ABSTRACT
A historical perspective of political events in Jerusalem is highly relevant for understanding the education system in East Jerusalem and its complexity. On September 11, 1917, after four centuries of Turkish rule, the British army conquered the city of Jerusalem. Throughout the Ottoman regime, Jerusalem was valued as a holy city by its rulers, but for most of this time, it was only a province. Throughout the 1930s, and especially during the 1936–1939 Arab Rebellion, the Palestinian focus shifted from Jerusalem to the villages around it and to the Galilee region, as they were the ones that carried the torch of the Palestinian resistance. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted the Partition Plan for the division of Mandatory Palestine, as resolution 181. According to this resolution, Jerusalem was supposed to remain a “Corpus Separatum”, an international territory that is separate from the Jewish and Arab independent states that should have been established.
