A textbook case

Two years ago, a senior U.S. State Department official called ‎me a liar to my face. He informed me that all the work done by the Center for Near East Policy Research on ‎the Palestinian Authority textbooks used by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was one great ‎fabrication, that the U.S. government had checked the textbooks used ‎by UNRWA, and that they met the highest standards of peace education. ‎

Six months later, the White House issued a statement in a similar vein to a ‎colleague in Washington: “While there is still work to be done, the Palestinian ‎government has made significant progress in reducing inflammatory rhetoric ‎and revising official textbooks. Over the past few years, the PA has helped ‎improve the Palestinian curriculum, including textbooks that discuss human ‎rights and the Holocaust, which has contributed to a better education for young ‎Palestinians.”‎

To respond to this, I asked my staff to purchase and translate all PA textbooks used by ‎UNRWA so that we could give the results to ‎the U.S. Congress and the Knesset.

One of the ironies is that the United States Agency for International Development in Ramallah wrote to us, saying that the ‎U.S. never examines the PA textbooks used by UNRWA, despite the fact ‎that the U.S. donates $400 million each year to UNRWA — one-third of the agency’s budget. 

Here are some quotes from the new schoolbooks that will be used in UNRWA schools this year:

‎1. The Zionist occupation started in 1856 (Social Studies, Grade 9)‎. ‎”Since the Zionist movement established in 1856 its first settlement, known as ‎‎’Montefioriyyah’ [Mishkenot Shaananim, Jerusalem’s first Jewish neighborhood built outside the Old City walls], southwest of the Jerusalem city wall, the series of division [actions] in ‎Palestine has not stopped. It [i.e., the Zionist movement] established settlements that included ‎training centers and arms depots. After the catastrophe [“Nakba” in Arabic] of 1948, it ruled ‎over more than 78% of Palestine’s territory. More than 850,000 Palestinians were made ‎to emigrate and they and their families lived in refugee camps in Palestine and in the diaspora. ‎Nothing of it [Palestine] was left except the Gaza Strip and the West Bank that were ‎occupied [later] in 1967.”‎

‎2. Zionists adopted Canaanite place names, thereby “stealing” Palestinian history (Social Studies, Grade 6)‎. ‎”The Zionist occupation named its own settlements by these Canaanite names, [thus] having ‎stolen and forged Palestinian national heritage and history.”‎

‎3. Zionism’s changes in Jerusalem (Social Studies, Grade 7)‎. ‎”The Zionist occupation pursued a policy of erasing Palestine’s Arab and Islamic features in ‎general, and especially in Jerusalem. Since the first day of Jerusalem’s occupation, the Zionists ‎started to change the identity of this Arab-Muslim city and make it [a city] of a Zionist nature. ‎They confiscated Palestinian land and built settlements there, harassed the Palestinian ‎inhabitants in order to force them to leave Jerusalem, so that the settlers would come in their ‎stead, demolished houses and forced the inhabitants to emigrate, took their identity cards and ‎separated Jerusalem from its Arab environment. They annexed the Islamic features to the ‎Zionist heritage list, as they transformed Al-Buraq Wall into the Wailing Wall; they ‎destroyed the Mughrabi neighborhood and changed its Arab-Muslim nature; they removed ‎some of the Jerusalem city wall and put instead other ones with Zionist decorations and ‎forms; they opened Jewish synagogues in Jerusalem’s Old City, and they are striving ‎painstakingly these days to gain control over the Noble Shrine [Haram al-Sharif, the ‎Arabic name for the Temple Mount] by letting the Zionist settlers enter it daily in ‎preparation for its complete takeover and cut any Muslim connection to this place that is ‎sacred to Muslims.” ‎

‎4. The Hebrew letter endangers Arab Jerusalem (Arab Language, Grade 10)‎. ‎”This article draws attention to the dangers surrounding Jerusalem, such as the foreign centers ‎that overlook its basins and suffocate its breath, the foreign wall that encircles its scope, the ‎checkpoints that limit its movement and the Hebrew letter that threatens the nature of its ‎culture. But Jerusalem is a genuine and sacred land that spits out the scum of foreigners and ‎pretenders.”‎

‎5. The Dimona reactor causes cancer in southern Hebron (Scientific Education, Grade 11)‎. ‎”For research:‎ Studies indicate an increase of cancer cases in southern Hebron compared to other Palestinian ‎areas. I will investigate the connection of that to its proximity to the Dimona reactor in the ‎Negev Desert.”‎

‎6. The occupation releases boars to cause damage to the Palestinians’ crops (Social Studies, ‎Grade 9)‎. ‎”The occupation has transformed vast areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into dumps ‎of poisonous refuse and acted to pollute the Palestinian environment with radioactive and ‎chemical materials, which has caused an increase in the rates of affliction with severe ‎diseases, chiefly cancer. It [also] dumped their markets with spoiled goods beyond their ‎expiration dates in the Zionist markets such as cars and foodstuffs, and released herds of ‎boars that caused damage to the inhabitants and their crops.”‎

‎7. The Zionist gangs (Arabic Language, Grade 9)‎. ‎”And the land — it changed its features out of anger, as if it could not bear the steps of those ‎ones who broke into it without asking permission — Zionist gangs that came from a foreign ‎world loaded with hostility and hatred toward Arabs and Palestinians.”‎

‎8. “Barbecue party” with Molotov cocktails (Arabic Language, Grade 9)‎. ‎”The neighbor: ‘The curfew does not include us in Al-Shurfah [neighborhood]. It is imposed ‎on Al-Natarish [neighborhood]. It seems that there is a barbecue party with Molotov cocktails ‎in one of the buses to the colony [Jewish settlement] of Psagot on Jabal al-Tawil mountain.'”

‎9. A map titled “the Arab Homeland — Political” (Social Studies, Grade 9) shows the entire country — Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip — in one color with the name “Palestine” next to it.‎

‎10. Zionism is guilty of “colonialist imperialism” and strives to exterminate the Palestinians (History Studies, Grade 11)‎. “Let us think and examine:‎ Land is the pivot of colonialist imperialism. It strives as much as it can to take hold of it by all means, even ‎by the extermination of the inhabitants and their annihilation.”‎

‎11. The poem below was taken from a PA schoolbook issued in 2016 that talks of the extermination of the ‎foreigners’ remnants in Palestine following its liberation (Our Beautiful Language, Grade 3)‎. The books issued in 2016 intensify the violent struggle for liberation of Palestine, which ‎includes — for the first time in the PA curriculum — reference to the fate of 6 million Jews living ‎in the country following its supposed liberation: the removal of the “usurper” (that is, ‎Israel) and the extermination of the defeated remnants of the foreigners (Israeli Jews):‎

‎”Let us sing and learn by heart: the land of the noble ones

I swear, I shall sacrifice my blood ‎

In order to water the land of the noble ones

And I shall remove the usurper from my country

And shall exterminate the scattered remnants of the strangers‎

O country of Al-Aqsa and the holy place‎

O cradle of pride and nobleness

Patience, patience, because victory is ours

And dawn will peep out of darkness.”‎

With even the newest textbooks in UNRWA schools promoting so much anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hostility, how is it that Palestinian education is not on the current agenda for Middle East negotiations?

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=19837