EU commissioner calls to reconsider aid to Palestinians

The European Union must review the conditions by which it gives funding to education in the Palestinian Authority, European Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement Oliver Varhelyi said Monday, after the release of an EU-sponsored report that found antisemitism and incitement in Palestinian textbooks.

“Firm commitment to fight antisemitism and engage with Palestinian Authority and UNRWA to promote quality education for Palestinian children and ensure full adherence to UNESCO standards of peace, tolerance, coexistence, non-violence in Palestinian textbooks,” Varhelyi tweeted. UNRWA is the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

The commissioner, the equivalent of a cabinet minister but for the entire EU, added: “The conditionality of our financial assistance in the educational sector needs to be duly considered.”

Varhelyi’s remarks came the day after the European Commission released the report it sponsored on Palestinian Authority textbooks, four months after its completion, showing instances of antisemitism and incitement to violence.

Varhelyi seeks to immediately slash funding to the Palestinian Authority, but EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell objects, a source in Brussels said.

Responding to a question about the matter earlier Monday, European Commission spokesperson Ana Pisonero said the report presents a “complex picture” and repeated the claim in its introduction, that the “textbooks largely adhere to UNESCO standards and adopt criteria prominent in international education discourse, with a strong focus on human rights.”

Yet, like the report, Pisonero soon contradicted that argument, saying that the textbooks “express a narrative of resistance,” which, as examples in the report show, is often violent, and “display an antagonism towards Israel.”

Though Pisonero did not mention antisemitism or incitement to violence in the textbooks, she said that “the EU has no tolerance for incitement to hatred or violence as a means to achieve political goals and antisemitism in all its forms. These principles are nonnegotiable for this commission.”

“The EU will step up engagement with the PA on the basis of this study with the aim to ensure further curriculum reform addresses problematic issues in the shortest possible time frame and the PA takes responsibility to screen textbooks not analyzed in the study,” she stated. “We have agreed to work with the PA on a specific roadmap… [that] must include a process of screening and monitoring of educational material for which the PA will be fully responsible and will ensure coherence with UNESCO standards.”

Brussels directly funds the salaries of teachers and the writers of textbooks, which, the report indicates, encourage and glorify violence against Israelis and Jews.

The EU commissioned the report in 2019 from the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and received it in February.

Almost 200 pages long, the report examines 156 textbooks and 16 teachers’ guides. The texts are mostly from 20172019, but 18 are from 2020.

The report includes dozens of examples of encouragement of violence and demonization of Israel and of Jews.