The school year started in occupied East Jerusalem with the news that 45,000 Palestinian children are now studying a curriculum put together by the Israeli authorities. That is more than a third of the Palestinian students in the occupied territory and almost double the number from the previous year. Meanwhile, Christian schools started the school year with a strike, as many of their teachers who live in the occupied West Bank were not granted permits to enter the city.
For the Palestinian population of occupied East Jerusalem, this is yet another form of encroachment on their national rights by the occupation authorities. For Israel, this is a justified intervention because Palestinian textbooks produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Palestinian teachers trained in Palestinian Authority (PA) institutions “teach hate”. According to international humanitarian law, an occupying power must facilitate the normal operation of educational institutions and avoid interference in their affairs.
Recently updated commentary by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the institution tasked with overseeing the application of the Geneva Convention, says an occupying power must not replace the existing education system with its own structures or impose new curricula. Yet Israeli interference in Palestinian education is extensive and reaches well beyond occupied East Jerusalem – into the occupied West Bank and, more recently, the Gaza Strip. For years, successive Israeli governments have demanded that the United States and European governments pressure the PA to revise its textbooks by conditioning aid.
Meanwhile, the devastation of Gaza’s education system has allowed NGOs funded by Western donors to introduce curriculums approved by Israel. The Israeli argument that all this is necessary to prevent Palestinian children from learning “to hate” in school does not stand up to scrutiny. Academic research, including a study funded by the US Department of State and prepared by both Palestinian and Israeli scholars, found that Palestinian textbooks do not promote hate and dehumanisation of Israelis.
So what is Israel actually looking to revise in Palestinian textbooks? Studies comparing Palestinian textbooks with the Israeli-edited versions used in occupied East Jerusalem have documented the removal or alteration of references to Palestinian national symbols, such as the national flag and anthem, Palestinian sovereignty and history. A 2025 study of primary-school textbooks found that Israeli modifications included replacing “Palestine” with “Israel” in some contexts and removing passages about the realities of occupation.
Israel wants references to the occupation, Palestinian history and self-determination erased from Palestinian textbooks not because they “teach hate”, but because they teach Palestinian children national consciousness – something Israel has fought against since its own creation, claiming “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. This is why Palestinian resistance to curriculum changes in East Jerusalem should not be understood only as resistance to an Israeli textbook. For many parents, teachers and schools, the fear is that accepting the Israeli curriculum also means accepting the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem and its erasure of Palestinian identity inside it.
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