Israel's Growing Role in Palestinian Classrooms Sparks Fears of Identity Erasure

The new school year in occupied East Jerusalem opened with a development that has alarmed Palestinian families and educators: roughly 45,000 Palestinian children are now being taught a curriculum assembled by Israeli authorities. That figure represents more than one-third of all Palestinian students in the occupied territory and is nearly twice the number enrolled in the Israeli-designed curriculum a year earlier, according to the source article, an opinion piece by Ehab Jabareen published by Al Jazeera.

The shift has deepened a long-running dispute over who controls what Palestinian children learn. Palestinian officials and parents describe the curriculum changes as part of a broader assault on national rights, while Israeli authorities have defended their interventions by arguing that Palestinian textbooks produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Education and teachers trained in Palestinian Authority institutions promote hatred.

Those competing claims sit at the center of a debate that extends well beyond East Jerusalem. Israeli interference in Palestinian education, the article argues, now reaches into the occupied West Bank and, more recently, into the Gaza Strip, where the devastation of the education system has created openings for NGOs funded by Western donors to introduce curriculums approved by Israel.

The Jerusalem school year also brought labor unrest in another sector. Christian schools began the term with a strike after many teachers who live in the occupied West Bank were denied permits to enter the city. The permit refusals added a further layer of disruption for families already navigating a fragmented and politically charged school landscape.

International humanitarian law offers a clear framework for such situations. Under the Geneva Convention, an occupying power is required to facilitate the normal operation of educational institutions and to refrain from interfering in their affairs. Updated commentary from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the body responsible for overseeing application of the convention, states that an occupying power must not replace an existing education system with its own structures or impose new curricula on the population.

The curriculum dispute has also played out through diplomatic and financial pressure. For years, successive Israeli governments have urged the United States and European governments to press the Palestinian Authority to revise its textbooks, using aid as leverage. The article frames this campaign as a sustained effort to reshape Palestinian educational content from the outside, rather than a narrow technical review.

Israel's stated rationale — that Palestinian children are being taught to hate — is challenged by academic research cited in the piece. A study funded by the US Department of State and conducted by both Palestinian and Israeli scholars concluded that Palestinian textbooks do not promote hatred or the dehumanization of Israelis. That finding undercuts the central justification offered for the interventions.

If the goal is not removing hateful content, the article asks, what exactly is Israel seeking to change? Comparative studies of Palestinian textbooks and the Israeli-edited versions used in East Jerusalem have documented the removal or alteration of references to Palestinian national symbols, including the flag and anthem, as well as material on Palestinian sovereignty and history.

A 2025 study of primary-school textbooks found that Israeli modifications included replacing the word "Palestine" with "Israel" in certain contexts and deleting passages that describe the realities of occupation. Such edits, the article argues, are less about preventing hatred than about removing material that fosters national consciousness — an outcome Israel has opposed since its founding, when it asserted that no such thing as a Palestinian people existed.

For many Palestinian parents, teachers and schools, accepting the Israeli curriculum carries a meaning beyond the textbook itself. It is seen as accepting the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem and the erasure of Palestinian identity within the city. Removing concepts such as the occupation, the Nakba, refugees, the right of return, Palestinian sovereignty and national symbols can gradually sever Palestinian political identity from the historical narrative that gives those claims their meaning.

The scrutiny runs in only one direction, according to the article. While Israel censors and shapes Palestinian curriculums, its Western allies devote little attention to what Israeli curriculums teach Israeli children. Israeli philologist Nurit Peled-Elhanan examined Israeli history and geography textbooks published in the post-Oslo years for her book *Palestine in Israeli School Books*. She found extensive use of racist tropes and the erasure of Palestinians, and warned that Israeli students graduate and enter mandatory military service having been taught to resent and fear Palestinians while knowing nothing about their "life-world."

More recent scholarship points in a similar direction. Israeli scholar Yael Teff-Seker studied 123 textbooks used in Jewish Israeli schools and identified strong ethnocentric framing, a persistent sense of Jewish victimhood and little space for Palestinian narratives. The study noted that peace with Arab nations is portrayed positively, but the occupation is described impartially and without judgment. The occupied Palestinian territory is sometimes referred to by Israeli names, such as Judea and Samaria, rather than the occupied West Bank.

Research coauthored by Israeli academic Roy Weintraub examined how Israeli state curricula address the Nakba, the events of 1948 that fundamentally shaped Palestinian identity and political reality. The term appears only partially in Israeli textbooks and teaching materials, and most materials justify the actions taken by Israeli forces during the war. The paper concluded that including difficult histories in a curriculum does not automatically encourage critical understanding of the suffering and injustices involved.

Taken together, the article suggests the debate over textbooks is about more than education policy. It is a contest over memory, legitimacy and the future of national identity on both sides of the conflict — one in which an occupying power has assumed the authority to decide what Palestinian children may learn about themselves.