Palestinian students are being exposed to materials that delegitimize Israel’s very existence, demonize Jews, and portray violence as heroic.By Khaled Abu Toameh, Gatestone InstituteWhile Western governments continue to search for a credible Palestinian partner for peace, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is once again demonstrating that it is unwilling – or unable – to undertake the most basic reform: preparing Palestinians for peace and coexistence with Israel.For years, the PA has promised the United States and European donors that it would overhaul its education system by removing incitement, antisemitism, and the glorification of violence from school textbooks. These promises remain largely unfulfilled.In its latest rebuke, the European Parliament has condemned Palestinian Authority textbooks for the seventh year in a row, citing the ongoing defamation of Jews, incitement to violence, and the promotion of jihad (holy war) as well as “martyrdom.”Members of European Parliament also called for future PA funding to be strictly conditional, based on genuine reform. Demanding conditions and accountability is overdue but extremely welcome.According to Euractiv, a European news website focused on EU policies:“While the European Commission claimed that ‘tangible progress has been observed’ and the PA textbooks were being aligned with UNESCO standards, researchers from Impact-se, a UK-Israel-based institute that examines school materials from around the world, found that changes in textbooks used in the 2025-2026 school year were ‘very limited, partial, and cosmetic.'”According to Impact-se:“Despite continued international pressure and the conditionality of European Union funding, the PA has repeatedly and explicitly rejected calls to reform its curriculum. In public statements spanning from 2020 to 2024, senior PA officials—including the Prime Minister, Minister of Education, and curriculum directors—have all affirmed their unwillingness to make even minor changes to school textbooks. These public rejections make clear that the PA’s refusal to reform is not the result of capacity constraints or technical obstacles, but rather a deliberate ideological stance.”Impact-se noted the number of topics that the PA curriculum does not teach. These include the Holocaust and the destruction of Jewish communities in the Arab world during World War II and the last 82 years.“Another point of concern is how the PA curriculum portrays Jewish people as a collective,” Impact-se wrote.“A central component of the PA curriculum’s antisemitic narrative is that it categorically rejects Jewish presence in the region.Not only has content teaching Jewish history and the origin of the Jews been ejected entirely from PA textbooks since 2016, but the current curriculum explicitly refutes the very existence of a Jewish people.The PA curriculum only recognizes the Jews as a religious community, which is how they are portrayed in the Qur’an and other Islamic sources, thus denying them the right to self-determination.Seen in this light, it is especially notable that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is frequently compared to anti-colonial struggles against European empires, such as the French in Algeria.The PA curriculum encourages students to believe that they share the same goal: of expelling the colonizing ‘invaders,’ the Jews, from the Palestinians’ indigenous homeland, presumably to Europe, as they are presented as entirely foreign to the region.”In fact, the reverse is true. In 1977, senior Palestine Liberation Organization official Zuheir Mohsen openly admitted in an interview in the Dutch daily Trouw:“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.”The Jews have lived in the area, such as Judea, continuously for nearly 4,000 years; they are the indigenous people as much as the Arabs are.PA educational materials, according to Impact-se’s study, regularly propagate hate towards Jewish people.In descriptions of early Islamic history, Jewish characters and groups are often associated with sacrilegious crimes, such as attempting to murder the Islamic prophet Mohammed or sexually dishonoring a Muslim woman, or other false charges libelously attributed to Jewish stereotypes.Examples of anti-Israel incitement and glorification of violence in PA textbooks include:1. General Sciences (vocational stream), tenth grade, 2020-2025, p. 55: “Newtonian physics is taught through an example of a young girl shooting a rock with a slingshot ‘toward a specific target,’ with an accompanying photo showing a hand hurling a loaded slingshot. In Palestinian culture, slingshots are strongly associated with attacks on Israeli soldiers…”2. Mathematics, third grade, Vol. 1, 2022-2025, p.15: “To teach numerical digits, a third-grade math exercise asks students to write out in letters the number of ‘martyrs.’ The statistic offered by the textbook is 2,139 Palestinian deaths, which includes hundreds of members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other armed Palestinian organizations killed during [the 2014 Israel-Gaza war].”3. Mathematics, seventh grade, Vol. 2, 2022-2025, p. 97: “A probability exercise… features an irredentist map of Palestine that includes all of Israel’s internationally recognized territory; it also teaches that Palestine was occupied in 1948, further implying that the territory of Israel proper is Palestinian.”4. Science and Life (Teacher Guide), eighth grade, 2018-2025, pp. 144-145: “The teacher guide for a lesson about the taxonomic classification of living organisms instructs biology teachers to hold discussions about ‘towns and villages whose residents the Zionist Occupation expelled.’ Selecting this unrelated discussion topic in a lesson on taxonomy can only be for political purposes, as a means of maximizing students’ historical resentment of Israel.”5. Chemistry (Teacher Guide), tenth grade, 2018-2025, pp. 93, 97, 99: “Chemistry lessons are politicized with the message that it is official Israeli policy to destroy Palestinian water resources. According to this teacher guide, one of the goals of a lesson titled ‘Water in Our Life’ is for students to grasp ‘the Israeli Occupation’s attempts to pollute the sources of drinking water.'”Israel, in reality, supplies all the water throughout the country; it is often the Palestinians who, sadly, do the polluting — to the detriment of everyone.6. Arabic Language, fifth grade, Vol. 2, 2020-2025, pp. 51-61: “Dalal al-Mughrabi, the perpetrator of the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, which killed thirty-eight Israelis, including thirteen children, on a civilian bus, is celebrated in a detailed ten-page Arabic reading comprehension text for fifth graders. The text exalts her and the terror act as ‘heroism,’ describing how the massacre made her memory ‘immortal’ in the ‘hearts and minds’ of Palestinians.”7. Social Studies, ninth grade, Vol. 1, 2020-2025, pp. 35, 37-40: The textbook teaches that “resistance,” including armed resistance, is a “natural and legitimate.” The lesson shows Israel as a supposedly colonial power and misquotes a UN resolution as stating that nations have the right to conduct “armed struggle” to free themselves from colonialism. The lesson appears to deliberately cloud the meaning of international law, resistance, and violence to justify Palestinian violence.8. Arabic language (1): Reading, Grammar, Prosody and Expression, eleventh grade, Vol. 2, 2023-2025, pp. 34-38: “Arabic language is taught with a poem that glorifies death and martyrdom, and lionizes men who were executed for murdering Jewish civilians in Mandatory Palestine.The poem… describes the June 17, 1930, execution of three Arab Palestinian men… by the British Mandate authorities, after they had been convicted of murdering innocent Jews in Hebron and Safed during the 1929 Arab riots.The poem – titled ‘Red [Bloody] Tuesday’ in reference to the day of the week in which the hanging took place in Acre Prison – praises the manner in which the three condemned men reportedly faced death with active joy and anticipation.This positive outlook on death is reinforced by the poem’s assertion that the men’s death is a “sacrifice for the sake of their country” and the frequent references to the ‘Paradise” and ‘reward’ that await the men after death.The facts are irrefutable. Despite a formal agreement with the European Union in 2024 to revise its curriculum, the PA has failed to implement meaningful changes.The PA’s own Ministry of Education recently admitted that textbooks currently used in schools “have not been revised at all.”If the Palestinian leadership is serious about peace with Israel -– not at all certain — it needs to begin by educating its children for peace, not indoctrinating them with hate.No one is asking the Palestinians to embrace Zionism. However, any society that aspires to statehood and peaceful coexistence — also not at all certain — must prepare its next generation for nonviolence, mutual recognition, and respect.So far, there is scant evidence that these results are even in the bottom quadrant of the Palestinian leaders’ goals.Instead, Palestinian students are being exposed to materials that delegitimize Israel’s very existence, demonize Jews, and portray violence as heroic.This systematic indoctrination has poisoned the minds of generations, making reconciliation far off, if possible at all.The growing willingness of European lawmakers to condition funding on educational reform is a positive development. For too long, international aid has flowed to the PA without sufficient oversight or accountability.The US and its allies should take concrete steps, including conditioning financial assistance only on verifiable textbook reform, and establishing independent mechanisms for monitoring the PA curricula.lso needed is demanding total transparency from the PA leadership, and supporting programs that promote coexistence and tolerance.The funding of terrorism must stop. Aid should not subsidize incitement. It should demand the total cessation of terrorism and the total cessation of terrorist funding.Until such a time, the PA’s promise of reform will continue to ring extremely hollow, and peace will be out of reach.The post Palestinian Authority’s ‘reforms’: Incitement in classrooms, empty promises to the West appeared first on World Israel News.