Entrance to the Ramallah Friends Schools, founded in Ramallah in 1869 by Quakers, initially only as a girls’ school for Palestinian students. The first experiments in mixed classes began in 1902 when Palestinian boys and girls had classes together for an hour and a half a day. It was a great success. Boys first took the Palestinian Matriculation examination in Jerusalem in 1926. The American University in Beirut agreed that male students could be automatically accepted after graduation. Most Palestinian women who graduated usually married and raised families. A few female students went to Jerusalem Girls College or the Teacher Training College in Beirut. An important step in the progress of Arab women’s education in the Levant was the opening of the Beirut College for Women in 1924. This placed responsibility on the Friends School to prepare all its graduates for higher education. In the period after the 1948 Nakba, thousands of refugees poured into Ramallah. More than 800,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes and destroyed communities, due to ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Zionist militias. The Friends School commencement that year with 47 graduates was perhaps the most moving one the schools had ever experienced. Even as the event was going on in the auditorium, hundreds of refugees were fleeing into Ramallah. Students and families assembled for the occasion could hear explosions in nearby Jerusalem. For a period, the International Red Cross occupied the Boys School buildings with the school providing accommodations and occasional hot meals to medical staff. The auditorium balcony was boarded up to store medical supplies. The main building was hastily converted to a hospital. A bedroom in the principal’s residence became a maternity ward with as many as seven refugee babies born in a single day. The school station wagon was driven by the principal, providing ambulance service to the critically wounded. The school continued to witness tragic events, starting with Israeli shelling during the 1967 occupation to forced shutdowns during the Intifadas. It remains one of the top academic institutions for secondary education in the region.