[JPost] "And they seemed so cooperative and nice" Despite a roadmap created with the EU to ensure new textbooks would be free of hate, the PA reneged on the promise and produced new hateful educational content.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has reneged on an agreement with the EU to revise its academic curriculums in 2021 and have instead promoted new academic materials that feature hateful language and violent imagery, a January 2022 report by The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) discovered.
Despite a roadmap created in tandem with the European Union to ensure new textbooks produced in 2021 would be free of hate — an initiative started following the publication of an EU funded study on Palestinian textbooks that discovered rampant antisemitism and violent references — the PA has not removed the troubling content from its textbooks, which are used to educate public school children in PA-administered regions.
"Faced with a clear call by the EU for them to create new textbooks free of hate and antisemitism, the PA simply reprinted the old ones, then produced thousands of pages of new teaching material with content worse than the textbooks themselves," said IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff. "The EU was apparently unaware of any of this."
While neglecting their promise to edit the textbooks, the PA produced thousands of pages of new material — much of it directly propagating violence and overt antisemitism. For instance, some materials teach of the "characteristics" of Jews who are devious and treacherous and Israelis, who are described as "Satan’s aide."
The new hateful learning materials span across school subjects. Science classes use illustrations of a boy with a slingshot to illustrate the transfer of energy, while Geography classes remove all mention of Israel.