According to the Jerusalem municipality, the scheme will exploit the Palestinian population's increasing isolation from the West Bank since Israel built a wall through the city a decade ago.
The extra funding will entitle Palestinian schools that switch to the Israeli curriculum to more classroom hours as well as music and art classes, teacher training and student counselling services -- most of which are currently lacking in East Jerusalem's Palestinian schools.
Last year Israeli education officials said they were considering lengthening the short school day in East Jerusalem's schools to take Palestinian youths off the streets. An Israeli curriculum, it is also hoped, will reduce nationalist sentiment.
Israeli officials believe both factors have fueled months of angry Palestinian protests, as well as knife and car attacks on Israelis, that have focused on Jerusalem. Some have termed the unrest a third intifada.
He added that the Israeli curriculum denied the Palestinians' identity, characterising them instead as "minorities" and religious groups.
Israeli officials appear to hope that East Jerusalem residents' will to resist is now weaker. Khweis, of the Union of Parents' Committees, said the education ministry was exerting strong pressure on schools. They were imposing the Israeli curriculum through "a war of financial attrition," he said.
Israeli courts have harshly criticized the government for the dire state of East Jerusalem's schools, especially a shortage of more than 2,200 extra classrooms. In 2011 the Supreme Court gave the government and municipality five years to build enough classrooms for Palestinian children in East Jerusalem. That deadline expires this summer.
A report in December by Ir Amim, an advocacy group for a fairer Jerusalem, found the situation had deteriorated dramatically since the ruling. Only 35 classrooms had been built over the past five years, failing even to keep pace with natural growth."The education ministry is holding educational resources hostage by conditioning funds to schools on their agreement to change their curriculum," Betty Herschman, a spokeswoman for Ir Amim, told Al Jazeera.
Khweis said Israeli officials had stepped up interference in the Palestinian curriculum in recent years, censoring large sections of textbooks. Changes have included: removing pictures of Palestinian flags and PA logos; excising information about PLO leaders; cutting lines from poems that could be interpreted as promoting struggle against occupation; and redacting references to the Nakba, the Arabic term for the loss of the Palestinians' homeland in 1948.
"Israel has so mangled the Palestinian textbooks that the curriculum is extremely weak," he said. "And now Israel turns to the schools and tells them they would be better off with the Israeli syllabus."
Saidam, the PA's education minister, said Israel had also started blocking the shipment of Palestinian textbooks to Jerusalem.
Fears have been heightened by comments from education officials that funds for schools making the switch will be offset by cuts to the budgets of schools that continue to use the Palestinian curriculum.
Saidam said the Palestinian cabinet had recently agreed to raise emergency funds to help schools that stick with the Palestinian curriculum. However, officials in East Jerusalem privately expressed doubt that much money would reach the city. The PA is in financial crisis, and Israel has blocked it from having any direct role in Jerusalem since 2000.
With East Jerusalem increasingly isolated physically from the West Bank, Palestinian pupils have found themselves trapped in an educational no-man's land, said Odeh.
Few Israeli institutions of higher education recognize the Palestinian matriculation certificate, complaining that students' competence in Hebrew is too low. But it is also difficult for East Jerusalem's students to access Palestinian universities in West Bank cities. If they do, they risk Israel revoking their East Jerusalem residency permits.
The Jerusalem municipality provides schooling for only 42 percent of the city's Palestinian pupils. A similar number are taught in what are known as "unofficial" schools, partially funded and supervised by the education ministry. The rest study in private, mostly religious, schools.
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