East Jerusalem: Palestinian schools under pressure, curriculum and teachers in the crosshairs

According to Al Jazeera, Israel is tightening its grip on Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem. The report describes restrictions imposed on teachers and pressure on institutions to adopt the Israeli school curriculum. These measures, the channel writes, threaten Palestinian education in the city.

The summary we have is thin. We do not know here the detail of the restrictions, the number of schools or teachers affected, or the precise mechanisms of the pressure, whether financial, administrative or otherwise. We will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the report.

Let us start with an obvious point that colonial projects have all rediscovered: you cannot durably control a territory without controlling what its children learn there. The school curriculum is an answer to the question "who are we, and where do we come from?" Imposing another narrative, another history, another set of maps, amounts to moving the border to where no wall can reach: into the minds of the next generation. Our reading, and it is the angle we stand by, is that pressure on curricula belongs to a tool of cultural domination typical of the logics of settler colonialism: reducing a people's presence on the land, and then in its memory.

The lever on teachers is no minor matter. A teacher means a salary, a licence, a career, sometimes an entire family that depends on that income. When working conditions become an instrument of pressure, the choice on offer is cruel: bend or lose your livelihood. Economic constraint does the work that a law need not spell out in black and white. It is a familiar mechanism of dependency: make a population reliant on institutions controlled by the other side, then set your terms.

We must also look at the families. Between the school that preserves identity and the one that promises recognised diplomas and better job prospects, many parents make calculations no one should have to make. This dilemma, manufactured by the balance of power, also divides: it sets neighbours, colleagues and families who wanted the same thing for their children against one another. Whenever a power structure fractures those it dominates in this way, the right question is: who benefits from the fracture?

Al Jazeera places at the centre those who resist: teachers, parents, school principals. This is where the essential struggle takes place. Teaching one's language and history under constrained conditions is an ordinary, everyday act, without slogans, and that is precisely why it is hard to crush.

What we do not yet know: the response of the Israeli authorities, the real extent of the pressure, how the number of schools giving way is changing. We will come back to it. But the fundamental question is posed: can one claim to administer a city while deciding what its children have the right to know about themselves?