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Israel is rewriting the Palestinian curriculum in East Jerusalem to erase Palestinian identity

Now, these tens of thousands of Palestinian children, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied the city in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools.

Nearly 38 percent of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem now study the Israeli curriculum, while the rest of the students’ textbooks are being censored line by line, stripping mention of Jerusalem, prisoners, the Nakba, and freedom fighters.

By Aseel Mafarjeh Mondoweiss, October 5, 2026

Sally Assi, 34, recalled watching her 11-year-old daughter, Aline, a third-grader at Nour al-Huda School in the town of Beit Hanina in occupied East Jerusalem, arrange her drawing supplies before asking her, “Do you know why we draw Jerusalem?”

“Because it’s beautiful… right?” Aline answered.

Assi smiled, but her question to her daughter wasn’t really about drawing. “Jerusalem isn’t just walls and the Dome of the Rock,” Assi told Mondoweiss. “Jerusalem, to our generation and the generations before us, is a living history. It has cities, people, prisoners, stories, dreams.”

What Assi is describing from her kitchen in the town of Betunia, adjacent to Ramallah, is not an isolated worry among Palestinian parents whose children attend schools in East Jerusalem, under the control of the Israeli Ministry of Education. It is the front line of a rapid, Israeli-driven transformation of Palestinian education in the occupied city, where the Israeli curriculum has become mandatory for every first- and seventh-grade class as of this school year, affecting well over a third of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem.

Now, these tens of thousands of Palestinian children, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied the city in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools. In addition, the remaining two-thirds of the Palestinian student body have been subjected to invasive Israeli alterations to the existing Palestinian curriculum, which has included the wholesale deletion of phrases, images, and symbols that denote Palestinian national identity, most significantly references to the Nakba of 1948 and altered phrasings around themes such as Jerusalem, prisoners, and Palestinian heritage.

It’s this quiet encroachment on Palestinian textbooks, as much as the wholesale replacement, that worries Assi most. “We don’t want our children to learn hatred, and we don’t want them to carry pain without meaning,” she said in an indirect reference to Israeli claims that Palestinian textbooks teach children to “hate.”

“But we want them to know the truth,” she added.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A trajectory decades in the making

Israeli affairs analyst Esmat Mansour says this shift didn’t begin this year, nor was it imposed by sudden decree. It’s a trajectory that has accumulated for decades, starting with early attempts to impose the Israeli curriculum after the 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem, which was blocked by parent and teacher resistance, keeping the Jordanian curriculum in place for years.

“When the Palestinian Authority was established, the Palestinian curriculum became the city’s reference text,” Mansour told Mondoweiss. “But it never entered classrooms without passing through Israeli review. Books were revised before approval, so the cover stayed Palestinian while the content was reshaped from within. Today, that has escalated into something bolder: direct expansion of the Israeli curriculum itself, not as a marginal alternative but as a primary track competing for the city’s children”.

That pattern of internal revision is exactly what Hebrew University researcher Samira Alian documented in a recent academic study 

What Assi is describing, in her kitchen in the town of Betunia, is not an isolated worry among Palestinian parents whose children attend schools under the control of the Israeli Ministry of Education. It is the front line of a rapid, Israeli-driven transformation of Palestinian education in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Israeli curriculum has become mandatory for every first- and seventh-grade class as of this school year.

Now, thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum, as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools.

It’s this quiet encroachment, as much as the wholesale replacement, that worries Assi most. “We don’t want our children to learn hatred, and we don’t want them to carry pain without meaning — but we want them to know the truth.”

A conflict that moved inside the classroom

In East Jerusalem, the fight over education is now no longer about the number of schools or classroom seats alone. It has moved into the classroom itself, into the book students open each morning, the terms their eyes land on, the images they study, the history they’re taught, and the narrative that will shape how they understand themselves in their city for years to come.

With the start of the 2026-2027 school year, that shift entered a more decisive phase: the Israeli curriculum has been imposed ………………………………………….. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/10/israel-is-rewriting-the-palestinian-curriculum-in-east-jerusalem-to-erase-palestinian-identity/

October 11, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Education, Israel