Palestinian schoolbooks still picture Israel end

A new study found that the Palestinians still support terror and destroying Israel, and funnel misinformation to their children.

A four-year study by the Israel-based Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center found that in 364 Palestinian Authority schoolbooks for grades 1 through 12, children are still taught that peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an option.

Col. (res.) Dr. Shaul Shay, former deputy head of the National Security Council of Israel, now director of research at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, told JNS that he was not surprised.

“One of the major problems with our relations with the Palestinians is that our expectation was that the Palestinians really wanted to put an end to the conflict, and not just go through a political process between the two parties,” he said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, and I don’t see it happening in the near future.

“The Palestinian media and textbooks all push the same consistent message because there is an expectation that this is what the Palestinian street wants,” he explained.

One reference, in an eleventh-grade history book mentions the “1972 Munich operation,” where 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were murdered: “Those who carry out such actions are called ‘self-sacrificing ones’ and those among liberation struggle is liberating the Muslim holy place of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem from the Jews’ sway.”

The struggle is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza, but includes the entire area from the Jordanian River to the Mediterranean Sea, continued the report. “Israel’s very name is replaced in the text in the vast majority of cases by ‘the Zionist Occupation’ or ‘the Zionist Entity,’ which should be extirpated from the Middle East” (History Studies, Grade 12).

Ido Zelkovitz, head of Middle East Studies at Yezreel Valley College, says that incitement in Palestinian media continues regardless of the U.S. administration’s decision to cut funding to UNWRA, the U.N. agency charged with Palestinian relief. He explained that Trump cannot dictate to Palestinians what their children study.

“If the Palestinians are going to change their state of mind, it must be their own decision, and I don’t see that happening in the short- or long-run,” he said. He dismissed the chance of financial pressure changing Palestinian attitudes, noting that they will simply turn elsewhere for funds. “It would take at least 40 years to change Palestinian attitudes, and to do this, the education curriculum must be altered.”

The European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee will vote on whether to freeze more than 15 million euros ($17 million) in aid to pay for school textbooks for the Palestinian Authority unless it removes incitement against Israel.

Zelkovitz does think that Trump’s strategy of allying with Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt to pressure Palestinian leadership could produce results.

Pressed on the viability of the two-state solution and the talk of alternatives, he said, “I don’t deny that the Palestinians, if they could, would push for a one Palestinian state solution without Israel.”

Still, he thinks the Palestinians may eventually be able to create a narrative of peace because without it, “they will never achieve their main goal of establishing a Palestinian state.”