Every September, tens of thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem walk into classrooms caught between two governments, two curricula, and two visions of what their future is supposed to look like. The blackboards are the same. The stakes are not.
For decades, Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem have largely followed the Palestinian Authority curriculum — the same textbooks used in the West Bank. But over the past several years, Israeli municipal and national authorities have sharply escalated pressure on school operators to abandon that curriculum in favor of the Israeli one. The tools of pressure are familiar: money, licensing threats, and the politically charged language of “incitement.” The consequences for Palestinian families, teachers, and children are concrete and lasting.
A Divided School System Inside the City
East Jerusalem’s Palestinian children attend schools through three main channels: the Jerusalem Municipality (which operates schools using the Israeli curriculum), UNRWA (which serves Palestinian refugees and historically used a Jordanian-based curriculum later aligned with PA materials), and private and waqf-affiliated institutions that have predominantly used PA curriculum. According to Ir Amim, a Jerusalem-focused Israeli advocacy and research organization, roughly half of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian students attend municipality schools, while the other half are distributed across UNRWA, private, and community institutions.
The divide is not merely administrative. Curriculum shapes language, history, identity. A child learning from an Israeli civics textbook encounters a different map, a different narrative of 1948, a different set of national heroes than a child learning from a PA-issued book. Palestinian educators and parents have long understood this. So have Israeli policymakers.
The Funding Lever: How Incentives Became Pressure
The financial architecture underpinning East Jerusalem’s private Palestinian schools is precarious by design. Many of these institutions operate in a legal gray zone — often unlicensed by the municipality, structurally underfunded, and dependent on fees that families in some of the most impoverished urban neighborhoods in Israel struggle to pay.
The Israeli government has periodically offered a direct exchange: schools that agree to adopt the Israeli curriculum receive access to municipal funding streams and a smoother path toward official recognition and licensing. Ir Amim documented this dynamic in detail in its 2019 report Unsafe Space, describing how unlicensed Palestinian schools face chronic threats of closure, and how the licensing process itself is conditioned — formally or informally — on curriculum compliance. The Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research has similarly noted the structural gap in per-pupil educational spending between West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, a gap that has persisted for decades and that makes the financial incentive to switch curricula genuinely coercive for underfunded institutions.
By 2019, Ir Amim reported that the number of East Jerusalem private Palestinian schools using the Israeli curriculum had grown significantly over the preceding years, driven in substantial part by these financial pressures rather than by community choice.
The “Incitement” Framework and Censored Palestinian Textbooks
Alongside financial pressure, Israeli authorities have deployed a rhetorical and political framework built around the word “incitement.” PA curriculum textbooks — particularly those covering history, geography, and civic identity — have been repeatedly characterized by Israeli officials and aligned advocacy groups as containing material that incites hatred or violence against Israelis. These claims have received wide amplification in Israeli and international media.
The claims themselves are contested. Independent academic reviews, including a 2013 study by IMPACT-se and responses from Palestinian educators and scholars, have produced sharply differing conclusions about what the textbooks actually say. What is less contested is how the “incitement” label functions politically: it provides justification for curriculum replacement that frames erasure of Palestinian national identity as a child-protection measure.
Specific content has been censored or suppressed. Ir Amim documented instances in which Palestinian students in municipality-run schools were issued PA textbooks with pages physically removed or content blacked out — a practice that made the contested nature of the curriculum visible in the most literal way. A child opening a textbook to find pages torn out does not need to be told that someone, somewhere, has decided part of their story must not be read.
UNRWA Schools and the Pressure on Refugee Education
UNRWA operates schools in East Jerusalem serving Palestinian refugee children, and the agency has faced its own intensifying pressures. Israel’s relationship with UNRWA has long been adversarial; Israeli officials have repeatedly accused the agency of allowing incitement in its classrooms and have lobbied donor countries to reduce or eliminate UNRWA funding. In October 2024, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation banning UNRWA from operating within Israel and prohibiting Israeli authorities from coordinating with the agency — a move UNRWA and UN officials warned would have severe humanitarian consequences for Palestinians in East Jerusalem and Gaza alike.
For East Jerusalem’s refugee children specifically, UNRWA schools have represented not only an education but a form of institutional acknowledgment of refugee status — a status Israel has never recognized for Palestinians holding Israeli-issued Jerusalem residency cards. Dismantling UNRWA’s educational presence in the city therefore carries weight that extends beyond the classroom.
What Families and Educators Say They Are Protecting
The resistance to curriculum replacement among Palestinian families in East Jerusalem is broadly documented in reporting and organizational fieldwork, even if individual testimony in this article is drawn from published organizational sources rather than original interviews. Ir Amim’s fieldwork consistently records that Palestinian parents express concern not simply about individual textbook content but about the cumulative effect of curriculum change on their children’s sense of identity and belonging — and about what adoption of the Israeli curriculum signals about their own position within the city.
For Palestinian educators, the stakes are also professional and communal. Teachers trained in the PA curriculum who work in institutions that switch face retraining requirements and, in some cases, job displacement. The curriculum transition is not a neutral administrative update; it restructures the knowledge, authority, and livelihood of Palestinian educational workers.
There is a harder truth underneath the policy debate. East Jerusalem’s Palestinian community lives under a municipal authority that formally annexed their neighborhoods in 1967 in a move not recognized under international law — a status confirmed repeatedly in UN Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 478 (1980). The curriculum battle is inseparable from that larger contest over sovereignty, presence, and who gets to tell the story of this city and the people who have always lived in it.
Sources
- Ir Amim, Unsafe Space: The Silencing of Palestinian Political Expression in East Jerusalem (2019), ir-amim.org.il
- Ir Amim, educational rights documentation and reporting on East Jerusalem schools curriculum, various years
- Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, statistical reporting on educational expenditure in East Jerusalem
- UNRWA, agency statements on Knesset legislation (October–November 2024)
- UN Security Council Resolution 478 (1980), on the status of Jerusalem
- UN OCHA oPt, periodic reporting on East Jerusalem humanitarian conditions
