The British government is to be lauded for stating that it willlook into the indiscretions of PLO “education”, as reported in the Jewish News article of February 12, 2020, entitled
“British government says changes will be made to Palestinian textbooks”
However, in this Jewish News article, the DFID, overseer UK foreign aid, made an untrue statement that “UK aid does not pay for textbooks…” and then went on to note that the UK has donated £65.5 million to the UN Relief and Works Agency.
As the director of an agency that writes about Palestinian Authority schools which operate under the aegis of UNRWA, I have met with officials of DFID, who say that they know that UNRWA allocates 54% of their budget to finance education, whose primary educational expense involves the purchase of school book with no oversight whatsoever from any donor nation, especially the UK, the fifth largest blind funder of UNRWA. So much for the claim that the “UK aid does not pay for textbooks…”
Another questionable statement quoted in the article is that UNRWA “was left in dire financial straits in 2018 after the US slashed US funding, ignoring the fact that UNRWA itself gave wide publicity to the fact that all US funding cut of UNRWA was replaced by the UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia & Qatar on September 1, 2018, the day after the US cut its funds for UNRWA. That is not known to the public, because UNRWA has conducted a high profile PR campaign which drums out the daily dirge that the US left UNRWA in “dire financial straits”.
To the substance of Palestinian schools. Our 20 years of research show that the PLO has transformed Palestinian schools into a tools of war, with what has been termed “the weapons of mass instruction..
Just this year, the PLO issued a new textbook dedicated to Dalal Mughrabi, who commandeered an Israeli bus in 1978 and murdered 38 Jews, including 13 children. Four pages about Dalal present her as a role model for fifth graders to emulate.
We have reviewed all 365 school books and 109 teachers manuals in use by the Palestinian schools which operate under UNRWA. Not one word about peace in any UNRWA book, even though the slogan of UN education remains: PEACE STARTS HERE.
As a gesture of integrity, why does the UK at least demand the removal of the new text dedicated to the legacy of Dalal Mughrabi?