Palestinian schools and curriculum funded by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) incites hatred for Israel and promotes jihad, according to a January 2021 IMPACT-se report.
“Our extensive research of PA (Palestinian Authority) school textbooks has consistently shown a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and subjects, with the proliferation of extreme nationalism and Islamist ideologies throughout the curriculum, including science and math textbooks,” reads the report.
The PA curriculum teaches Palestinian children to reject “the possibility of peace with Israel” and does not include teaching on “any historical Jewish presence in the modern-day territories of Israel and the PA.”
Despite this fact, the UNRWA continues to use 58 percent of its budget to fund education within PA territory, according to IMPACT-se.
The UNRWA’s excuse for continuing to fund the material without any attempts to alter the content is that it would “impeded the PA’s ‘national sovereignty.’”
The UN provides its own supplementary material in an attempt to bring attention to UN values, despite a lack of explanation as to how these materials are actually implemented.
In 2019, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report detailing the reality that “these materials [are] not used in UNRWA classrooms.”
Even if these materials were used, IMPACT-se found that the material provided by the UNRWA “frequently references, and sometimes directly reproduces, texts and phrases from the PA textbooks that glorify violence and sacrificing one’s life and blood to defend the ‘motherland.’”
IMPACT-se also explains that the UNRWA says it has performed its own “review” of PA curriculum yet fails to publicly provide any follow-up with regard to how the study was conducted or details about the findings.
“UNRWA’s stated review criteria ignore the majority of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) standards such as peace-making as the ultimate goal to solve conflict, respect for non-Palestinian Other, and incitement to violence,” reads the IMPACT-se report.
Throughout the study, IMPACT-se found no evidence that material produced by UNRWA to supplement PA curriculum made any attempt to condemn the anti-Israel, violent, and terrorist-glorifying narratives pushed on children by PA textbooks.
IMPACT-se evaluated 122 booklets funded by the UNRWA “in close conjunction with the relevant PA textbooks” to obtain the study’s results.
