Palestinian education in the Israeli settler state: divide, rule and control

This paper situates the Israeli public educational system in the broader context of colonizing educational systems and explores the avenues through which it serves the Jewish settler-state project and establishes a colonial educational hegemony. Public education in Israel is legally mandated to promote the values of Jewish culture and loyalty to the Jewish state. Furthermore, its policy and content systematically instill racially derogatory attitudes toward the Palestinian citizens of Israel among Jewish students, as a basis for fostering and perpetuating the deep-seated societal division between Jews and Palestinians. In addition, the public educational system effectively maintains the cultural, socioeconomic and political subordination of Palestinian students through the substandard and discriminatory provision of resources, programs and services and the imposition of aims, goals and curricula that alienate Palestinian students. Consequently, their levels of educational achievement are lower than that of their Jewish counterparts. As such, the Israeli public educational system plays an essential role in consigning Palestinian citizens to the social, economic and political margins of society. The Israeli educational system is designed to control both the Palestinian Arab minority and Jewish majority and to maintain an unbridgeable divide – in support of the Zionist settler state vision.