Arab child waves knife during Gaza City march
Arab child waves knife during Gaza City marchReuters

While politicians have for years made a political issue out of imposing a “core curriculum” on resistant haredi schools in Israel, little has been said about the lack of core curriculum studies in Israeli Arab schools – especially those in Jerusalem.

Instead of studying basic subjects they need to integrate into Israeli society, Meir Zemach of the Lach Yerushalayim organization asserted, Arab students in Jerusalem are spending their time learning hatred and incitement - the kind of “studies” that lead to stabbing attacks.

A good example of that “education,” Zemach told Arutz Sheva, was a slideshow that a teacher in a school in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina showed her students recently, portraying IDF soldiers as bloodthirsty monsters.

In another example, a community center in Sheikh Jarrah held a “prayer session” for “martyrs” who had been killed while attacking Israelis.

Children in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem are in an educational system all day long, going directly from school to after-school programs which are unsupervised, and often run by Hamas,” said Zemach.

“Many of the schools are also classified as 'private schools,' so there is no Education Ministy supervision on what they are teaching.” Many of the schools and after-school programs are funded by money from European “donors,” further ensuring that they ignore Israeli authorities.

The best way to deal with the problem, said Zemach, was to provide students with another alternative – real studies that will prepare them for the high-tech future, instead of learning incitement.

“We need to prepare a core curriculum for these schools,” he said. “It doesn't have to be filled with 'Zionist content,' but could concentrate on science, math, language, and other areas that would qualify these students for a bagrut (matriculation) certificate,” a requirement for attending university, he added.