On January 21, 2026, the Israeli Knesset approved a law banning Palestinian university graduates from teaching in Israeli schools. Under the law, teachers with a degree from a Palestinian institution can be employed at an Israeli school only if they also hold a degree from an Israeli institution, unless “it is proven that their employment would have a harmful influence on students or minors.”1

The bill states its purpose is “to prevent the harmful influence of the Palestinian Authority [PA], which is hostile to the State of Israel and its values, and to safeguard the educational values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” The legislation added that “studies at these institutions include, in many cases, antisemitic content and indoctrination whose purpose is to deny the existence of the State of Israel and to seriously incite against it.”2

The law does not apply to teachers already employed in Israel’s education system; however, Palestinian university graduates or those who have completed at least one academic year or are currently enrolled at a Palestinian institution must earn an Israeli teaching certificate within two years to then be employed at an Israeli school. The law will apply to principals in three years if they also don’t have an Israeli degree.3

“[The decision] had nothing to do with the security issues as much as with the national, Palestinian identity that is well-shaped in Palestinian universities,” Dr. Maram Masarwi, author of Creeping Israelization: Education in East Jerusalem (1967–2022), told Jerusalem Story (see Education Expert: Israel Aims to “Engineer the Palestinian Jerusalemite Student’s Personality”).4

More than 60 percent of teachers in East Jerusalem schools hold degrees from Palestinian universities—the largest figure across the Palestinian education system in Israel.5

“Preventing the hiring of new teachers with degrees from these universities effectively paralyzes the educational process in the schools,” Fadwa Husseini, director of the Faisal Husseini Foundation, a Palestinian organization supporting East Jerusalem’s Palestinian education sector, told Jerusalem Story.6

What’s more, Jerusalem’s educational administration plans to open nine new Palestinian schools in the next five years, adding another 540 teachers into the East Jerusalem education sector.7 But the recently passed law threatens to limit the number of teachers employed.

“This policy is not an isolated measure but part of an integrated system aimed at the destruction of Palestinian education,” Husseini said. “This policy also cannot be isolated from what is happening [elsewhere] in the [rest of] West Bank, where thousands of students have lost their right to reach their schools as a result of closures and military incursions. And, of course, from what is happening in Gaza, where the whole education system is destroyed.”

Israeli rocket fire has obliterated nearly 92 percent of the Gaza Strip’s academic institutions—a scale so massive that experts have labeled Israel’s actions as “scholasticide.”8

In May 2025, Israel ordered all six United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools in East Jerusalem to close (see Israel Closes All UNRWA Schools in East Jerusalem), cutting off access to education for approximately 800 Palestinian students. At the end of January 2026, school operations were further impeded as utility providers began severing electricity and water services from UNRWA facilities, including its East Jerusalem schools and its vocational training center in Kufr ‘Aqab, located behind the Israeli-built Separation Wall (see Neighborhoods beyond the Wall).9

And just as Jerusalem’s private school semester was set to start on January 10, 2026, Israel denied military entry permits to Palestinian teachers employed in these schools who hold PA IDs and live in areas of the West Bank outside the Jerusalem municipal boundaries.10 Hundreds of teachers and staff could no longer access Jerusalem. In response, East Jerusalem private schools went on strike for a week.11

“The biggest private schools in Jerusalem rely on 25 to 30 percent of their teaching staff from the rest of the West Bank, and these teachers require entry permits to [enter the city and] reach their workplaces,” Husseini said.

On the one hand, the law targets Palestinian identity. On the other, it further entrenches Israeli control over Palestinians.

“Studying in Israeli higher education is actually a real shift in your attitude—in your language, knowledge, and identity,” Masarwi said. “You are more dependent on the Israeli job market.”

The new law, Masarwi noted, is also designed to weaken the Palestinian economy, as prospective Palestinian teachers are pushed to pay tuition and housing to Israeli universities instead of Palestinian ones. So, instead of investing in Palestinian higher education, Palestinian students are pulled toward an Israeli future, leaving Palestinian institutions to atrophy.

“[Israel wants] to actually create a very fragile Arab identity inside Israel, one that is not rooted deeply in its own culture, language, society,” Masarwi said.

This has become evident over the years as Israel has sought to impose its own curriculum on Palestinian schools. Following Government Decision 3790 of 2018, Israel succeeded in overhauling the Palestinian education system in East Jerusalem within five years. Today, almost 89 percent of schools in East Jerusalem adhere to the Israeli curriculum (see Education Expert: Israel Aims to “Engineer the Palestinian Jerusalemite Student’s Personality”)—a result of consistent government pressure to implement the Israeli curriculum or face license revocations and funding cuts.

“They control your history, they control your narrative, they control your knowledge, they control your language, they control even the way that you name places—what you remember and what you shouldn’t remember,” Masarwi said.

With the law, Israel is attempting to extinguish the Palestinian spirit in Jerusalem altogether.

“This decision comes as part of a long series of policies and measures aimed at undermining Palestinian education in Jerusalem to the point of erasure,” Husseini said. “After Israel failed to expel Palestinians physically from the city through various means, it shifted to a strategy of erasing Palestinian identity through education and pushing Palestinians to the bottom of the economic pyramid to remain a cheap labor force that serves the economic benefits of Israel with no real prospects.”