Israel uses law to destroy Palestinian education in East Jerusalem

On Tuesday, the Chairman of the Knesset’s Education Committee, Zvi Sukkot of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, arrived at a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem for a “surprise visit” – his second in two weeks. He did not come to evaluate pedagogy or classroom conditions or needs. Instead, he smashed the school’s entrance sign because it featured a Palestinian flag and publicly pledged to shut it down. This storming of the school was more than just a publicity stunt meant to appeal to his political base ahead of Israel’s October 2026 elections. It was the physical embodiment of a sweeping state campaign targeting Palestinian education in unlawfully occupied and annexed East Jerusalem. Sukkot is using his position to physically police Palestinian schools. This move comes on top of the Knesset’s aggressive legislative campaign to destroy Palestinian education in East Jerusalem that lawmakers have pushed in recent years. One such law, passed in January 2026, bars graduates of Palestinian universities in the West Bank from working as teachers in Israel and in East Jerusalem. This law is based on racist ideology and extremist claims that graduates of these universities are inherently dangerous and morally unfit to be educators. The motives of the law’s proponents were made clear during Knesset deliberations: advancing what several MKs called the “Israelisation” of the educational system and of the students, even at the expense of access to education. In a May 2025 Education Committee session, one Likud MK claimed that this law is needed as teachers who graduate from Palestinian universities “do not cultivate Israelisation” among their students. The law passed despite the devastating consequences it is bound to have on the already fragile and disadvantaged Palestinian education system in East Jerusalem. This system is largely dependent on graduates of West Bank universities – who are overwhelmingly women – and it already has a serious shortage of teaching staff and classrooms. Another law, passed in November 2024, which is widely referred to as the “Silencing Law”, gives the Israeli Ministry of Education full discretion to suspend or dismiss teachers through a fast-track administrative process. It targets speech the ministry deems to be “incitement to terrorism”, based on the ambiguous and arbitrary clauses of the Israeli Counter-Terrorism Law, which has become a catch-all mechanism to criminalise Palestinian speech. The 2024 law also gives the ministry the right to revoke funding from schools on these same grounds.