NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 27: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas coughs during his address at the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2018 in New York City. World leaders gathered for the 73rd annual meeting at the UN headquarters in Manhattan. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) A new report highlights how Palestinian textbooks promote hatred against Israelis and Zionists.
The Jerusalem Post reported that the comprehensive review was written by Arnon Gross of the Meir Amit Intelligence Center, and David Bedein of the Center for Near East Policy Research. Gross and Bedein studied almost 400 Palestinian textbooks from 2013 to 2020.
Gross and Bedein found that the textbooks promote “delegitimization of the State of Israel’s existence, including the denial of Jewish holy sites within Israel; demonization of Israel and the Jews, who are regularly referred to as ‘the Zionist enemy’; and incitement to violent struggle to reclaim the whole of Israel as Palestine, with no education for peace and co-existence,” according to the Post.
Additionally, the authors found that Palestinian textbooks also deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem and don’t have any references to peace or a two-state solution.
Some specific examples from the textbooks include a math problem that reads, “One of the settlers [Israelis] shoots at [Palestinian] cars that pass on one of the roads. If the probability of his hitting a car in one shot is 0.7, and the settler shot at 10 cars, what will you expect to be the number of cars that were hit?”
A textbook also refers to Fatah terrorist Dalal al-Mughrabi as a “female martyr” and “super heroine.” Al-Mughrabi was involved in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, where Palestinian militants hijacked a bus on Israel’s coastal highway and killed 38 people, including 13 children. It is considered to be the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history.
Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Abraham Cooper told the Post, “Another generation of children [are being] brainwashed to hate and glorify terrorist murderers. Donor nations and international agencies funding these schools must demand change from the Palestinians. Unless and until this educational model is scrapped there is no hope for any peace plan, however brilliantly crafted, if this is the narrative of hate universally imposed by Palestinian leaders upon their constituents from generation to generation.”
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) released a similar report in September explaining that hatred in Palestinian textbooks has worsened since 2000. The report stated, “There is a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and subjects in a more extensive and sophisticated manner, embracing a full spectrum of extreme nationalist ideas and Islamist ideologies that extend even into the teaching of mathematics and science.”
In May, the European Parliament, the legislative branch of the European Union (EU), passed a resolution condemning hate in Palestinian textbooks and stating that EU funding should never go to “textbooks and educational material which incite[s] religious radicalization, intolerance, ethnic violence and martyrdom among children.”
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