PA accuses Isarel of “Israelizing” Palestinian education

Excerpt of a column by Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, regular columnist for official PA daily and former advisor to former PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on national affairs

Headline: “Israel is Israelizing the education”

“The Palestinian people still adheres to its identity, its history, its culture, and its cultural heritage, and it has stood against the most severe plot of falsification in history, its Zionist owners, their masters in the capitalist Western states, and their pawns. Palestine is still called Palestine, and the people is still well-rooted in its historical embrace and is preserving its national narrative.

Despite this, successive governments of Israel have not submitted to the Palestinian people’s willpower and courage. They are still acting through all means and ways to create new breaches in the Arab Palestinian consciousness by fighting the Palestinian narrative under the title of ‘incitement’ and the rest of the means of the carrot and the stick, and by spreading drugs, prostitution, and other problems that harm Palestinian society…

On Thursday, July 28 [2022], Israeli Minister of Education Yifat Shasha-Biton cancelled the permits of six schools in Jerusalem, the Palestinian capital, under the aforementioned pretext and the claim that the Palestinian [PA] curriculum includes contents that ‘incite against the Israeli state and army.’ …

This was in order to insert and integrate the Israeli curriculum into the Palestinian curriculum, which will affect the Palestinian students’ consciousness in an arbitrary and terroristic manner…

Therefore, we must develop the means of struggle in the field of confrontation in order to defend the national education and culture in general, and the national curriculum in particular, in order to preserve the Palestinian narrative and not to allow it to be integrated with the fake and false Zionist narrative, regardless of the cost.”

Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul is also a former PLO Central Council member.