New Palestinian Textbooks Encourage Violence: Report
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Aiden Pink December 4, 2017
New textbooks issued by the Palestinian Authority for grades 5-11 encourage violence against Israelis, according to an analysis by a watchdog group.
The report, released by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), claims that the Palestinian curriculum “exerts pressure over young Palestinians to acts of violence in a more extensive and sophisticated manner.”
Such examples take place across all academic disciplines, from religion to history to even science. A 7th-grade science textbook depicts a boy shooting soldiers with a slingshot to demonstrate Newton’s second law of motion.
“During the first Palestinian uprising, Palestinian youths used slingshots to confront the soldiers of the Zionist Occupation and defend themselves from their treacherous bullets,” the textbook states. “What is the relationship between the elongation of the slingshot’s rubber and the tensile strength affecting it? What are the forces that influence the stone after its release from the slingshot?”
The narrator of a poem in a 3rd-grade textbook vows to “remove the usurper from my country” and “exterminate the remnants of the foreigners.” A 5th-grade Arabic-language textbook calls martyrdom and jihad “the most important meanings of life.” And a 9th-grade social studies textbook praises Dahlal Mughrabi, who participated in a 1978 terror attack that killed 38 civilians, including 13 children. The textbook falsely claims that Mughrabi killed 30 soldiers.
The state of Israel is almost solely referred to as the “Zionist Occupation,” the report claims, and the history of Jewish presence in any parts of the land is not included. And unlike old curricula, the new history textbooks do not include any mention the Oslo Accords, in which the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel. (Some maps cited by IMPACT-se do not distinguish between Israel and the Palestinian Authority)
“With a comprehensive and oft-stated justification for defensive (obligatory) jihad, the curriculum’s focus appears to have expanded from demonization of Israel to providing a rationale for war,” the report authors stated. “The crux of this report is education for war and against peace with Israel.”
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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