June 20, 2007.
On Tuesday, President Bush, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,
announced that the US government will renew funding for the ‘humanitarian
needs’ of the Palestinian Authority on the assumption, as Bush emphasized,
that this aid will bolster the ‘moderate’ elements of the Palestinian Authority.
One of those ‘humanitarian’ needs involves funding the schools of the
Palestinian Authority.
The question remains, however, whether the US government should
consider schools of the Palestinian Authority as one of the ‘moderate’ elements
that should once again be funded by the US government.
Indeed, Congressman Brad Sherman (D-California) told this reporter that
following the death of PLO leader and founder Yassir Arafat in November 2004,
one of the clear promises made by Palestinian Authority leader Machmud Abbas
was that he would introduce textbooks that would promote peace and
tolerance.
When Rep. Sherman and 34 other Congressmen confronted Abbas
during his trip to Washington in May 2005 with the crass anti-Semitic
incitement in the schools that was then being taught in the Palestinian schools,
Abbas’s defense was that these school books were published before he was
elected leader of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005, and he promised to
make improvements.
Now, two years later, new PA textbooks for eleventh and twelfth grades have
been published, and the first books published during Abbas’ reign hardly do any
educating for peace with Israel.
Instead, they promote the ideal scenario of a violent struggle against
Israel. Dr. Arnon Groiss, who holds a Ph.D in Islamic Studies from Princeton
University, and who serves as a senior researcher for the Center for Monitoring
the Impact of Peace, translated these new schoolbooks and was recently
invited to make a presentation for the European Parliament in Brussels, because
of EU member funding for the Palestinian Authority school system.
Dr. Groiss reported that the new PA schoolbooks teach the following
values:
- Jews are foreigners and have no rights whatsoever in
Palestine. - The Jews have a dubious and even murderous character.
- Israel is an illegitimate usurper who occupied Palestine in 1948 and 1967.
- Israel is the source of all kinds of evil done to the Palestinians.
- Peace with Israel based on reconciliation is never sought.
- A violent
struggle for liberation is encouraged instead. - The exact area to be
liberated is never restricted to the West Bank and Gaza alone. - Jihad and
martyrdom are glorified and terrorist activities against Israel are implicitly
encouraged. - The West is Imperialist, aspires to world hegemony, and
directs a cultural attack against Islam and supports Israel.
Groiss notes that the PA schoolbooks teach students that Palestine and
Jerusalem have been Arab since antiquity, on account of the ancient
Canaanites and Jebusites who are presented as Arabs. All others, including the
Jews, were foreign invaders with no legitimate rights in the country.
In these new Palestinian school books, which were produced by the
Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, not by the Hamas, Jewish holy places in
the country are not recognized.
Instead, they are presented as Muslim holy places usurped by the Jews. Groiss
points out that the Jewish holy place of Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem is
renamed “Bilal bin Rabbah Mosque” in 2001, while in 1996 it was still called
“Rachel’s Dome” in another textbook. We are witnessing here a new myth in
the making.
In his presentation, Groiss brought up numerous examples of how the new
Palestinian textbooks teach that Israel is solely responsible for the conflict and
the Palestinians are Israel’s victims. The Arab armed opposition to the UN
Partition Resolution of 1947 is not mentioned, nor is the invasion of seven Arab
armies on the day that Israel declared independence in 1948.
Groiss assembled a list of 25 accusations against Israel that appears in the
Palestinian school books, which include the following:
- Israel
contributes to Palestinian social ills and family violence; - Israel causes the
increase of drug abuse cases in Palestinian society ; - Israel pollutes the
Palestinian environment; - Israel usurps Muslim and Christian holy places;
- Israel strives to obliterate the Palestinian national identity and
heritage.
The books also glorify those who kill Jews and achieve martyrdom: One book
reads: “The flow of blood gladdens my soul, as well as a body thrown upon the
ground, skirmished over by the desert predators.” In other cases, martyrdom is
described as a wedding party.
These new Palestinian schoolbooks, thus obliterate Israel as a sovereign state,
and present it as an enemy that one should fight to the end.
In other words, as Groiss says, “they teach war rather than peace.”
The question the Bush Administration must now cope with is whether or not to
fund the Palestinian war curriculum in the framework of supporting
‘humanitarian’ gestures for ‘moderate’ elements in Palestinian culture or seeing
what that culture really is.
