When she told her cousin that her 12-year-old Jewish schoolfriend had slept over at her house one night, Aeen, an Arab-Israeli schoolgirl, was shocked at the response.

“She said, ‘She didn’t try to kill you, she didn’t try to hurt you?’,” Aeen said. Such a negative response to their cross-cultural friendship is something that the 406 pupils of the Max Rayne School in Jerusalem have to cope with when outside their classrooms. The school, the only bilingual education centre in a deeply divided city, brings together Arab and Jewish children for an education that spans both cultures and languages.

“There are Arabs who don’t like Jews,” says Aeen, who is 11. There are also Jews who do not like Arabs: located between two poor neighbourhoods in southern Jerusalem - one Arab, one Jewish – the opening of the school’s new premises yesterday drew protests from a handful of Jewish residents who resent both the traffic jams that it brings and the principle of bilingual education.

“I pray the building will collapse,” said Yoshua Haham, an irate pensioner standing outside the grounds of the school, named after the British Jewish philanthropist Lord Rayne. “From a religious point of view, I’m against it. I wouldn’t put my Jewish kids in with Muslims. I don’t want them to learn about Muslim culture.” Such attitudes are precisely what the school – which was spread out previously in cramped campuses across the city – aims to change. Each primary school class has two teachers, one speaking Arabic, the other Hebrew. The children mix freely, learning about their histories and forging rare friendships that bridge the gap between the two communities.

“It’s a small thing, but it’s growing,” Ala Khattib, the Arab co-director who works with a Jewish fellow principal, said. The school was set up by an education trust called Hand in Hand, which has opened four centres in Israel, including one in an Arab village that is attended by about 100 Jewish students. “We try to be nonpolitical but education is always political,” Mr Khattib said. “What we are doing here is preparing the leaders, who can lead to a change in society.”

Ilham Barhoom, an Arab-Israeli mother, said she felt that her son, 12, was safer in the school than in a purely Jewish institution, where she said Arab children were sometimes the target of retaliatory violence from Jewish children after terrorist bombings.

“We’d be afraid of violence against him in a Jewish school but here there is coexistence. They will learn to live with each other, learn the culture of the other,” she said.

The pupils are separated briefly once each May, when the Jewish-Israeli children mark Israeli independence, which Palestinians refer to as the naqba, or disaster. Then they return to class to discuss the varying perspectives on the 1948-49 war and other issues that shape so many identities here.

“The beautiful thing about school is you don’t have to agree,” Mr Khattib, a former human rights worker, said. In his school, racial tensions are secondary to the more common frictions of growing up. “We have the biggest fight in the sixth grade,” he said. “The boys and girls fight. They hate each other. But it’s Jewish and Arab girls against Jewish and Arab boys.”

If their teachers have high hopes for their young charges, the pupils themselves believe that they are at the forefront of change in their troubled country.

“I want to change the world,” exclaimed Yael, standing with her Arab friends, who nodded their agreement before their teacher ushered them back to class.

Founding father

—Max Rayne (1918-2003) was a property developer who became a self-made millionaire

—His donations were usually anonymous. In 1964 he gave the National Gallery £225,000 to acquire a painting by Cézanne, on the condition that he received no publicity

—The Rayne Foundation, set up in 1962, grants millions of pounds to thousands of beneficiaries every year

—He helped to found Darwin College in Cambridge