Palestinian Authority textbooks for the school year of 2016 doubled down on demonizing Israel and praising “martyrdom,” a report released this month by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) concluded. The report assessed the contents of textbooks in the PA school system ranging from the fourth through 12th grades.
“Despite assurances from the PA Education Ministry, these new books are actually more radical than we have previously seen,” said Marcus Sheff, the CEO of IMPACT-se. “There is clear evidence of a strategy of radicalization of young Palestinians, devised and implemented by the ministry, which includes a commitment to an Arab Palestine encompassing the entirety of Israel.”
The textbooks glorify terrorists, featuring math questions asking students to calculate how many “martyrs” had died in the first and second intifadas combined. Maps depicting “Palestine” are shown covering all of Israel.
“The most troubling aspects of this curriculum involve the attitude of PA/PLO/Fatah authorities toward the six- to 10-year-old children who are considered to be expendable; and the indoctrination of these youth to the idea that all of Israel belongs to Palestine and all Israelis are evil,” the report assessed.
A study by Professors Arnon Gross and Roni Shaked of the Harry Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem similarly found in January that Israeli cities established since 1948 had been erased from textbooks used in United Nations-run schools in the West Bank, while all Jewish historical and cultural ties to the country had likewise been expunged.
A previous report by IMPACT-se, issued last June, discovered that the word “peace” did not appear at all in its survey of 78 PA textbooks for grades 1 through 12.
In The Palestinian Textbook Fiasco, published in the June 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Adi Schwartz dissected a State Department-sponsored study that whitewashed the extremism present in Palestinian textbooks.
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