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Palestine accuses Israel of falsifying Palestinian curriculum in Jerusalem schools

October 26, 2018 at 1:20 am

Palestinian students attend activities during a summer camp, organised by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) at Zaitoun School in Gaza City, Gaza on 18 July, 2017 [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency]

Palestinian Education Minister Sabri Sidem accused Israel, Thursday, of “falsifying” the Palestinian curriculum in schools in occupied Jerusalem.

Sidem said in a news conference held at the ministry’s headquarters in Ramallah that “the Israeli authorities printed distorted copies of the Palestinian curriculum and distributed them to the schools supervised by the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem.”

He pointed out that the distortion affected “all the curricula issued by the Palestinian Curriculum Development Centre.”

“The occupation authorities removed the Palestinian flag from all books covers, the Palestinian keffiyeh, and the name of the State of Palestine and its Eagle Logo as well as the phrase ‘Ministry of Education and Higher Education,’” he clarified.

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He added that Israel “removed paragraphs and replaced them with others which support the Israeli case, in an attempt to obliterate the Palestinian version.”

During the conference, the minister announced the launch of “the national campaign against the policies of the occupation against Palestinian education in the Holy City,” in order to address “the serious falsification of the Palestinian curricula content and the act of reprinting them with distorted contents and imposing them on the schools of Jerusalem.”

Israel, which has occupied the city of East Jerusalem since 1967, seeks to impose the Israeli curriculum on Palestinian schools, in a move that the Palestinian Authority rejects.