Occupied Jerusalem- Since the Knesset banned its work at the end of last October, the occupation municipality began racing against time to attract students from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Refugees (UNRWA) schools in East Jerusalem, coinciding with the students’ families searching for suitable alternatives, amid an unknown fate surrounding the second semester of next year. The occupation gave the agency and its facilities – including schools – until January 30 to close its doors permanently.
Within less than two months, the occupation will disrupt many of the schools, clinics and relief centers that UNRWA has opened in Jerusalem since its founding, to get rid of a burden that the occupying state has always seen as a threat to its presence and sovereignty in Jerusalem, and to strengthen the cause of Palestinian refugees. The agency’s schools fought in various ways, including preventing… Licensing, reducing services, supporting alternatives, and launching counter-legal, political and media campaigns.
The occupation municipality took advantage of this ban to attack the agency’s schools and attract its patrons to sit in the seats of schools affiliated with the Israeli Ministry of Education, which teach the Israeli curriculum. It provided temptations to the students’ parents, represented by individual personal communication to convince them, displaying cheap services, and providing transportation for some students.
Polarization methods
The municipality’s task was not easy, despite its influence in East Jerusalem. Dozens of families, upon hearing the ban, rushed to transfer their children to other schools that teach the Palestinian curriculum, while municipal teams were unable to access the personal data of all UNRWA school students to convince their families individually. They also found it difficult to Persuading some school principals to switch to the Israeli curriculum, due to its distortion of national identity and its academic weakness compared to the Palestinian curriculum, especially in the English language subject.
In the same context, one of the school principals in Jerusalem (who preferred to remain anonymous) confirmed that the occupation municipality is continuing, with unprecedented determination, to fight the Palestinian curriculum in Palestinian schools, through surprise inspection visits, imposing the distorted curriculum, and cutting or reducing financial funding for violators. . He also told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that the municipality thought about adding additional specific hours to strengthen students in the English language within its schools to convince the families.
He continued, “The municipality is racing against time for fear of hundreds of students moving to schools that it says are inflammatory and reinforce Palestinian identity. It intends to erect temporary buildings worth 15 million shekels ($4 million) until new buildings are constructed to transport the students to, in light of a shortage of classrooms by 2000.” room, and actually transferred some of them to existing schools, as it transferred 200 female students from the Shuafat camp to two mixed schools inside the camp, and 50 A student goes to a school inside the Old City of Jerusalem studying the Israeli curriculum.
According to UNRWA data, more than 1,800 Palestinian students, male and female, study in 7 educational institutions affiliated with it within the borders of the municipality of Jerusalem, including 6 schools and a vocational training college in Qalandiya camp (which includes 344 students), where the rest of the schools are distributed as follows:
- 3 schools in Shuafat Camp, northeast of Jerusalem, two for girls and one for boys.
- A primary school for girls in the town of Silwan, south of Al-Aqsa Mosque, near the Mughrabi Gate.
- And one primary school for boys in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood near the Jerusalem Wall.
- Another medium school for females in the village of Sur Baher, south of Jerusalem.
As the end of the first semester approaches, Jerusalemite Aya Muhammad, the mother of a student at an UNRWA school in Shuafat camp, is looking for a suitable and inexpensive alternative, as she expressed to Tel Aviv Tribune Net her dissatisfaction and concern about the school’s closure.
She said: “The school was more than just a place for education. I fear that my child will lose his connection to his national identity in schools affiliated with the municipality. I also fear that he will not find a good education at a reasonable cost in this short time, amid the high costs of private schools. In addition to that, my child’s sudden transfer It may result in some psychological and societal effects due to changing the environment and being forced to adapt quickly.”
With the approaching termination of services #UNRWA Under an arbitrary law to expel the agency from the occupied territories, the mayor of the occupation, Lal V., called for… #Jerusalem Moshe Leon, parents of Jerusalemite students in UNRWA schools, to register their children in municipal schools.
The Palestinians rejected this invitation, considering it a violation of the law… pic.twitter.com/Mqz6m0zr3G– Quds Feed (@quds_feed) November 29, 2024
Fate unknown
When talking about solutions and ways of confrontation, the head of the Jerusalem Committee against Judaization, Nasser Hadmi, believes that occupied Jerusalem lacks a unified leadership that can unify the position of Jerusalemites and build on their achievements.
He added to Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “Everything the municipality is doing contradicts not only international law, but also the law of the occupying state itself. We are living in a period of orgy and lawbreaking by state institutions. The situation would be different if Jerusalem schools had a unified body that could make its decisions.” Among them are the protest abstention from education, and the parents’ refusal to send their children to schools that teach the Israeli curriculum. We live in exceptional circumstances, and the people of Jerusalem today are affected.”
It is noteworthy that, according to the Faisal Al-Husseini Foundation in Jerusalem, the number of Jerusalem students in the school stages (not including kindergartens) has reached about 98,428 male and female students, about 45,500 of whom go to 146 schools affiliated with the Palestinian umbrella (public endowments, private schools, UNRWA), and the rest go to schools affiliated with the occupation municipality, including historical schools that the occupation took control of during the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1997. 1967, charter schools, and relatively modern schools, all of which teach the Israeli curriculum.