“The key to bridging the gaps in the East of the city begins and ends with education. The transition to the Israeli curriculum will allow the next generation in East Jerusalem to learn the Hebrew language, which is the bridge that connects them to the rest of Israel. The Ministry is leading a great cooperation between the Ministry of Education on the one hand and the Jerusalem Municipality on the one hand, which allows Let us bring about a real revolution in the Arab community in East Jerusalem."
"Nathaniel Isaacs", Director General of the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage of the Israeli occupation
In the "Alfa" school located on the land of the town of Beit Hanina, north of the occupied city of Jerusalem, a Jerusalemite primary school student is playing in a soccer field equipped with the standards of typical schools, after leaving his movable school seat, while a large and prominent slogan appears in the background in Hebrew: “Happiness does not mean having what you want, but being content with what you have.”
Everything here was built in a modern style thanks to the $12.4 million dollars pumped in by the Ministry of Education and the Israeli Municipality of Jerusalem to build the school.
The "Alpha" school is a realistic example of what the Israeli occupation state is offering on a plate of gold to the residents of occupied Jerusalem: advanced education in modern schools with the latest technology and entertainment, thanks to generous funding.
However, the return is the submission of the Jerusalemite students to the Israeli curriculum known as the “Bagrut”, where Hebrew is taught as a basic language along with the biographies of the symbols of the occupying state, in addition to the civilian subject that is used today to obliterate the Palestinian identity and reinforce Israeli narratives in the hearts of children, who were not accepted 90 % of their families are Israeli citizens.
Since the occupation state officially annexed the eastern sector of the city in 1980, and later granted Jerusalemites the right to obtain Israeli citizenship, most residents of Jerusalem have insisted that they carry only residency documents issued by the occupation.
What has been going on in the Jerusalem education file for years is a major breakthrough in Israeli efforts to strengthen the grip of the occupation and Zionist hegemony in Jerusalem, after the highest hopes of Israeli officials were that Jerusalem schools would accept the Palestinian curriculum books that the occupation had reprinted and distorted some of their information before failing to push for their adoption. by coercion.
Now, while Israel clings to the de facto authority, it has decided to create, through the “Israelization” of education in Jerusalem, exclusive and tempting gates through which the Palestinians live a better life that is not available in the West Bank or Gaza, and the price - as the curricula show - is the Palestinian identity of those students who grow up on the curricula It serves the occupation's agenda above all else.
The "Israelization" of education in Jerusalem
In fact, the Israeli efforts in this regard are not new today. Since 1967, the occupying state has accelerated its efforts to impose its textbooks on the schools of the city of Jerusalem that it had just occupied. The occupation was eventually forced to abandon these attempts.
With the advent of the nineties, the way was quickly given way to the approaches of the Palestinian Authority instead of the Jordanian approach, as international agreements (including the Oslo Accords) obligated the occupation to allow the authority to impose its approach on the occupied city.
An image of deleting the Basmala and the Palestinian Authority logo from the cover of the tenth grade book, which was mentioned in a study by Samira Elyan, researcher and lecturer at the Hebrew University (communication sites)
However, without regard to international laws such as Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantee the right of occupied peoples to obtain an education consistent with their beliefs and to protect their culture and heritage from change or distortion, the practical steps of the occupying state towards familyization have begun. The Palestinian curriculum has accelerated since 2011. The Ministry of Education of the occupation printed the Palestinian curriculum at the time after subjecting it to deletion and distortion. It removed the slogan of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian flag, and distorted the lessons that dealt with the Palestinian issue and urged the right of return.
In other words, these curricula deprived about 98,000 Jerusalemite students of the possibility of studying the history of the Palestinian cause and acquiring sufficient knowledge to build a Palestinian identity, in schools affiliated with the Waqf, UNRWA schools, and private schools alike.
As for the most serious Israeli moves against education in Jerusalem, they took place in 2014, when the occupying power responded to the vision of former members of the General Security Service (Shin Bet), officials in the Ministry of Finance, and a few former activists in the far-right "Elad" organization, about the need to reduce "violence". In Jerusalem, through an integrated plan to reduce gaps in infrastructure, employment, education and social welfare.
Indeed, the occupation cabinet approved at that time a plan whose budget was estimated at $86.5 million, according to which the Ministry of Education began providing economic incentives to East Jerusalem schools to move to teaching the Israeli curriculum.
By 2017, it had already transferred 23 out of 180 schools to the Israeli Curriculum Program, after those schools received abundant funding, and the salaries of teachers and staff increased.
The occupation quickly rolled up its sleeves in order to instill the Zionist narrative among the Palestinians and impose its full curriculum on Jerusalemite students after that. East Jerusalem schools to teach the Israeli curriculum.
The Israelis have said clearly that any Arab school in Jerusalem that switches to the Israeli curriculum or even opens a single secondary class from it will immediately have a generous budget.
In order to expand the use of the Israeli curriculum in East Jerusalem, Tel Aviv provided additional funding to schools that chose to make the change and granted about $120 million for education in Jerusalem, then stipulated that 47% of it be allocated to local schools that accept the integration of Israeli subjects, and even reached its efforts to use its influence In Jerusalem to prevent government buses from transporting students to schools that do not follow the Israeli curriculum.
A woman distributes unmodified textbooks as part of the Palestinian parents' protest against the Arabization of the curricula (Reuters)
Basic education: an open battle with the occupation
The Emirate of Transjordan was established in 1921 AD, and it gained its independence in the name of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946 AD, and King Abdullah bin Al-Hussein (I) annexed the lands located on the western bank of the Jordan River to his kingdom in 1951 AD, after the defeat of the Arab armies in the Palestine war in 1948 AD, and it remained Until it fell into the hands of the Zionist occupation in 1967 AD.
A paragraph from the history textbook for the ninth grade in Palestine
Although what was previously mentioned is firmly established in history, and is known by millions throughout the Arab world, the Israeli occupation state, as part of its efforts to distort the Palestinian curriculum in Jerusalem, deleted that paragraph from the history book and left its place blank.
Moreover, the images of Al-Aqsa Mosque, the word Palestine, the Palestinian flag, and verses from the Holy Qur’an were deleted, and in the civil material that is usually used to inculcate the Palestinian national identity and naturally clashes with the narratives of the occupying state, where information about adherence to the land, the right of return, Palestinian prisoners, settlements, military checkpoints, the uprising and the displacement of the Palestinians From their villages, the material has been replaced with other appropriate content from the Israeli point of view.
Delete a paragraph on the history of Jordan that was mentioned in a study by "Samira Elyan", researcher and lecturer at the Hebrew University (communication sites)
Today, with the end of the first semester of this year approaching, Jerusalemites such as Gina Asfour, a mother with children in Jerusalem schools, are still experiencing the shock of the first moment in which they grabbed the ministerial book after it was distorted by the occupying power.
Gina found that the previous lessons about the apartheid wall had been completely removed, while the settlers were presented as good neighbors helping the Palestinians in farming. To convince him that the settlers who turned our lives into hell are good neighbors, and he sees their attacks on us with his own eyes.”
The oppression of this Jerusalemite mother transcends all limits, as she is one of those who insist until their last breath on challenging the occupation authorities that want to obliterate the identity of their Palestinian children, and refuse to enroll their children in Israeli curriculum schools.
They participate in protests to counter the Israeli measures, most notably the commitment to comprehensive strikes that are organized in rejection of the Israeli approach.
In a first step of its kind, a protest battle erupted last September between Palestinian parents and students on the one hand and the occupation authorities on the other, and the parents did not hesitate to close most schools in East Jerusalem in protest against being forced to accept a modified version of the Palestinian curriculum.
In the face of the occupation’s decision last July to revoke the permits of six schools in East Jerusalem that insisted on teaching the Palestinian curriculum, and give them one year to modify their curricula or cancel their license completely under the pretext that the curriculum contains “dangerous incitement” against the government and army of the occupation, parents distributed Original Palestinian books that have not been altered by Israeli censors.
The occupation authorities closed the office of the Palestinian Directorate of Education in Jerusalem in 2019, while Palestinian schools suffer from a shortage of 3,517 classrooms.
Palestinian schools began a strike to protest against the Arabization of curricula (Getty Images)
In fact, the occupation's arbitrary measures against Palestinian education created a huge gap between Arab schools in the cities occupied in 1948 and between Jerusalem schools and Israeli schools.
In the first, the classrooms contain the largest number of students, with the appointment of teachers with lower salaries, and educational facilities that lack the basics such as libraries, computers, and science laboratories, while this is available and more in Israeli schools, where the entertainment space has reached the extent of the existence of a studio for editing films and rooms for theatrical performances.
At the same time, the homes of Jerusalemites are being demolished in favor of building schools that teach the Israeli curriculum only, as happened in January 2022, when the occupation police evacuated two Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to make way for the construction of a school for “Jewish and Arab students who suffer from learning difficulties,” as claimed by the occupation authorities.
Moreover, this policy causes students to continue dropping out of schools, as more than a quarter of Jerusalemite children of school age have never been enrolled in any educational framework known to the occupation authorities. Indeed, according to the report of the Israeli human rights organization Ir Amim, there are currently 41 thousand A Palestinian child is not registered in any of the schools in East Jerusalem, and their percentage increased from 13% in 2017 to 29% in 2022. In the meantime, the phenomenon of school dropouts in Jerusalem is exacerbating, with a rate of 3% for girls and 4% for boys, compared to a dropout rate It is only about 0.5% in the occupying country.
A closed school in East Jerusalem during a strike in protest against the Arabization of curricula (Reuters)
The occupying state and the "Israelization of curricula"
Despite the difficulty of accepting such facts, the reality today reveals relative success for the efforts of the occupying power over the past years to equip Jerusalem schools according to the Israeli vision and to keep them away from the Palestinian curriculum, at least at the level of numbers, as the data issued by the (Israeli) Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage reveal The expansion of the use of the Israeli curriculum in East Jerusalem, as 51% of public schools in East Jerusalem currently adhere to the Israeli educational curriculum, an increase of 34% in the past four years. During the same period, the occupying power opened six new schools and 65 preparatory schools in occupied Jerusalem.
The percentage of Palestinian students studying Israeli curricula in schools affiliated to the Israeli Ministry of Education and the occupation municipality amounted to 15% of the total number of students from grade 1 to grade 12 in the academic year 2020-2021, while their percentage reached 8% in the academic year 2017-2018. which preceded the activation of the last five-year plan.
The percentage of holders of an Israeli high school diploma (majority bagrut) among East Jerusalem students increased from 19% in 2017-2018 to 40% in the academic year 2020-2021, according to data from the Ministry of Education of the occupation.
The occupying state offers many attractions that push some residents of Jerusalem towards choosing new schools instead of national schools, including opening the door wide for students of this curriculum in well-known Israeli universities, the most famous of which is the Hebrew University, as well as providing a faster way to work in Jerusalem, which is dominated by Israeli law and is not recognized in Mostly in several majors in Palestinian universities, which means that Jerusalem students, who are prevented from educational institutions in the West Bank by the apartheid wall, have a close Israeli university option that guarantees a good-paying job future when they graduate from schools with an Israeli curriculum with a recognized certificate and a good Hebrew language.
The occupying state has granted all new schools that teach the Israeli curriculum services that are not available to its counterparts, such as connecting these schools to high-speed Internet networks, providing thousands of laptops, even separating classes into small groups that raise the quality of teaching, and providing assistance to students with learning difficulties. With the presence of remedial courses, and a support network of psychologists.
The occupying power is also working to open more specialized schools in the fields of technology, arts and languages, raising children for girls, and repairing devices and car mechanics for boys, which means that graduates of these disciplines have a better opportunity to enter the labor market.
An empty classroom in a closed Palestinian school in protest against the Arabization of curricula (Reuters)
By using its political and military hegemony over East Jerusalem, in light of the weakness of the Palestinian Authority and the deteriorating social and economic conditions of the Palestinians, the occupying state is intensifying its efforts to liquidate the Palestinian issue at its source through the capture of the Palestinian educational curricula.
However, her efforts sometimes collide with facts on the ground, where Palestinians see daily various kinds of brutality, apartheid and violence, and at other times collide with history that can no longer be hidden in the era of open spaces.
How many countries have woven curricula inspired by their imagination to erase or falsify history, then it soon became a laughing stock among its new generations after they read and knew the true history of their country.
Despite Israel's tireless efforts to do so, erasing the Palestinian identity altogether remains an elusive goal, as the experience of the 48 Arabs who acquired Israeli citizenship tells us, without their identity being erased or their cause liquidated inside Israel.
Identity is formed in homes before the school curricula tamper with them, and they are homes that bear on their shoulders a long memory that the arms of the occupation ministries and security institutions did not and will not extend.