The donor nations to the Palestinian Authority educational system had egg on their face last summer, when our investigative research showed that the consuls of Italy, Holland, Belgium, Finland and Ireland, had financed new school books for the Palestinian Authority for the past school year that were supposed to promote peace yet instead promoted a war curriculum.

These school books and that curriculum of the PA can be perused at the website of the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace located at www.edume.org, an organization now affiliated with the Truman Center for the Advancement for Peace at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

This year, foreign governments waited for feedback from the Israeli government before they decided whether or not to finance the Palestinian school system.

In late June, We asked the Israeli Foreign Ministry, as to whether or not it would recommend that foreign governments continue to fund the Palestinian school system. Their response: “We ask that the donor nations support the Palestinian school system, but not the school books, and implore the PA not to use their school system to incite hatred against Israel”.

We asked the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education whether it would consider changes in its curriculum this year, or the removal of any school books which continue to teach the idea of Jihad to conquer the whole land of Palestine. The answer, from all levels of the PA Ministry, was a curt “no”.

Our follow-up question to the Israel Foreign Ministry: Since the PA ignores the requests to change its curriculum, what is your recommendation as to whether the donor nations should continue to fund the PA school system? It took the ministry of Israel Foreign Affairs a full month to answer that question. The answer that I got at the end of July was the same as a month before: Finance the PA school system, not the PA school books, and implore the PA not to use its schools to incite against Israel.

We posed the same question to deputy minister of Foreign Affairs, Rabbi Michael Melchior. His spokesman wrote back that Rabbi Melchior had indeed raised the issue of incitement with the foreign consuls.

That was not the question, we pointed out. The question that we had asked Rabbi Melchior, (who is also the head of Meimad, a liberal Orthodox movement that promotes peace education) was whether or not he supports the continued funding of the PA educational system. Rabbi Melchior personally answered this question after addressing a forum of diplomats and journalists on July 25th. Rabbi Melchior said that he had been assured that all donor nations had implored the PA to cease its anti-Israel curriculum in the PA schools. Yet he would not answer the question as to what to recommend to the foreign consuls in Jerusalem, now that the PA is ignoring all requests to change their curriculum.

The bottom line: Israel indeed recommends to the donor nations of the PA that they renew funding for the PA school system, despite the fact that the PA runs the first curriculum since Nazi Germany to promote a war against the Jews.

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David Bedein
David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.

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