Political Conflict and Exclusion in Jerusalem: The Provision of Education and Social Services by Rawan Asali Nuseibeh

Author:Rawan Asali Nuseibeh [Nuseibeh, Rawan Asali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781317535775
Google: fTmvCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-08T12:15:37+00:00

Such interventions are not possible in municipal schools serving Palestinian students because the expert in the Palestinian curriculum and the Tawjihi is the Palestinian Ministry of Education, and there is no cooperation between the two ministries; also the Palestinian Ministry of Education does not have such programmes or the budget necessary to implement any reform programmes and Palestinian students miss out.

This chapter has set out to describe the education sector in East Jerusalem. It has shown that the State of Israel which claims sovereignty over East Jerusalem is claiming the land but not fulfilling its duty towards the Palestinian residents. Its provision of educational services is both insufficient and highly politicised. It provides educational services to only 47 per cent of the population; this insufficient provision of educational services is not the only problem. This system is also underfunded, highly centralised and lacks strategic planning which takes into account Palestinian children’s needs.

The problem does not only lie in the Israeli municipal educational system, but also in the other systems providing education to Palestinian children in East Jerusalem. The other three systems are not compensating for the lack of provisions by the municipality. Educational services the PA provides in Jerusalem are even weaker than the services the Israeli municipal system renders. They suffer from limited funding and sound educational policies. The PA provides services to only 14 per cent of the Palestinian schoolchildren in Jerusalem and the numbers are decreasing; enrolment has decreased by 4 per cent since 2005. The third system providing services is UNRWA and it provides education to a very small percentage of students, which is 3 per cent of the student population. The fourth system is the private system, which provides education to 31 per cent of the student population and is available only to students with higher socio-economic backgrounds, which further increases inequality in East Jerusalem.

Lack of schools is not the only problem the East Jerusalem education sector faces, but also the quality of the educational services available is poor. What makes the problem of service provision worse is that the Israeli municipality discriminates against the other systems which provide educational services to the Palestinians, thus limiting their scope of work further. Awqaf, UNRWA and unrecognised private schools are subject to restrictions in terms of renovating and expanding their school building and acquiring work permits for teachers who come from the West Bank.

This chapter contributes to the main theory of this book by showing how Israel provides services unequally to Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem. While the state invests in its education sector in West Jerusalem, it neglects and discriminates against Palestinian educational institutions in East Jerusalem, which results in a fragmented and weak educational structure in East Jerusalem. This reflects the ethnocratic nature of the state, which prefers and promotes the welfare of the Jewish population solely; as mentioned in Chapter 1, an ethnocratic state distributes resources unequally, thus ensuring the domination of the chosen ethnic group (Yiftachel, 2006). This chapter has also shown how

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