Investigators have come across evidence that shows the indoctrination of Palestinian children into terror is happening in the Palestinian educational system.
In a textbook that is meant to teach ‘reading comprehension,’ there is a story that glorifies suicide bombings. In the physics section of a science textbook, Newton’s Force of Gravity is taught through the example of missiles aimed at Israeli soldiers. And in a biology textbook, the function of certain organs within the human body is taught using a violent conflict with the ‘Zionist army’ as the stage where these organs are examined. A look at the school textbooks of the 13-year-old boy Muhammad Aliwat who shot at a crowd of Jews, wounding a 47-year-old father and his 22-year-old son on Saturday at the entrance to the City of David in Jerusalem, reveals that the Palestinians are indoctrinating their children to commit violence.
Over the weekend, a 13-year-old from East Jerusalem shot two Israelis. It didn't happen in a vacuum: the teen attends Furqan School in Shuafat, which uses PA-approved textbooks that glorify violence and call for "martyrdom." We must confront the violence in Palestinian culture. pic.twitter.com/T2RpzdT8FB
— Bassem Eid (@realbassemeid) January 31, 2023
The international research and policy institute IMPACT-se, (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education) which researches and analyzes textbooks around the world to encourage content of peace and tolerance, examined lessons that appear in the books used by Palestinian schools in the last two years. The researchers found that textbooks in subjects such as science and mathematics encourage students to sacrifice themselves. This is reinforced by Palestinian television programs for children that glorify the ‘shahid’ or martyr.
Aliwat, a resident of the Silvan neighborhood in Jerusalem, ambushed a group of Jews on Saturday and opened fire on them with a short-range pistol. He is an 8th-grade student at the Al Furqan Islamic School for Boys in the Shuafat neighborhood of Jerusalem, which, according to the Al-Jazeera network, uses the curriculum and books approved by the Palestinian Authority. Before leaving for the attack, Aliwat left a note in his school notebook in which he expressed his desire to die in an attack against Jews. In addition, in the note, he apologized to his mother and informed her that she was going to be proud of him. "God, or victory or martyrdom," the boy wrote in the note.
A deep dive into the textbooks he used for school shows that the students learn reading comprehension through an Arabic language textbook that glorifies violent descriptions of suicide attacks in which Palestinians "cut the throats of enemy soldiers" and "put on explosive belts." The descriptions are accompanied by an illustration of Israeli soldiers shot to death by a Palestinian gunman.
A lesson in an educational book published last September by the Palestinian Ministry of Education in Ramallah devotes an entire chapter that teaches that martyrdom is a "must" for fighting enemies, and that it brings honor and glory to both the self and the nation, and guarantees the ‘shahid’ (martyr) an automatic entrance to heaven. In this book the students are even asked to write an essay about real terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians, highlighting the details of how the Jews died. All the stories and narratives have a common theme, to teach the children that those who do not sacrifice themselves are viewed as weak.
Not Just Antizionism, But Antisemitism
While the entire find was shocking, the fact that it was not simply that the books were teaching an anti-Israel or anti-Zionist philosophy but teaching the students to hate Jews, in general, is what stood out. In lessons with an anti-Semitic tone, the Jewish religion and by extension the Jews who practice it are described as corrupt, evil, and impure. The textbooks teach the children that Judaism poses a real threat to the sanctity of Islam. An example of this is found in a story that describes how a Jew maliciously tricked a Muslim woman into undressing in front of an amused Jewish audience.
It really shouldn’t be this difficult to remove Jew hatred from textbooks. The international community cannot continue to condone this by funding the Palestinian Authority with zero accountability. https://t.co/7QgKQ12rdL
— Brooke Goldstein (@GoldsteinBrooke) January 24, 2023
Violence and incitement were also found in science and math books at the school where Aliwat studied. Newton's gravity was taught in a 7th-grade science class through the use of rockets aimed at soldiers to teach about the physical forces of the rocket flying toward the soldiers. The students are asked, "[w]hat are the forces that affect the object after it is launched from the launcher?."
Chemistry is learned through an illustration and example of mixing a water and salt solution that they are taught Palestinian prisoners drink during hunger strikes. In biology class at Aliwat's school, they learn about hormones and the function of organs in the human body during a violent conflict with the Zionist army to teach about specific physical phenomena. It was also discovered that when Aliwat was in the fourth grade, he and his classmates were taught addition and subtraction by counting the number of suicide terrorists and other Palestinians who died in the first and second intifadas alongside a picture of coffins being carried in a mass funeral.
Even the teacher training books that are taught at Aliwat's school for the past two years instruct them to teach in great detail about ‘horrific atrocities’ committed by "Zionist gangs" in 1948, with the authenticity of the accounts unverifiable and no footnotes citing the source as is typical. The teachers are instructed to teach in a 7th-grade history textbook that Zionists ‘smashed the heads of Palestinian children with clubs in front of their mothers and then executed the mothers at the entrance to the cave they fled to,’ again, with no source but an emphasis on the bloodthirsty nature of Israelis.
Having met with and received personal authorization from Yasser Arafat to review all textbooks issued by the PA and used by @UNRWA schools in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the center engaged Dr. Arnon Groiss to review more than 1,000 school books: https://t.co/ueyA3A7vkk
— TheJ.ca - Canada's Jewish News (@ca_thej) February 2, 2023
The students are told that the bodies were collected and burned until they were blackened with coal and that Palestinians were forced to carry the bodies and throw them into wells. Israel is even described as Satan in a poem in an Arabic language textbook that calls for the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a site that is administered by the Muslim Waqf of Jordan.
It is important to note, as the Judean has written about several times, the same curriculum found in Aliwat’s school is taught by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). The largest donor to UNRWA is the United States, making US taxpayers unwillingly complicit in the indoctrination of children into terror. According to IMPACT-se, “UNRWA states that it uses the Palestinian curriculum as a ‘best practice’ to teach refugee populations with local curricula and that it doesn’t change or alter the content in the textbooks.”
In a press release issued by IMPACT-se, their CEO Marcus Sheff said: "Countries that condemned this weekend’s terror attacks are some of the biggest donors to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA. The majority of that funding goes to the education system. When exactly will the penny drop for them that there is a direct, clear and unavoidable line between the teaching of violence and acting it out to tragic effect in the real world?".
