[News] Palestinian Schools in Occupied Jerusalem Suspend Classes as Israel Denies Teachers' Permits

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Palestinian Schools in Occupied Jerusalem Suspend Classes as Israel Denies
Teachers' Permits
Quds News Network
August 31, 2026
[image: Palestinian Schools in Occupied Jerusalem Suspend Classes as Israel
Denies Teachers' Permits]

Israel imposes its curriculum on all new grades in occupied Jerusalem
schools, seizes UNRWA schools, denies Palestinian teachers' permits, and
imports Jewish teachers, to erase Palestinian education.

For the first time since Israel occupied and annexed East Jerusalem in
1967, every newly opened grade in the city's public schools will teach the
Israeli curriculum instead of the Palestinian one, as the school year
begins, marking a major escalation in Israel's long campaign to strip
Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem of their national education and identity.

According to Israeli reporting, all new first-grade and seventh-grade
classes in the state education system in occupied Jerusalem will use the
Israeli curriculum this year. More than 45,000 of the roughly 120,000
Palestinian students in the city, some 38 percent, will now study the
Israeli program, up from single digits just 15 years ago and fewer than
13,000 students only six years ago. The shift is the fruit of a deliberate,
years-long Israeli effort to "Israelize" Palestinian schools, driven by
funding incentives dangled before principals, a 2018 government plan
explicitly designed to fund the Israelization of the city's schools, and
Israeli laws that stripped academic recognition from graduates of
Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank, coercing Palestinian
families toward the Israeli system by closing off the alternatives.

The imposition of the curriculum is only one front in the assault on
Palestinian education. Israel has also moved to seize the schools of UNRWA,
the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, in the city. After passing laws
banning the agency, Israeli forces shut down its six schools in occupied
Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem occupation municipality has now taken over two
large UNRWA compounds to open Israeli schools in their place. In the
Shuafat refugee camp, the municipality seized the school UNRWA built in the
1960s, and in Kafr Aqab it took over the Qalandiya vocational training
center it stormed just last week, the last UNRWA facility operating in the
city, to convert it into an Israeli-run boys' school.

At the same time, Israel is squeezing the Palestinian teachers who form the
backbone of the city's independent schools. Private schools across occupied
Jerusalem have been forced to suspend classes until further notice because
Israel refused to renew the work permits of their teachers, leaving
thousands of Palestinian students without instruction and holding the
education of an entire community hostage to Israeli bureaucratic coercion.
The permit denial is a powerful lever: by choking off the ability of
Palestinian teachers to work, Israel pressures schools toward the Israeli
system and erodes the Palestinian educational institutions that have
resisted it.

Those Palestinian teachers who remain are being watched. A recent
investigation revealed that Israel's Education Ministry has been secretly
surveilling teachers over their social media posts, hunting not only for
what it calls incitement but for any criticism of the Israeli government,
and that three of every four teachers targeted are Palestinians. The
surveillance, building secret intelligence files from screenshots and
police and Shin Bet data without the teachers' knowledge, is designed to
intimidate Palestinian educators into silence and to purge those who will
not conform.

As it purges Palestinian teachers, Israel is importing Jewish ones. The
Israeli government has launched its first national "aliyah program" to
recruit Jewish teachers from North America to come and teach in Israel,
actively bringing in foreign Jewish immigrants to staff its classrooms even
as it denies permits to the Palestinian teachers already living in occupied
Jerusalem. The contrast lays bare the logic of the entire campaign: the
replacement of Palestinians with Jewish settlers and immigrants, applied to
the school system as it is applied to the land.
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