Under the pretext of “national security,” Israel is ramping up its longstanding attacks on Palestinian education in the city.
In the middle of the school day on May 7th, Israeli forces stormed three United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools in the East Jerusalem refugee camp of Shuafat. Accompanied by education ministry officials, heavily armed police officers evacuated the schools’ 550 students, who ranged in age from six to 15. “Many of the kids were preparing for their final exams and went home in tears,” Roland Friedrich, the head of UNRWA in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, told Jewish Currents. “It was a very traumatizing experience for the children, and in clear violation of international law and their right to education.”
Ever since the Oslo Accords granted the Palestinian Authority (PA) autonomy over educational policy, students at most of East Jerusalem’s schools—including those run by UNRWA—have been taught a curriculum grounded in Palestinian history and culture. In response, right-wing Israeli groups and politicians have led a sustained campaign against these institutions—accusing them of promoting terrorism and trying to force them to move to an Israeli curriculum. Given Israel’s longstanding interest in shutting down UNRWA, the agency’s East Jerusalem schools have become a particular target—especially after October 7th. Emboldened by leaders from across the spectrum accusing the agency of collaborating with Hamas, in May 2024 Israeli protesters threatened UNRWA staff with guns and set fire to the perimeter of the organization’s compound. In October of the same year, the Knesset passed new legislation to expel UNRWA from East Jerusalem and criminalize any official contact with the agency; the raid in Shuafat represented the enforcement of this law.
The shuttering of UNRWA schools, which educate less than one percent of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem, is only one step in an escalating Israeli campaign to place the city’s Palestinian education system under a security lens. In November 2024, the Israeli government passed a law permitting the education ministry to withhold funding from schools where “expressions of sympathy with terrorist acts are occurring or being permitted.” The law also empowered the education ministry to dismiss teachers suspected of holding such sympathies. Another bill, this one preventing all schools in Israel from hiring graduates of Palestinian universities in the future, is in the final stages of approval and is likely to become law. (Sixty percent of teachers in East Jerusalem schools are alumni of Palestinian institutions.)
According to critics, Israel’s ultimate goal with such moves is to suppress Palestinian identity. In a recent report, Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO that works to promote a more equitable Jerusalem, described the new policies as “a direct attack on the right of children in East Jerusalem to learn according to their identity, heritage, and culture.” The political scientist Nathan J. Brown, who has researched the development and content of the PA curriculum, concurred. Israel’s attacks on education are “part of a broader project that looks to liquidate all the structures and institutions of Palestinian national life,” he told Jewish Currents, “so that you are left with Palestinians without Palestine.”
Soon after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, it attempted to replace the Jordanian education system with an Israeli alternative. “Since the very beginning, Israel wanted to change the curriculum as a means to assert its sovereignty over Jerusalem,” Gaal Yanovski, a researcher at Ir Amim, told Jewish Currents. Only a general strike from the Palestinian population forced Israel to retreat from such efforts, and the Jordanian curriculum remained in place for several decades—reviewed and censored by the Israeli authorities, but not altogether in their control.
“Since the very beginning, Israel wanted to change the curriculum as a means to assert its sovereignty over Jerusalem.”
After the signing of the Oslo Accords, the East Jerusalem education system moved into the hands of the newly established PA, which developed a curriculum with a greater emphasis on Palestinian history and identity. Israel’s security establishment was initially disinterested in challenging this curriculum; so long as the PA was abiding by its security commitments, Brown told Jewish Currents, Israel was content to let the issue of Palestinian education be. “It is only when Netanyahu was first elected [in 1996] on a platform of rejecting the Oslo Accords that he desperately looked for a new excuse to avoid fulfilling Israel’s end of the bargain,” he said. “And he found it by seizing on ‘incitement’ in education . . . and framing it as a primary driver of conflict.”
Even so, the status quo was slow to change, and only did so amid the security crises of the 2010s. It was in this period that officials began turning to the Palestinian education system as an explanation for outbursts of violence, resulting in a reality where “education and terror are closely linked in the Israeli psyche,” as per Tess Miller, a staff member at Ir Amim. The shift became especially pronounced following the “knife intifada” of 2015 and 2016, when Palestinian youth carried out a wave of stabbing attacks across Israel. Subsequently, education officials formulated what the historian Amnon Ramon describes as “the first plan to encourage schools in East Jerusalem to transition to an Israeli curriculum through a special supplementary budget.” The plan offered extra resources to schools that taught the Israeli curriculum, with then-education minister Naftali Bennett explicitly stating that he wanted to prioritize “every school that chooses the Israeli curriculum” in order to “aid the Israelization process.”
In 2018, this logic would come to be institutionalized in Resolution 3790, Israel’s first five-year plan for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. While the resolution was presented as a broad investment program, nearly half of its 445 million NIS ($133 million) education budget was reserved specifically for schools that adopted the Israeli curriculum. “The plan had dozens of chapters and goals, but its real centerpiece was transferring Palestinians to the Israeli syllabus,” Ir Amim’s Yanovski explained. He noted that “there was still an element of choice to the policy” because the Israeli curriculum was being promoted rather than imposed: “The thinking was that with the right incentives, [Palestinian] parents would eventually see it as better for them.” But the real purpose of these moves, and the veiled threat beneath them, was always clear. As then-mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barakat clarified in 2018 while proposing an earlier version of a law to expel UNRWA from the city, Israeli leaders’ true goal in the city was “putting an end to the lie of the ‘Palestinian refugee problem’ and the attempts at creating a false [Palestinian] sovereignty within [Israeli] sovereignty.”
In recent years, Israel has continued to build on this strategy of leveraging investments to force Palestinians to change their curriculum. For 2024-28, the government allocated an expanded budget of $860 million to East Jerusalem, with $215 million reserved for education. Schools had to adopt the Israeli curriculum to receive much of this funding. In fact, this budget set explicit targets for increasing the share of students studying the Israeli curriculum in Jerusalem municipality‑run schools, from 24% in 2022-23 to at least 45% by 2027-28. (According to municipal data obtained by Ir Amim, the figure stood at 27% as of this August.)
Since October 7th, the push to remake the Palestinian education system has accelerated, with the far-right repeatedly alleging that Palestinian education constitutes “incitement” to violence. At the center of this drive is Avichai Boaron, a settler activist and Likud lawmaker who took over as chair of the Knesset subcommittee on East Jerusalem’s education system in 2024, and who treats Palestinian schooling as a national security emergency. In this role, Boaron has said that “every classroom where there is incitement to terrorism is a classroom with 30 potential terrorists.” Following this logic, he suggested that Israel should fund the retraining of Palestinian teachers to address such “incitement” and, in a heated speech in the Knesset, warned Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush that “October 7th, 2030 will be on your hands” after the latter refused to adopt Boaron’s 100 million NIS ($30 million) proposal for retraining teachers.
Thanks to the advocacy of Boaron and his ilk, the educational part of the East Jerusalem five-year plan has remained fully budgeted despite the sweeping spending cuts Israel has undertaken to finance its many wars. And as before, such funding is overtly conditioned on Israelization. Boaron has said as much in meetings of his subcommittee, baldly stating that “we have to inculcate one Israeli curriculum in all the schools, and whoever doesn’t want to cooperate won’t get money.”
Before, the children were learning about Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Nakba, and the Naksa; now, they are taught about the Wailing Wall, Israeli Independence Day, and the Six-Day War.
For East Jerusalem’s already disadvantaged Palestinians, this campaign poses a quandary. Around 70% of Palestinian youth in the city live below the poverty line, and structural discrimination has meant that tens of thousands are attending overcrowded and otherwise substandard schools. In 2023, the Israeli Supreme Court deemed that these conditions amounted to “differential treatment” and ordered the city’s authorities to submit a plan to address them; however, city officials have repeatedly ignored the court’s orders. This has left East Jerusalem’s Palestinians desperate for quality education, a fact that the Israeli right is relying on as it pushes unpopular curricular changes onto parents. “Israel has created a vacuum through a lack of basic services, and then exploited the situation so that the only choice for parents is to accept a school where they have to put their Palestinian identity aside,” Ir Amim’s Miller explained.
The recent ban on UNRWA schools has tightened this bind. Shaher Alkam, the chair of the parents’ committee of UNRWA schools in Shuafat, told Jewish Currents that for months, many of the students from the three forcibly closed schools in Shuafat remained out of school altogether. In this context, most parents were left with no choice but to send their children to Arabic-language schools that teach the Israeli syllabus. “It is agony for the parents who have to send their children through a checkpoint, which can take more than two hours each way, into a part of the city that their children do not know, to study a curriculum that goes against their identity,” Alkam said. Before, their children were learning about Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Nakba, and the Naksa; now, they are taught about the Wailing Wall, Israeli Independence Day, and the Six-Day War. Most significantly for those who live in Shuafat refugee camp, all references to Palestinian refugees and the right of return are erased from their children’s new program of study, even as they navigate the militarized checkpoints and systemic discrimination that continue to define their plight as refugees.
Despite its role in animating these sweeping changes, the idea that the Palestinian education system is a driver of violence is contradicted by Israel’s own evidence. At one of Boaron’s subcommittee meetings in 2024, security officials presented him with data on the correlation between being educated in the Palestinian system and committing crimes with nationalist motives. In the end, the statistics that Boaron had long demanded demonstrated the opposite of his expectations: It was the Israeli education system, and not its Palestinian counterpart, that was more likely to push Palestinians toward violence. Even more significantly, the data showed that youth who were either not registered or had dropped out of school were far more likely to carry out violent attacks—exactly the conditions that Israel created for the students in Shuafat and across Jerusalem.
Boaron, however, remained undeterred by evidence, and is determined to achieve even greater securitization. His subcommittee already includes several officials from police and intelligence services, and has recently started focusing on topics such as dismantling barriers to data-sharing between schools and surveillance agencies. Suhad Bishara, a Palestinian lawyer who is representing the petitioners for an interim injunction against the UNRWA ban, told Jewish Currents that this lack of concern for evidence was unsurprising, as the East Jerusalem campaign has never truly been about security. “It is clear that there is no justification for securitizing education in this way. Instead, all of this is a pretext to erase the national identity of Palestinians.”