Education in Palestine faces major challenges that require concerted efforts to achieve development and progress, to ensure the provision of distinguished education that contributes to building a bright future for all; in light of the difficult conditions experienced by our Palestinian people, education stands out as one of the most important sectors facing major challenges that threaten its continuity and effectiveness. The education system in Palestine suffers from several problems, most notably the ongoing conflicts that directly affect the daily lives of students and teachers.
The first of these challenges is movement restrictions, as road closures and security checkpoints disrupt educational trips and restrict students and teachers’ access to schools.
There are times when students find themselves forced to stay at home due to security conditions and Israeli attacks. This leads to frequent interruptions in the educational process. It makes it difficult to achieve the required academic achievement.
The impact of ongoing conflict is another challenge, with students and teachers living under the constant threat of violence, arrest without charge, or murder , leading to high levels of stress and anxiety.
The fear and uncertainty that students feel negatively affects their concentration and ability to learn, making the educational process more complicated and arduous than it needs to be .
Under these circumstances, there is an urgent need for international and regional support to enhance education in Palestine, with a focus on developing e-programs and distance learning as a necessary means to ensure the continuity of education in difficult circumstances.
The Palestinian people in the 1948 area have been subjected to policies of ignorance and tyranny since the beginning of the occupation, and this policy extended after 1976 to include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip . The Palestinian education system has been a constant target of the occupation’s destructive policies, as these policies aimed to achieve the following:
1 – The Palestinian education system has been diverted from its goal, which is to create a Palestinian personality that is committed, creative, and struggling, with a distinct identity, connected to its Arab environment, and interacting with the international community.
2- Obstructing and slowing down the natural development of the entire Palestinian education sector through artificial isolation from its Arab, Islamic and international surroundings. As a result of the policies of closure, roadblocks, closing educational centres and reducing the development budgets that must be allocated, Palestinian society has been deprived of natural growth.
3- Preventing the education sector from playing its supposed role, like any other education system, in effectively contributing to the progress of human civilization by obstructing communication relations with other civilizations. The Palestinian education system was deprived of the advantages of interaction and cooperation with the international community, and those in charge of the education system in Palestine had to make double efforts to compensate for the defect resulting from the destructive occupation policies.
The Israeli occupation has constituted a structural obstacle to the Palestinian educational process , as it has reduced its authority and sovereignty in formulating an educational system that meets the requirements and aspirations of Palestinian society for advancement and development. The occupation has also tried hard to reduce or marginalize the role of education in promoting the national, moral and humanitarian concepts that any educational system aspires to instill in society. Instead of Palestinian society turning to building the energies of its people and enhancing the quality of its human resources, which are, as is always said, the only natural wealth that Palestinians possess, budgets and efforts have been allocated to rebuilding and addressing the negative effects of the occupation, which has prevented Palestinian society from keeping pace with the development of the era. Moreover, education in Palestine has a special feature that is not available to most peoples of the earth, which is that Palestine’s poverty in natural resources has made human capital a focus of special attention, and the Palestinian education system has become one of the most important tributaries of the struggle process, which aims to enhance the sense of identity, consolidate national belonging and form barriers to the process of Judaization and moral sabotage that the occupation has tried to create (Birzeit University, 2005).
Palestinian education had faced the harshest conditions, difficulties and obstacles with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank . There were military and arbitrary orders to educational institutions of all kinds and forms, all of which aimed to create an ignorant generation working in the cheap labor market in Israel. They deliberately ignored educational institutions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian people lived under harsh conditions, including a shortage of school buildings and their equipment, such as playgrounds, laboratories and libraries. The occupation generally aimed to obliterate the cultural, civilizational and social features of the Palestinian people, their entity and their identity, and ultimately to forget their land and homeland, displace the Palestinian people and divert the revenues of the Palestinian economy to Israel (Habayeb, 1991). From here we note that the occupation authorities sought to tighten their grip on this sector by controlling the educational process and emptying it of its content. They targeted the educational process in its comprehensive concept and its comprehensive elements, which include the curriculum, the school, the teacher and the student. These constitute the most important future occupation programs in the occupied territories.
Immediately after 1967, the military governor of the West Bank issued Military Order No. (2) regarding the Israeli army’s assumption of power and jurisdiction . The second paragraph of the said order states that “the laws that were in effect in the area on 28 May (7 June 1967) shall remain in effect to the extent that they do not conflict with this proclamation or any proclamation or order issued by it or conflict with changes resulting from the IDF’s occupation of the area” (Shahada and Kuttab). This procedure secured for the occupation authorities what they wanted and gave them the legal cover to practice their policy without bearing the consequences. The occupiers did not impose Israeli laws on the West Bank and the rest of the occupied territories, which is equivalent to annexation, but they issued the laws they wanted as amendments within the framework of Jordanian law itself. This (i.e. working under the cover of the previous Jordanian laws in the West Bank, and the previous Egyptian laws in the Gaza Strip) led to the creation of a duality in education that made it lose its balance and momentum, as it maintained the old structure or framework, while the schools placed budgets and the course of events under the authority of the occupation. An example of this is that students continued to take the Jordanian Tawjihi exam, and a center was designated in Nablus to administer these exams, and the same applies to the Gaza Strip with the Egyptian Tawjihi exams.
The educational objectives of the occupation authorities during this period can be summarized as follows:
1- Making the Palestinian student ignorant and isolating his past from his present in order to obscure the features of his future.
2- Making the Palestinian student ignorant of the history of the Palestinian issue and its developments.
3- Distorting Arab and Islamic history to make the student lose confidence in his nation, its history and civilization.
4- Confirming the legitimacy of its existence and usurping the rights of the Palestinian people and preventing the people from the right to self-determination.
5- Establishing a policy of regional expansion and imposing a fait accompli on the residents of the occupied territories.
The occupation authorities closed the Education Office of the Jerusalem Governorate and arrested the Director of Education. They also attached all government schools affiliated with the Jordanian Ministry of Education to the Israeli Education Authority and the Education Administration to the municipality, while the official schools in the West Bank and Gaza were placed under the supervision of the Education Officer. As for the private schools, they were attached to the Ministry of Education in accordance with Law No. (564) of 1968. The occupation authorities intended, through their educational policies, to gain complete control over the city and weaken its connection to the Palestinian cities in the West Bank, and to muzzle Arab nationalism in the areas of belonging to Arab heritage, national and cultural values through their application of the Israeli curriculum, whose philosophy aimed to instill in the souls of children the fact that the country is originally Jewish and was liberated from intruders. Hence, education in Jerusalem has suffered great damage. The occupation authorities have appointed teachers and instructors in Arab schools who do not have educational and technical qualifications that would allow them to practice the teaching profession. Many of them only hold high school certificates. The occupation authorities have not implemented compulsory education, nor have they imposed on parents to register their children, which has led to the spread of the phenomenon of school dropouts. They have also prevented national institutions from granting licenses to build new schools and expand existing schools, while obligating property owners to pay all types of municipal taxes, income and additional taxes. They are treated as residents of West Jerusalem, with the great disparity in living standards and income. The Israeli measures in education issues have met with strong resistance from the residents and the educational system, and complete rejection from school principals and teachers. They have arrested a number of teachers, closed the education office, and arrested the director of education and his assistant. The majority of teachers have refused to work in schools affiliated with the Ministry of Education and have turned to private and national schools that have continued to apply the Jordanian curriculum. Teachers have played a major role in encouraging parents of students to transfer their children to national schools, whether they are Affiliated to Islamic endowments or to Christian monasteries and churches and schools owned by associations or individuals . Education in Arab Jerusalem and its suburbs under the occupation in schools affiliated with the Israeli municipality and education went through three stages, which are:
1- The stage of implementing the official Israeli curricula during the period between (1967/1968-1971/1972) in secondary school classes.
2- The phase of implementing the unified Israeli curricula during the period between the two academic years (1971/1972-1972/1973).
3- The phase of returning to applying the Jordanian curriculum in the year (1973/1974) in the secondary stage, then the Jordanian curriculum was applied in the preparatory stage (1978/1979), and in the academic year (1980/1981), the Jordanian curriculum was applied in the primary stage while maintaining the application of the Israeli curriculum with regard to the Hebrew language and Israeli civics.
With the beginning of the blessed Intifada in January 1987, the occupation forces used several arbitrary practices in order to suppress the Intifada from within and to impose collective punishment on the Palestinian people, as they believed that pressure on the Palestinian people would lead to pressure on Palestinian youth to stop the Intifada. One of the most severe of these practices was the collective closure of all educational institutions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The occupation authorities also considered any gathering for the sake of education to be outside the law and punishable. Palestinian universities were closed and considered closed military zones, as was the case with educational institutes as well. The closure included (1174) schools in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. The closure lasted for a period of (17) months out of a total of (28) months (Educational network, 1990).
The continuous closure of educational institutions by the occupation authorities faced increasing international and internal pressures that prompted the occupation authorities to reopen schools in late July 1989, after a closure that lasted for six months. After three and a half months, the occupation authorities returned and ordered the closure of schools in November for two months (Educational network, 1990). Schools were then reopened in January 1990, and schools and educational institutions were allowed to reopen gradually. The continuous closure process, the arbitrary measures accompanying it, and the collective punishment had a significant impact on the level of achievement and academic performance of the Palestinian people. Students moved from one grade to another without having completed the curriculum for those grades, which contributed to the creation of a large group of uneducated students who were not aware of the basics of education necessary for reading. The continuous closure process had the greatest impact on the Palestinian people in all its sectors and categories. This policy aimed to threaten the future of education for the Palestinian people, and its impact included:
1- Educational impact.
2- Social impact.
3- Psychological impact.
4- Economic impact.
The Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Palestine supervises public education in government schools, UNRWA schools and private schools. The Ministry also supervises higher education in Palestinian colleges and universities. Educational ladder: The educational ladder includes the following stages: Stage One: Pre-school education (kindergarten): includes children from the age of 4 years – 5 years and 5 months. Stage Two: General education, including: A) Basic/compulsory education 1 – 10: Students enter the first grade of primary school at the age of 5 years and 6 months. Which lasts for ten years; that is, until the end of the tenth grade of primary school (compulsory stage). B) Secondary education (1st – 2nd) and includes: 1.) Academic secondary education: It lasts for two years in its scientific and humanities (literary) branches. Students here are prepared to take the General Secondary School Examination (Tawjihi), which enables successful students to enroll in universities. 2.) Vocational secondary education: It also lasts for two years and is divided into five branches: industrial, commercial, agricultural, nursing, and hotel. Students here prepare to take the general secondary exam (vocational guidance) which enables them to enroll in community colleges or some university colleges whose specializations suit the type of education in the secondary branch. Duration of the academic year: The academic year begins on: September 1 of the solar year, and ends on June 30 of the following solar year. That is, the duration of the academic year is (9) months.
