Occupied Jerusalem - The

Israeli Minister of Education, Yifat Shasha Biton, decided last Thursday to cancel the permanent licenses of Palestinian schools in occupied Jerusalem, due to what she said was "incitement against the state and the Israeli army in textbooks."

Shasha Biton threatened to cancel the license of every educational institution whose curricula contain incitement against "the State of Israel and its symbols."

This came after a series of inspections of those schools carried out by the Implementation Department in the Monitoring and Enforcement Department in the Israeli Ministry, which amounted to selecting books from students’ bags in the classroom, and calling school principals to a hearing committee, which ended with depriving them of a permanent operating license, and replacing them with temporary ones. For a period of one year, the school will remove the contents, as a condition of returning the licence.

The schools mentioned are the Abrahamic College in the Al-Suwaneh neighborhood, which was established in 1931, and the Faith Schools with its five branches throughout occupied Jerusalem, which was established in 1984. The schools are classified as private and include more than two thousand Jerusalemite students and enjoy international quality standards.

Al Jazeera Net tried to communicate with school principals, but they preferred to postpone the permit to the media because they were not informed of the decision directly from the Ministry of Occupation, and they only knew about it through the media.

The Israeli decision claimed that “incitement” was mentioned in some third, seventh and ninth grade books by glorifying the prisoners and their armed struggle against the occupation, accusing the latter of being responsible for the water crisis in the territories of the Palestinian Authority, talking about the occupation of Palestine and crimes against its people, and narrating issues of the Nakba, massacres, demolition, arrest and settlement and the apartheid wall, in addition to obstructing and targeting Palestinian medical staff.

What does license cancellation mean?

The Director-General of the Jerusalem Affairs Unit in the Palestinian Ministry of Education, Dima Al-Samman, told Al Jazeera Net that international law obligates the occupation to provide semi-free services to the children of the occupied city, including the allocations of private schools that are paid after the school's license.

And she adds that these allocations are a right, not an honor, as Jerusalemites pay taxes to the occupation under compulsion.

Schools need these financial allocations due to some binding Israeli laws regarding the minimum wage, the termination fund, and some other costly criteria, bearing in mind that the average student premium in them reaches two thousand dollars annually, and therefore canceling the license will lead to higher premiums or reduced salaries to fill the deficit.

After the Israeli decision, schools will have two options: the first is to refuse to modify the contents and thus cancel the license and cut the financial allocations, while the second is to accept the amendment of the contents, increasing the possibility of the Israeli curriculum leaking to those schools, and the succession of concessions and interventions.

After canceling the license and allowances, schools will need compensation and parallel financial support from local and international community institutions, and they will be forced to raise fees, and thus a student emigration to schools with lower premiums, such as schools affiliated with the occupation municipality in Jerusalem that teach the Israeli curriculum and receive financial support.

Jerusalem schools teach a curriculum that celebrates Palestinian national issues (social networking sites)

Blackmail and Judaization

The Director of the Jerusalem Affairs Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Education, Dima Al-Samman, confirms that the occupation blackmails schools into accepting forging the curriculum in exchange for a license, in an effort to impose its control over education in Jerusalem, in implementation of the "five-year" plan in which it planned to teach the Israeli curriculum to 98% of school students in Jerusalem.

To this end, Dima adds that the occupation has been seeking since 1967 to impose its curriculum in Jerusalem by reprinting the original Palestinian curricula issued by the Palestinian Ministry of Education, after deleting national content from it, adding other Judaizing content, and punishing schools that do not acquiesce.

In response to this trend, one of Jerusalem’s notables says, “We will not allow the closure of schools that graduate generations with correct national and Islamic education,” stressing the need for popular support for these schools, and an increase in financial support from the Palestinian Ministry of Education, in addition to the need for students’ parents to refuse to put poison in the minds of their children.

This is evidenced by a successful experience about 5 years ago in the Kafr Aqab neighborhood, north of occupied Jerusalem, where the occupation municipality tried to impose its curriculum in some schools. Parents refrained from buying distorted books for their children, while Palestinian books were provided to them for free.

He adds that "the occupation generously supports Jewish religious schools, and entrenches its alleged narrative in the curricula, while fighting Palestinian realities."

The argument for accepting funding

While some Jerusalemites view the schools’ financial allocations as a legal right in exchange for taxes, a rejectionist current has emerged saying that the recent decision is an inevitable result of accepting funding and enabling the occupation to intervene.

Researcher Ziad Abhis expresses this that most of the schools in Jerusalem have accepted funding except for four since 2012, and in return the occupation maintained its unconditional support for 8 years, until he was assured of its dependence on it to constitute 30% of the budget of some of them, after which the stage of setting gradual conditions for Judaizing education began. .

Abhis confirms that the exit exists, but it requires will and gradualness, adding, "It is necessary first to restore the unity of the education sector with its three arms; Sufficient and without incapacitating him with luxury and luxuries.