Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar informed the Knesset that he planned to expand a pilot curriculum of student tours in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.  Hebron is the only Palestinian city with a Jewish settlement at its heart. To enable a few hundred settlers to move about freely, Israel chose to enforce a formal policy of discrimination against the Palestinian residents of the city, and throughout the years Hebron city center became a ghost town.

The controversial “heritage tours” curriculum has until now been geared only toward students in the Jerusalem school district, but Sa’ar now wants to make it available to students across the country. “The response to this these tours has so far been high, and has been carried out by choice by the interested schools,” Sa’ar told the Knesset. “We must not allow this illusion to be created among Arabs that it will ever be possible to uproot Jews from Hebron.”

A Palestinian resident of Hebron carries a protest sign from one of the balcony surrounded by a grid to protect the Palestinian civilians from settlers’ attacks in Shuhada Street, in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron, September 2011 (Photo: Activestills)

Last week, the Israel Police canceled a government program that would allow high school students to tour Hebron with the Breaking the Silence organization – a group that collects testimony from soldiers who have served in the West Bank – after pressure from right-wing settler groups.

The program would have marked the first time the Education Ministry had granted a school permission to tour Hebron with the awareness group.  Students from the school – the Hebrew University Secondary School, better known as “Leyad’a” – were to be accompanied not only by their teachers, but also by the Education Ministry’s supervisor for the school and deputy director for the district. Police said that the tour was canceled because Breaking the Silence “planned to diverged from their authorized plan”.

According to Breaking the Silence’s director, Dana Golan, “We were invited to speak, so, as we do with every Israeli group that invites us, we will come with the goal of showing the reality of the occupation and its implications in Hebron.”

Related:

“Breaking the Silence – Israeli soldiers talk about the occupied territories” website: http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/

B’tselem video: The “quiet transfer” in Hebron

http://www.btselem.org/video/2009/10/introduction-quiet-transfer-hebron