Conference Program

In East Jerusalem, schooling is not a neutral public service but a contested political arena where citizenship, legitimacy, and collective belonging are continuously negotiated. This paper argues that the Israeli Ministry of Education operates through a systematic curricular project that minimizes or erases Palestinian narratives from official textbooks and learning materials, producing a regime of “acceptable knowledge” that redefines what can be publicly named, remembered, and debated in the classroom (Pinson, 2020).

Building on scholarship that links attacks on education to broader projects of cultural erasure, the paper situates curricular silencing within the wider logic of undermining education as a pillar of identity and rights. Recent work introducing “Educide” highlights how the dismantling of educational systems whether through physical destruction or systemic obstruction threatens cultural continuity and collective resilience (Iriqat et al., 2025). While my focus is East Jerusalem, the concept helps foreground how education becomes a strategic site where identity is targeted and democratic futures are constrained.

A central contribution of the paper is its stance on teachers. I do not treat educators as the source of silencing, nor do I moralize their pedagogical choices. Instead, I foreground the structural conditions that compel avoidance: policy and curricular ambiguity, surveillance fears, and reputational risk. Within this reality, teachers’ “silence” often functions as an intelligible survival strategy an attempt to protect students, families, and themselves under conditions where controversial public issues can be misread as security threats (Gindi & Erlich Ron, 2019).

Analytically, I propose a “silencing cycle” relevant to East Jerusalem: (1) curricular and policy ambiguity around Palestinian identity, (2) teachers’ perceptions of professional and reputational risk, (3) pedagogical avoidance and self-censorship, and (4) students’ alienation and constrained political agency in their community. I argue that this cycle produces clear democratic costs: shrinking freedom of expression in educational space, diminished recognition of minority narratives as civic knowledge, and erosion of classroom practices central to democratic learning (dialogue, disagreement, justification, and mutual recognition) (Pinson, 2020).

In line with the panel’s emphasis on inclusion, empowerment, and resistance, the paper concludes by outlining principles for identity-affirming democratic pedagogy approaches that can sustain civic participation and collective memory without reproducing an “emergency logic” that renders Palestinian identity inherently suspect (Pacetti et al., 2024).