Israel offers young Palestinians the settler state curriculum

Inducements are more school funds and opportunities

JERUSALEM // Young Palestinian Faris Abu- Mayyaleh will soon find out how he did in his final high-school exams, in which he answered questions about Israel’s founding fathers and the history of Zionism.

Faris, 18, from East Jerusalem, chose to study the Israeli curriculum instead of the Palestinian equivalent in the hope that it will open more doors at colleges in Israel and help him to get work there.

“I know it’s the ‘occupation’. But Palestine, Israel – I don’t care. I just want to go to university,” he said.

Israel hopes many other Palestinians will share his attitude after offering additional funding to Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem if they agree to teach the Israeli curriculum.

The aim, it says, is to help young Palestinians gain the qualifications they need to find work in Israel more easily. It also offers Israel a chance to steer some Palestinians away from a curriculum it claims is rife with anti-Semitism.

It is a loaded issue for school principals, parents and pupils. Many Palestinian schools badly need funding, but embracing the Israeli education programme is seen by many Palestinians as tantamount to adopting the narrative of the enemy.

Only 10 of the city’s public Palestinian schools have so far agreed to the change since last year, and only about 5,000 of the 110,000 Palestinian pupils of East Jerusalem’s 185 public and private establishments study the Israeli curriculum.

“It’s not easy,” said a Palestinian member of staff who teaches Israeli civics at a Palestinian school. “The children want to learn about their own people. I teach a lot of things I don’t believe in, but I have no choice.”

Under the Israeli curriculum, pupils are taught that the ArabIsraeli war of 1948, the year Israel was created, was a battle for independence for a state that would be a haven for Jews after centuries of persecution.

The Palestinian curriculum teaches it as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the fighting.

The head of one East Jerusalem school who rejected the Israeli curriculum said the authorities had offered to triple the annual budget per pupil to about 1,500 shekels (Dh1,576).

Israeli education minister Naftali Bennett, head of the religious-nationalist Jewish Home party, said the programme was meant to close gaps in education and ease the poverty and unemployment that has afflicted Jerusalem’s 320,000 Palestinians for decades.

The ministry did not provide full details of extra budget and incentives these schools have received, beyond funding for extra teachers and teaching hours.

Asked whether funding could be tripled per pupil at schools that adopted the Israeli curriculum, an education ministry source said it was “certainly possible” but the offers varied from school to school.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel and other campaigning groups say Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem are underfunded and the Israeli authorities should fund all the city’s schools equally.

“Israeli authorities have for years neglected the education system in East Jerusalem,” said Nisreen Alyan, head of the Jerusalem Programme at ACRI.

“While it is the first time the government and municipality see a need to close the gaps in East Jerusalem, the programme is designed according to a political agenda.”

The education minister rejected the criticism.

“I’m not forcing anything on anyone. I’m saying ‘ make it available’,” Mr Bennett said. “I believe market forces will do the job. Parents will tell their children: ‘I want you to get the Israeli diploma so you get a job in programming, not cleaning’.”

Israeli authorities recognise that gaps in education deepen a chasm between East Jerusalem – which Israel annexed in 1967 but which Palestinians want to be the capital of their future state – and predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem, making it harder for Palestinians to get ahead in life.

More than a third of Jerusalem’s Palestinian children drop out of high school, whereas only about 2 per cent of Israeli children do so. Almost 80 per cent of the city’s Palestinians live below the poverty line and only 40 per cent are working, mostly at the lower rungs of the labour market ladder, according to the Israeli central bureau of statistics. The Israeli national employment rate is 64 per cent, and 58 per cent for Israelis in Jerusalem.

Palestinian schools are short of 3,800 classrooms, disproportionately affecting the poorer Palestinian and ultra-orthodox Jewish sectors. The municipality has rented flats or supplied mobile shacks to serve as teaching spaces.

“I see normal schools there,” said Mahmoud Awissat, a father of six from Jabel Mukhaber who drives a school bus in West Jerusalem. “It’s worlds apart.”

Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat admitted gaps in the standard of schools. “We’re catching up,” he said. “We took a loan of a billion shekels to build 1,000 classrooms, and half of those will be in East Jerusalem.”