The teacher from Bethlehem or Beit Jala may be an excellent instructor, and perhaps they have taught at a school in Jerusalem for years and live only a short distance from their school. Now the occupation forces have denied entry to more than seventy such teachers and staff. Freire observed that education can replicate oppression or it can be a practice of freedom, and that freedom starts when children can think, ask questions, remember and imagine. Having teachers in the classroom is the first step, and having the right teacher for the task is crucial.
Education should be a place where children learn that the world can change and that they can take a meaningful part in that process.
Education and the Struggle for Jerusalem
As a new school year sets in on September 1, over 8,500 students at Christian schools in Jerusalem aren’t coming back to class. The schools have suspended classes because Israel has not renewed entry permits for more than 70 teachers and staff members who live in the West Bank. Their absence impacts not just on teaching, but administration, health services, cleaning and security and other necessary work. The Christian schools have stated that they cannot start the year safely and properly without the permits.
Every school has a formal curriculum, such as the mathematics lessons, the science lab, the stories and the history; but there is also what theorists have called the hidden curriculum. This curriculum, always present, includes the messages children take in about who they are, where they belong, whose history matters, and what kind of society is possible.
Education is therefore always political, and the question is what kind of politics it serves. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire defined education as a “practice of freedom,” a concept that has shaped generations of educators. It is not the role of education to merely give students information from an expert. They should be taught to “read the world” and to understand the forces that influence their lives and empower them to change them.
This is especially relevant in Jerusalem, where a child’s education can be affected by checkpoints, walls, permits, competing national narratives, and competing versions of Jerusalem’s history.
Not a New Struggle
This is not a new struggle. Schools have always integrated religious, linguistic, community, and political identity in the modern history of the Levant. In Jerusalem, Christian schools, established many generations ago, became important; they served Christian and Muslim families and played a part in the cultural life of the city.
Under the British Mandate, education became increasingly connected to competing national projects. The educational systems of Palestinian Arabs and of the Hebrews evolved differently, and history and geography subjects became sites of competing visions of Palestine.
Following the 1948 Nakba, which established the State of Israel through a massive ethnic cleansing event, Palestinian schooling was split by the political geography thrust on the region. The schools in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem school, were instructed in the Jordanian curriculum, and the Gaza school in the Egyptian curriculum.
When Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, education was subjected to yet another level of politics. In the classroom the fight for identity unfolded, influencing developing children’s sense of identity and continuity and connection to their homeland for generations.
UNRWA and Palestinian Education
Schools were not only places of continuity for many Palestinian refugees, but they also served as loci of integration and meaning for wider Palestinian society. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) first started running schools for Palestinian refugees in the early 1950s and has been educating generations of Palestinian children.
There is, however, a need for precision, when we talk about the role of UNRWA. UNRWA did not develop a Palestinian curriculum. It typically adopted the curriculum of the host authority and enabled pupils to progress to the wider education system where they could take recognized examinations. After 1996, in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza stripped this, coming to include the Palestinian Authority curriculum.
What UNRWA added was an educational process that focused on critical thinking, human rights, tolerance, inclusion and respect for UN principles. It also considered books and offered additional content when available.
Curriculum and Palestinian Children’s Hearts and Minds as an Israeli Battleground
The Israeli curriculum has been moving forward in East Jerusalem, as Israeli authorities have ramped up efforts to push it in the area. In 2024, the Knesset in Israel addressed that most East Jerusalem students continued to learn the Palestinian curriculum, and urged the use of the Israeli curriculum.
Israeli journalist Nir Hasson has written that, for the first time since 1967, all first and seventh graders entering the formal public school system in Jerusalem this school year will be studying under the Israeli curriculum, not the Palestinian curriculum. His account of the state of education in East Jerusalem indicates that the formal system accounts for approximately 40% of education.
This is hailed as another major milestone in the Israelization of East Jerusalem’s education system, but access shouldn’t be about forgetting.
Recent studies of Palestinian textbooks in East Jerusalem have noted modifications of content relating to Palestinian history, Jerusalem and the Nakba. In this instance, the phrase “Jerusalem is the capital of my homeland, Palestine,” was changed to “Jerusalem is the city of peace.” Other alterations eliminated mentions of Palestinian displacement and experience of occupation.
But it is not necessary to forget one’s own history in order to learn that of another. The aim of education is to broaden a child’s awareness of the world, not confine it within the boundaries of the story sanctioned by the political occupation power.
The Closing of UNRWA Schools
The struggle over education is not limited to textbooks.
In May 2025, Israeli occupation authorities-imposed closure on six of UNRWA’s schools in East Jerusalem, impacting almost 800 Palestinian children. Israeli forces marched into schools in Shu’fat refugee camp during class hours, displacing hundreds of children from schools.
And on August 25, 2026 Israeli closed the UNRWA Qalandia Training Centre, to replace it with a new Israeli school complex.
Recently, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) released a story about Palestinian teacher Arwa Alzraiy, who has a long history of serving at an UNRWA school in the Gaza Strip, in a context experts have termed scholasticide. She said when her school was destroyed, she felt she lost her home, her friends and her teachers.
The school was later reconstructed and, years later, she came back as a teacher. Her narrative illustrates that education is not just as a mechanism for the transmission of information, but rather can be an expression of continuity and hope.
Read the full article, “This is a pedagogy of hope” from the American Friends Service Committee.