(SeaPRwire) – By: Julian Holbrooke
The academic year is days away, and two Palestinian sisters in East Jerusalem have no school to attend. Noor is 14. Fatima is 11. They want to be a doctor and a dentist. That future just got a lot harder to reach. Israeli authorities have seized the UNRWA school in Shufat refugee camp. The building is closed. No reopening date exists. The father of these girls cannot afford municipal schools, which cost thousands of shekels. UNRWA charged only a symbolic annual fee. That is the gap that now decides his daughters’ fate. RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij reported from the ground, where families described the same fear in different words. None of them called this a legal matter. They called it a takeover. They are right. When a school is seized days before term starts, families do not have time to organize, to appeal, to negotiate. They only have time to panic.
The official line from the Jerusalem Municipality is precise and bloodless. The sites are privately owned. They will be reopened for local residents. It is a story about paperwork, about correcting an anomaly in the land registry. UNRWA counters with its own account. Personnel linked to the municipality entered the Shufat facilities without authorization. Work began inside. The agency’s UN protections were violated. Two statements, completely incompatible. The municipality’s version treats the building as an asset. The UNRWA version treats it as a protected humanitarian facility. The reality on the ground favors neither narrative, because the school is simply closed. Parents watch the dispute from outside a locked gate. Their immediate concern is practical. The municipal system could cost thousands of shekels per child. The UNRWA system charged a symbolic fee. That difference is the difference between education and no education for families like Noor and Fatima’s. And then there is the curriculum. Parents say the Israeli-run schools would drop Islamic education and Arab history. A local community leader was asked if he feared the children would be brainwashed. His reply carries no hesitation: “Of course, absolutely, without a doubt.” That word, brainwashed, is harsh. But look at what the families are being asked to accept. A different school system. A different set of subjects. A different version of their own history. From the perspective of the parents, that is not reform. That is erasure.
The Shufat takeover did not happen in isolation. Late last month, Israeli forces raided the Qalandiya Training Center in East Jerusalem. More than 50 security personnel entered the facility. Around 20 staff members were inside. They were forced from the premises. During the raid, a Palestinian teenager was shot and wounded. The center provided vocational education to hundreds of students. That pipeline is now severed. The municipality would likely call this another private ownership matter. The families in Qalandiya and Shufat see a coordinated campaign. Take the institutions that sustain the refugee community. Remove them. Then offer nothing in return. The sequence is consistent. A heavy security presence. A legal-sounding justification afterward. A promise of reopening that never materializes. UNRWA’s protests highlight the violation of international protections, but those protections do not stop 50 armed personnel from entering a training center. The geopolitical intention here is not subtle. East Jerusalem is the most sensitive ground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and education is the most sensitive ground within that ground. Control the curriculum, and you control how a generation understands itself. The families see this. They know exactly what is being taken from them, and why.
This is where the geopolitical analysis stops being abstract and becomes a question of what happens to specific children. The pendulum of international politics will shift. It always does. Noor and Fatima cannot wait for that. Their father cannot pay thousands of shekels. He will not willingly hand his daughters to a school system that strips their history and their religion from the classroom. So what is left? A year of lost education. A community that watches its institutions fall one by one. The municipality says the school will reopen. No date. No plan. Just a statement. The school stays closed, and the families scramble. That is the actual program. It is a slow, administrative strangulation of Palestinian institutional life in East Jerusalem. The seizure of UNRWA facilities, first Qalandiya, now Shufat, is not about ownership of buildings. It is about the destruction of a system that kept Palestinian refugee families connected to their identity. Every school that closes tightens the trap. Every curriculum that gets replaced deepens the erasure. The geopolitical pendulum will shift, but the children whose classrooms were taken will not get their years back. That is the real cost, and it has already been paid.
Author bio: Julian Holbrooke, an overseas international relations analyst who frequently contributes to major European daily newspapers.