In many countries around the world, schools have resumed in September. Millions of students are unable to access their schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Palestine, particularly in the Jordan Valley, thousands of students face other challenges than the pandemic that hamper their access to proper education: Israeli apartheid regime.
In the Jordan Valley, which is designated as Area ‘C’ under full Israeli control according to the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Palestinian Bedouin communities are denied their right to education. Israeli apartheid and de facto annexation practices and policies prohibit Over 38 communities in the area from construction, including the erection of schools and kindergartens. Any schools and kindergartens in the targeted communities are subject to demolition by the Israeli occupation authorities.
In this report we address the following:
- A profile of threatened schools in the Jordan Valley
- Israeli violence against Palestinian students
- Law at the service of a viscous apartheid regime
- Israeli infringement on International Law
- Call to action
To defy Israeli apartheid practices against Bedouin communities there, Stop the Wall together with civil society organizations and popular groups formed a coalition and launched the Right to Education Campaign. The Palestine New Federation of Trade Unions also endorses the campaign as part of its struggle against Israeli exploitation of Palestinian children who are deprived of access to proper education and end up as cheap wage labor for Israeli corporations.
Through the Campaign:
- We advocate for the right to education of the Palestinians in the Jordan Valley in order to defy Israel’s intensified de facto and planned de jure annexation of the Jordan Valley.
- We believe that the education of the new generation is a crucial effort to bring hope, strengthen determination and develop a vision for the future exactly where Israel plans to vanish us from the land.
- We believe that supporting Palestinian right to education there cannot be fulfilled without dismantling the entire regime of Israeli apartheid that ethnically cleanses Palestinians from their lands.
