As calls to deradicalize Palestinian textbooks get louder, some urge a broader focus

Since October 7, international pressure has mounted on the PA to remove indoctrination from its curriculum, but expert says true societal shift must go beyond classrooms

By Gianluca Pacchiani 11 November 2024, 11:21 am Edit

Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel

File: A woman instructs children on arithmetic multiplication in a classroom at a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) at the Shati camp for Palestinian refugees, west of Gaza City, on May 7, 2024. (AFP)
File: A woman instructs children on arithmetic multiplication in a classroom at a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) at the Shati camp for Palestinian refugees, west of Gaza City, on May 7, 2024. (AFP)

During a recent visit to Ramallah, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel confronted UN officials over the glorification of terrorism contained in school curricula administered by the agency for Palestinian refugees.

In a video, Bettel is seen holding a textbook and challenging an official: “UNRWA is not neutral on education if they teach this. It’s in the book… If I want to defend you, help me to defend you.”

Bettel’s remarks underscored longstanding concerns about the Palestinian education system, which has been criticized for years for promoting indoctrination, antisemitism, and violence.

These criticisms have resurfaced in the wake of the October 7 massacre, along with renewed concerns over the neutrality of the UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides education for nearly 550,000 Palestinians registered as refugees, including some 300,000 children in Gaza.

Analysts and foreign officials assert that the curriculum plays a role in radicalizing Palestinian youth, with some pointing to the October 7 massacre as a particularly severe example of the effects of such an education.

“When we saw what happened on October 7 and those appalling acts of rape and murder and beheading and abducting of babies and the elderly, we were not surprised,” said Marcus Sheff, CEO of the London and Tel-Aviv-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, better known as IMPACT-se. “These horrific acts of murder and desecration of bodies require some serious indoctrination.”

According to Sheff, the solution, like the problem, must also come via the classroom. Experiences from the Arab world suggest that changes in educational content can make a meaningful impact, he argued, pointing to the reliance on top-down textbook-based teaching found throughout the Mideast.

“Textbooks are uniquely authoritative in this region – critical thinking is not encouraged,” Sheff said. “A whole subject is connected to a textbook. The children learn what is in their books, what is on their desks, and that is what teachers teach.”

IMPACT-se has monitored school curricula globally since the late 1990s, with a particular focus on anti-Israel content in the Arab world.

The organization’s annual reports have consistently highlighted problematic content within Palestinian school materials. This includes the systematic erasure of Israel, denial of Jewish ties to the land, and glorification of violent jihad and martyrdom, or as Sheff put it, “this overriding idea that it is every young person’s job to sacrifice themselves.”

Palestinian schools in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, including ones run by UNRWA, use textbooks and curricula drafted by the Palestinian Authority.

But despite condemnations by the European Parliament every year for the past five years, and by lawmaking assemblies and governments across the world, the PA has resisted amending its textbooks to address these issues.

In East Jerusalem, where most non-Israeli schools follow the Palestinian curriculum, the Jerusalem Municipality has for years attempted to censor inflammatory content by covering certain sections of textbooks with blank stickers.

An image distributed by IMPACT-se in May 2021 shows a textbook used in UNRWA schools in Gaza, describing the 1968 Battle of Karameh between the IDF and Palestinian fedayeen guerillas, who also attacked Israeli civilians. (Courtesy: IMPACT-se)

However, Sheff noted, the stickers only piqued students’ curiosity. Students reportedly kept two sets of textbooks: a “censored” one for inspections and an “uncensored” one used in class.

The municipality subsequently opted to print its own version of the books with the offending content omitted, requiring they be used in Palestinian schools in the city in lieu of those provided by the PA.

According to Haaretz, at the start of the current school year police occasionally searched the bags of Palestinian students, and in some instances confiscated books that were deemed to contain inflammatory material.

The police did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Times of Israel.

The European Parliament has conditioned future funding to the Palestinian Authority on the removal of antisemitic material in its curriculum. But Sheff expressed concerns the PA could get aid flowing again with only a few cosmetic changes.

“We’re talking about probably close to a thousand changes in this curriculum which really need to be made,” he said.

Is changing textbooks enough to change a society?

Some experts are skeptical that revising textbooks alone can counter deeply ingrained radicalization. Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, argues that genuine change will require a more comprehensive societal shift.

“In order to promote dramatic change, you need soul searching. You need that the other side, the Palestinians, will also have the basic desire to change things. I don’t see any of that,” Milshtein told The Times of Israel.

Despite over 80 percent of Gaza schools being destroyed or converted into refugee shelters according to UN data, informal schooling is reportedly continuing, largely taking place in tents.

There, teachers previously employed by Hamas or UNRWA may continue teaching the same messages as before with little oversight, including “the legacy of Hamas and the importance of jihad and martyrdom,” Milshtein explained.

“It’s not like Germany after 1945, where the whole society promoted soul-searching,” Milshtein said.

“In Gaza at the moment, there is no statehood or organized regime. And society will reject any attempt at deradicalization. Bringing new teachers and changing the textbooks is very important, but it’s not enough,” he said.

A Grade 5 Arabic language book produced by the Palestinian Authority Education Ministry and adopted by UNRWA in its schools, glorifying Palestinian terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, a PLO member who participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel that resulted in the death of 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children (IMPACT-se, courtesy).

However, some Arab countries with reform-minded regimes have begun adjusting their curricula to reduce radicalism. The UAE stands out for including Holocaust education in its curriculum since last year, while other Western-aligned Arab countries such as Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have made strides to remove antisemitic content and de-emphasize hateful and violent passages of the Quran and the hadiths from Islamic studies, according to IMPACT-se.

On the other hand, other countries in the region that foster Islamist groups, such as Qatar, still lag behind, as highlighted by a recent report by the US State Department based on an IMPACT-se study.

“Countries change their curricula because they understand it’s for the good of their society, because they understand that radicalizing generation after generation is not necessarily good for them,” Sheff said.

“All countries can be helped, one can be in dialogue with them. But ultimately, they make their own choices. It’s about their educational systems and their societies in the future.”

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