More than a shift in tactics needed

On Monday the Palestinian Cabinet approved plans to make changes to their educational curriculum, as reported in The Jerusalem Post on 21 May. On the face of things, this may have been something of a surprise. After all, for several years the Palestinian Authority has steadfastly rejected calls to overhaul educational material which has poisoned countless young Palestinian minds.

The Palestinian Authority has invested huge amounts of international aid money in creating a curriculum that has encouraged generations of Palestinian children to reject peace and engage in violence and terror when called on to do so by leaders in Ramallah.

There is a clear imperative that suffuses the 173 textbooks that make up the Palestinian curriculum. The vision presented to schoolchildren from the first grade until graduation is of a single Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, gained through jihad, martyrdom, sacrifice and violence. Peace is simply not an option. Nor is there an option for Jewish presence in the land historically or an existing Israel today.

The PA has for years aggressively resisted all attempts at change, obfuscating about the contents of the textbooks to the governments that fund it. Having debated the Minister of Education at a hearing at the European Parliament, we have first-hand experience of this tactic.

But that game is now up. Governments and legislators know exactly what the content is in the textbooks and they will no longer suffer it.

We do not see, nor have we seen in the past, any evidence from the PA, on its official and semi-official outlets, or through discussions with interlocutors, that it is ready to give up on the strategy of radicalizing over a million children every single school day and then using these children as tools in a violent struggle. It is clearly a central national pillar of the Palestinian Authority.

There has been no effort by the Palestinian leadership to remove hate for three consecutive years since the launch of the new curriculum. They continue to teach radical and systematic ideas of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and all subjects.

So, the Palestinian cabinet decision to publicly announce a plan to “review and develop” their curriculum seems like another, albeit novel reaction to international pressure.

In August 2019, the United Nations issued an unprecedented report calling on the Palestinian Authority to remove all antisemitic material, hate speech and incitement to violence from their school curriculum that perpetuates prejudices and hatred.

In December 2019, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bipartisan Peace and Tolerance in Palestinian Education Act by unanimous consent. In the same month, the Norwegian Parliament instructed its government to withhold funding to the Palestinian Authority if incitement is not removed from textbooks, describing the new PA curriculum as “devastating to the peace process.” In March 2020, the UK government announced it is “deeply concerned about allegations of incitement in Palestinian Authority’s school textbooks.”

IMPACT-se has been integral to the initiation and adoption of these measures keeping the Palestinian curriculum a hot-button issue in parliaments across Europe and in the United states.

A new Palestinian Minister of Education has taken a more diplomatic approach. But there is no reason to believe it is not a further tactic to appease donor states and play for time while maintaining funding for the extremist education system the Palestinian Authority has worked so hard to create.

We will ensure that governments and legislatures continue to be made aware of the contents of the PA textbooks, drive legislation such as last week’s rare official condemnation of the PA by the European Parliament and follow closely the EU study of the PA curriculum we instigated “with a view to identifying possible incitement to hatred and violence and any possible lack of compliance with UNESCO standards of peace and tolerance in education.” This report must see the light of day.

IMPACT-se has analyzed each and every page of every PA textbook taught to 1.3 million children in their schools.

We will check if they continue to teach antisemitism, telling schoolchildren that Jews control the world and are corrupt; teaching children that martyrdom and jihad are “the most important things in life,” and that “dying is better than living”; teaching that those who become martyrs will be rewarded with 72 virgin brides in paradise; teaching calculus in 4th grade by counting numbers of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings; teaching Newton’s Second Law through an image of a violent confrontation and the use of a slingshot targeting soldiers to explain motion and tensile strength; teaching that horrific terror acts such as the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre is justified and legitimate; teaching that society’s role models and heroes are terrorists such as Dalal Mughrabi, who killed 38 Israelis including 13 children; teaching nine-year-old third graders to recite a poem calling for “sacrificing blood” to remove the enemy from the land; teaching first graders to read and write with an exercise on the letter “h” (hā) using words like shahid (martyr), hujum (attack) and harab (run away); teaching that Palestine’s contiguous territory is from the “river to the sea”; teaching that gender equality is considered to be unjust and unwise.

We will check if Israel is characterized as a peace partner, whether Jews are represented decently and whether Jewish history in the Land of Israel is denied.

We will be checking every line of every book come September.

The writer is the CEO of IMPACT-se – The Institute for Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education.