Palestinian Education System

Debate between Joan Ryan and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 4th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Joan Ryan]

I will make a little bit of progress and will come back to my hon. Friend—I do not want to leave out the last person who wants to intervene.

There are many instances where the PA have clearly and repeatedly flouted the principles I referred to. Perhaps most egregious is its payment of salaries to those who commit terrorist attacks—a truly grotesque policy that further incentivises violence by rewarding those who are serving the longest sentences, and thus have committed the most heinous acts, with the highest payments. The official PA media are also saturated with vile anti-Semitism and the glorification of those who commit acts of violence against Jews.

I fail, for instance, to see how children’s television programmes in which poems are recited that refer to Jews as “barbaric monkeys”, “wretched pigs” and the “most evil among creations” do anything to advance the cause of peace, reconciliation and co-existence. Neither do I view the naming of summer camps and sports tournaments after so-called martyrs who murder Israeli schoolchildren as in any way conducive to furthering a two-state solution.

I confine my remarks today, however, to the question of incitement in the Palestinian education system in general and the new PA school curriculum in particular. In 2016 and 2017, the PA published a reformed curriculum covering both primary and secondary school students. It represented the most substantial revision of the curriculum since the establishment of the PA in the wake of the Oslo accords. As the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education outlined in a series of reports, the new curriculum represents a significant step backwards. Based on standards for peace and tolerance derived from UNESCO and UN declarations, it found that the new curriculum

“exerts pressure over young Palestinians to acts of violence in a more extensive and sophisticated manner”

and has expanded its focus

“from demonization of Israel to providing a rationale for war.”

It is

“more radical than ever, purposefully and strategically encouraging Palestinian children to sacrifice themselves to martyrdom.”

The incitement is pernicious and pervades subjects across the curriculum and across every age group. Children of 13 are taught Newton’s second law through the image of a boy with a slingshot targeting soldiers. For the avoidance of any doubt, I have here the textbook and can show hon. Members the relevant photograph. The evidence is not difficult to come across. Children of 10 are asked to calculate the number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings in a maths textbook, and I have that here too.

[Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. I would advise the right hon. Lady that it is not possible to use exhibits. Apart from anything else, how is that to be recorded in Hansard? The right hon. Lady should use her expertise and education to describe in words, rather than use exhibits.

[Joan Ryan]

Thank you for your guidance, Sir Christopher. I shall abide by it.

Children of 11 are told that martyrdom and jihad are the

“most important meanings of life”.

They are taught that

“drinking the cup of bitterness with glory is much sweeter than a pleasant long life accompanied by humiliation”.

To ram home that terrible lesson, martyrs such as Dalal Mughrabi—who led the infamous 1978 coastal road massacre in which 38 Israelis, including 13 children, were brutally murdered—are held up as role models. Let us be absolutely clear. This is, as Hillary Clinton once suggested, a form of child abuse: teaching children to hate, to kill and to sacrifice their own lives. Palestinian children deserve so much better than to be taught that the best they can aspire to in life is death.

Those are just a few of the dozens and dozens of examples of incitement that litter Palestinian schoolbooks. Less obvious, but no less malign, is the fact that the curriculum continues to suggest that Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque is under threat. That false and incendiary claim has frequently triggered violence. The curriculum offers no education for peacemaking with Israel or any suggestion that the path of peace is preferred to the path of violence. It implicitly argues that Palestinians will return to a pre-1967 Israel through violence. For instance, it teaches nine-year-olds the necessity of “sacrificing blood”, “eliminating the usurper” and annihilating the “remnants of the foreigners”.