Ziad Ibhais - a researcher specializing in Jerusalem affairs
At 9:30 this morning, crews from the Education Department of the occupation municipality stormed the Al-Iman Elementary Schools today to search for the Palestinian curriculum in the students’ bags; this is the curriculum that the Parents’ Council had distributed to the students on 9/26 in response to the occupation municipality’s decision to close the Al-Iman Schools and its branches, as well as the Ibrahimiyya School, if they did not adhere to teaching the curriculum subject to supervision and printed under the supervision of the Zionist Education Department.
1- This escalation in aggression confirms that the battle for the independence of private education in Jerusalem has become a battle of existence in which it is necessary to adhere to the constants and return to the authentic principles, and to seek the help of parents, students, and the Jerusalemite and Palestinian community behind them, as this depth is the only one capable of waging this battle.
2- The occupation targets the Iman schools for their Islamic ideological identity and for attracting an important segment of the elite in Jerusalem, to be a title for its resolution of the battle of the subordination of private education to it.
3- The occupation views the current blackmail as a “winning battle” in all respects: it will either end with the Iman Schools’ administration fully agreeing to its terms; or it will lead to self-censorship and an automatic lowering of value ceilings under the sword of the challenge of survival; therefore, this battle can only be won by moving to the other side and waging the battle of liberation from the restrictions that allow the occupation’s acquaintances to carry out this blackmail; and not by passing the time and bowing to the storms.
4- This means in conclusion that we need a double move: First, solidarity with the Iman and Ibrahimi schools through a popular movement that stands in the face of the bullying of the occupation’s intelligence services and their intelligence behavior; and at the same time, the administration of the Iman and Ibrahimi schools must abandon their previous trickster choices that led us to this result; and stop receiving conditional and humiliating “support” from the occupation municipality; and develop a clear financial and administrative plan to end their dependence on this support so that they do not remain under the sword of the occupation’s intelligence services at every moment.
Without a dual action; supporting on the one hand and correcting the wrong path on the other, all protests will turn into mere slowing down and passing time; and the schools of faith and Abraham will eventually fall into the clutches of the occupation as long as they are addicted to doses of conditional funding, the use of which was a sin from the beginning - and these are schools that were founded on Islamic and national values; they must be corrected before it is too late.
English 
العربية