Twenty released Palestinian inmates set to return to Jerusalem schools in January
Social workers to decide in each case whether to allow student to return to school; some municipal officials fear they may have bad influence over peers
Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
During a seven-day truce in Gaza, between November 24 and December 1, Israel freed 240 Palestinian security prisoners as part of an exchange deal with the terror group Hamas that led to the release of 105 hostages.
Of those 240 Palestinian inmates – all women and minors – 20 were East Jerusalem residents of school age, who are slated to rejoin the city’s education system on January 10, after the Christmas holidays marked in the city’s east.
Some Jerusalem municipality officials have expressed concerns that the newly released inmates may be perceived as heroes at their schools and have a negative influence over their peers. Others maintain that reintegrating them into the education system is the best way to monitor their behavior going forward.
Last week, senior municipality officials sat down with representatives of the city’s Education Department to discuss the issue. The department has been meeting with the parents of the released teens to try and find the right solution for each of them, based on the severity of the charges on which they were convicted and the educational gap they accumulated during their detention.
Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a deputy mayor, told The Times of Israel that the municipality and the Education Ministry have been collaborating to draw up an individual plan for each released minor.
“The Jerusalem municipality is assessing and mapping the needs of those teenagers so they don’t go back to radicalization. With social workers, we’re looking at their pedagogical needs. We’re looking at whether the school that they were in is the school they should continue to be in.”
By working with Arab social workers, psychologists and education experts, the municipality is assessing the needs of each teen individually in coordination with their parents, “so that they don’t go back into a life of crime and terrorism.”
Hassan-Nahoum assessed that most of the released youths will be starting school on January 10, unless social workers establish otherwise. It may be decided to place them in a different school than before “if it’s assessed that that’s better for their development, or for some reason the school was toxic in some way to them, [or] if a [student] is a danger to other children in their school.”
The process is compounded by the fact that the municipality and the Education Ministry do not have full oversight over what is taught in many of the educational establishments in East Jerusalem.
A large number of East Jerusalem students – 44%, according to recent UN data – attend schools that function under the “recognized but unofficial” system, under which they get most of their funding from the city of Jerusalem, but are only partially monitored by it.
In addition, about 15% of students attend “unrecognized schools,” administered either by the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA or by Islamic authorities. The latter are funded and operated by the Palestinian Education Ministry and follow the Palestinian Authority curriculum, and Israel has no oversight.
In strong criticism of the “recognized but unofficial” school system – which also applies to ultra-Orthodox schools – Hassan-Nahoum said: “It’s ridiculous that the government of Israel is actually paying for the Palestinian Authority curriculum in East Jerusalem schools. It’s absolutely ridiculous. We’re paying for them to teach them how to hate us.”
Israeli officials as well as European ones have long complained of incitement in the Palestinian curriculum.
An increasing number of schools in recent years have shifted from teaching the Palestinian curriculum to the one taught in Arab Israeli schools, which is fully drafted and supervised by the Israeli Education Ministry and which prepares pupils for admission to Israeli universities.
Opposition has emerged among Palestinians to the shift, sometimes accompanied by acts of vandalism, as many East Jerusalemites perceive switching to the Israeli curriculum as a loss of their identity.
The transition represents a welcome development, according to Hassan-Nahoum. “We have moved the needle, but not fast enough,” she commented.
“There’s a lot of parents who want [the Israeli] curriculum because they understand that their kids’ future would be much better if they spoke Hebrew and English, but not the tawjihi, the Palestinian Authority curriculum, with which they then have to do some type of conversion to go into university.”
Among the staunchest opponents of the idea that released security inmates should rejoin schools is far-right city council member Arieh King. In an interview with Walla, King said: “Young terrorists are more dangerous than adult and older ones. We cannot let the most dangerous terrorists into schools in which they will become ‘superheroes’ and an object of admiration for their classmates.”
Walla said King also called for the establishment of a school on the grounds of a police station, or of the West Bank’s Ofer Prison – from which many of the prisoners were released – arguing they could attend there instead of returning to their previous institutions.
