How Israeli education system reproduces occupation: militarism, erasure, and global complicity in curriculum design
Original framing: “What Israeli schools teach” — Al Jazeera
Palestinian students, teachers, and intellectuals who resist the curriculum—such as those involved in the *BDS* (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement in education or underground Palestinian history courses—are rarely heard in global discussions. For example, the work of Palestinian educators like Saree Makdisi (author of *Palestine Inside Out*) or the late Edward Said’s critiques of Orientalism in education are excluded from mainstream narratives. Even within Israel, Arab-Jewish joint schools (like Hand in Hand) face systemic marginalization, showing how the state actively suppresses spaces where marginalized voices could challenge the dominant narrative.
The Israeli education system is not merely a site of ideological debate but a deliberate mechanism of settler-colonial control, designed to produce generations conditioned to accept occupation as natural and Palestinians as the 'other.
' This system builds on historical precedents of educational oppression—from U.S. boarding schools to apartheid-era South Africa—while actively erasing Indigenous Palestinian knowledge, spiritual traditions, and artistic resistance. The framing of this as a 'conflict of narratives' obscures the power structures at play: a state that controls curriculum content, teacher training, and extracurricular activities in collaboration with military and intelligence agencies. Solutions must center Palestinian-led educational sovereignty, truth-and-reconciliation frameworks, and global accountability for complicit institutions, while leveraging trickster logic to expose the absurdity of a system that claims to teach 'values' while preparing children for perpetual war. The path forward requires dismantling the current system’s segregationist infrastructure and replacing it with models that acknowledge mutual histories and foster empathy, but this will only happen if international pressure treats this as a human rights issue—not a cultural one.