Israel’s war on Palestinian education is about erasing identity
An UNRWA school in the West Bank
Anna Saif writes in The New Arab on 27 January 2025:
In September 2024, the EU Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee gave preliminary approval to the freezing of €20 million earmarked for the Palestinian Authority over what it termed its “antisemitic texts books”. This was followed by a vote in the plenary session of the European Parliament in early December to condemn UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority, and to demand the halting of funds for Palestinian education.
This renewed attack on Palestinian education came after the trusted Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research published a report in 2021 in which it found that Palestinian schoolbooks adhere to UNESCO standards.
It is important to ask why the EU Committee did not ask for a similar report on Israeli education? Surely the war crimes of the IDF in Gaza must be the product of socialisation processes in Israeli society, including its education?
In realty, this attack on the Palestinian curriculum is the result of an ongoing campaign to stamp out Palestinian political consciousness and indigenous identity in order to silence the Palestinian national narrative.
If the EU halt educational funds this year, it would vindicate Netanyahu’s vitriolic call for the “deradicalisation” of Palestinian education: “They have to stop teaching their children to become terrorists. They have to stop teaching and indoctrinating a whole generation on the annihilation of Israel.”
Yet it is Israel which is annihilating the Palestinians. This year 625,000 Palestinian school children in Gaza have missed out on another academic year due Israel’s genocide. 45,000 six-year olds could not start their school education, and 39,000 18-year olds could not take their final school exams last summer.
Furthermore, despite the recent announcement of a ceasefire, Palestinian children now have no schools to go to because almost 90% of all education buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Education in Gaza cannot be ‘deradicalized’ because it is non-existent. It has been obliterated, and over 12,000 school children who should have been beginning their second school term this January have been murdered by Israeli bombs, as well as over 500 of their educators.
If this was not enough, Israel has taken the unprecedented step of banning UNRW. The UN relief and works agency has been the main supplier of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians since 1949 and now runs 198 schools in Gaza and 96 in the West Bank. The viciousness of this move is as savage as the genocide itself.
A crusade against Palestinian schoolbooks