Outcry over UK funding of Palestinian hate texts
THE PUBLICATION of an EU report confirming taht Palestinian school textbooks incite violence and antisemitism has prompted renewed calls for the UK to stop funding the teachers who produce the material.
Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) called on the UK to “act decisively to end its facilitation” of the PA’s “extreme curriculum”.
The UK and the EU directly pay the salaries of teachers who are involved in the production and teaching of the educational materials.
CFI said British taxpayers would be “understandably appalled” to discover they had been funding the use of “hatefilled material” and criticised a “decade of prevarication and denial” by the UK government.
The EU official in charge of all EU aid to the PA and UNRWA signalled a possible change in policy following the report. Oliver Varhelyi – the Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement - wrote: “The conditionality of our financial assistance in the educational sector needs to be duly considered.”
The review, undertaken by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, was completed in February 2021 but has just been published following growing pressure for its public release. It details extensive examples of radical material from 156 textbooks and 16 teachers’ guides used between 2017 and 2019.
The report included dozens of examples of encouragement of violence and demonisation of Israel and of Jews, including the repeated glorification of “heroine” Dalal al-Mughrabi, who killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, in a terror attack. The report found glorification and praise of terrorists who killed Israeli civilians in history, social studies, science and maths books.
An exercise in one religious studies textbook asked students to discuss the “repeated attempts by the Jews to kill the prophet” Muhammad and asked who are “other enemies of Islam”.