The interwar years of Arab rule of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian dispersion, and military administration of Palestinians in Israel, has often been characterized as a time of quiescence, and a pre-cursor to the “re-appearance” of Palestinian identity in the early 1960s. In historical studies on the West Bank/Jordan, in particular, the exact nature of the quiescence, or more accurately, the modalities of silencing, is often left unread. One crucial site of early ‘national silencing’ is the educational curriculum of the UNRWA/Unesco school system. Using the Jordanian (and West Bank) schools as point of departure, I interrogate UNRWA’s decision, under pressure of hosts and donors, to adopt the host curriculum(s), and thus deny Palestinian refugees the possibility of their own national curriculum. With UNRWA/Unesco archival material, documents and reports, memoirs of teachers and students, interviews and press articles by UNRWA and Jordanian Ministry of Education curriculum developers, and history, civics and geography textbooks from 1949 to 1958, I draw out the logic of this decision, and its ramifications in shaping the political education of Palestinian refugees, and the ways in which UNRWA schools therefore became regarded by Palestinian teachers and students as impediments to political will. Through a reading of the textbooks, I map the ambivalent and contradictory ways in which the Jordanian curriculum used in UNRWA schools rendered ‘Palestine’ invisible in the single most important set of narrative material Palestinian youth encountered in the aftermath of their dispersal. I measure this ‘de-nationalization’ against the multi-layered and tense role of UNRWA as the primary engine for the emergence of a burgeoning mobile and educated Palestinian class, and its enduring symbolic power as the location of Palestinian ‘success’. By measuring the materials of an UNRWA education against the ‘products’ of this schooling, I attempt to make sense of the ways in which UNRWA’s schools have and continue to act as spaces of contention over the politics of ‘educating refugees.’