, his cousin Khaled Salah, 37, showed some visitors around. Suleiman said he had learned the English words for "bird" and "cat." He said that he liked Hope Flowers, and that it was closed because "they arrested Ibrahim." His cousin asked Suleiman if he knew why the Israelis imposed a curfew. "Because they want Al Aksa and Jerusalem, "Suleiman replied, in a reference to Al Aksa mosque. Asked if he would play with an Israeli, he said: "I don't like them. They shoot people."

But what about an Israeli boy who was not armed? "An Arab?" he asked. A Jew, he was told. "No," he said. ------

Copyright 2002, New York Times and James Bennet. Reprinted by permission. Presented by MidEastWeb - http://www.mideastweb.org/

This article originally appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/international/middleeast/20MIDE.html