Palestinian School Textbooks: EU Review Debate
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John Howell
Main Page: John Howell (Conservative - Henley)Department Debates - View all John Howell's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(2 years, 11 months ago)
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John Howell (Henley) (Con)
Thank you, Dame Angela, for your permission to leave this debate early to attend another meeting. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Angela.
The teaching of Palestinian children to hate Israel and Jews and the incitement of violence within the Palestinian Authority’s official curriculum are unacceptable and are having and will have extraordinary real-life consequences on Palestinians and Israelis today and in the future. At least 31 Palestinian schools are named after terrorists, and three after Nazi collaborators. They teach young Palestinian children that such actions are honourable and will be rewarded with respect and glory. In addition, children are taught about Newton’s second law through textbook images of a boy aiming a slingshot at an Israeli soldier.
The EU report contends that the presence of national resistance fighters masked by a traditional keffiyeh scarf
“suggests that the liberation of Palestine might be achievable through violent resistance.”
It concedes that these images present “highly escalatory potential”. Addressing concerns about the prevalence of references to jihad across the curriculum, the EU report also finds:
“One in eight references to jihād in Social Studies…relates to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East: ‘the Palestinian freedom struggle as jihād’.”
Another textbook, “Islamic Education”,
“contains a whole lesson on jihād in the context of military fighting.”
Those alarming examples have a tangible effect on Palestinian children. Students at UNRWA schools have been quoted as saying things such as:
“I am ready to stab a Jew and drive over them”,
and:
“I am prepared to be a suicide bomber”.
They have also said that everyone needs to attack the Jews until there will not be one left in the land, and called the Jews liars and dogs.
The words in these textbooks must have no place in an UNRWA school, nor in a peaceful future for the middle east. Sadly we have seen, all too painfully, how this belligerent rhetoric has even led children to commit acts of violence and terror. In the last five years, Palestinian minors have been involved in as many as 116 terror attacks, which killed five Israelis and injured dozens. Stone and Molotov cocktails, stabbings and shooting attacks on Israeli citizens have been undertaken by Palestinians as young as 11. Along with his 14-year-old cousin, a young boy from East Jerusalem’s Shuafat neighbourhood stabbed a light-rail security guard in November 2015. Once detained, he recounted how he wanted to “die as a martyr”, while his cousin said:
“I wanted to kill the Jews who are torturing us.”
We are united in this place in our shared search for peace in this troubled region, and halting the indoctrination of Palestinian children from these deplorable textbooks must be a central pillar of that process.