Over 12,000 school children who should have been beginning their second school term this January have been murdered by Israeli bombs, as well as over 500 of their educators, writes Anna Saif. [GETTY]
In September 2024, the EU Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee gave preliminary approval to the freezing of €20 million earmarked for the Palestinian Authority over what it termed its “antisemitic texts books”. This was followed by a vote in the plenary session of the European Parliament in early December to condemn UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority, and to demand the halting of funds for Palestinian education.
This renewed attack on Palestinian education came after the trusted Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research published a report in 2021 in which it found that Palestinian schoolbooks adhere to UNESCO standards.
It is important to ask why the EU Committee did not ask for a similar report on Israeli education? Surely the war crimes of the IDF in Gaza must be the product of socialisation processes in Israeli society, including its education?
In realty, this attack on the Palestinian curriculum is the result of an ongoing campaign to stamp out Palestinian political consciousness and indigenous identity in order to silence the Palestinian national narrative.
If the EU halt educational funds this year, it would vindicate Netanyahu’s vitriolic call for the “deradicalisation” of Palestinian education: “They have to stop teaching their children to become terrorists. They have to stop teaching and indoctrinating a whole generation on the annihilation of Israel.”
Yet it is Israel which is annihilating the Palestinians. This year 625,000 Palestinian school children in Gaza have missed out on another academic year due Israel’s genocide. 45,000 six-year olds could not start their school education, and 39,000 18-year olds could not take their final school exams last summer.
Furthermore, despite the recent announcement of a ceasefire, Palestinian children now have no schools to go to because almost 90% of all education buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Education in Gaza cannot be ‘deradicalized’ because it is non-existent. It has been obliterated, and over 12,000 school children who should have been beginning their second school term this January have been murdered by Israeli bombs, as well as over 500 of their educators.
If this was not enough, Israel has taken the unprecedented step of banning UNRW. The UN relief and works agency has been the main supplier of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians since 1949 and now runs 198 schools in Gaza and 96 in the West Bank. The viciousness of this move is as savage as the genocide itself.
A crusade against Palestinian schoolbooks
Before the IDF started blowing up Palestinian schools, the ideological war against the Palestinian education system was equally malicious and it started decades ago. After Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli officials reviewed every page of the Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks taught in Palestinian schools, censoring them radically. After Oslo and the introduction of the new Palestinian curriculum, a sustained attack on it began in 2000 and has continued unrelentingly.
The Israeli NGO, The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) is a key protagonist in this onslaught. It berates the presentation of Palestinian history including the Nakba, the liberation struggle, and critiques of Zionism in schoolbooks. There have been 17 exhaustive and antagonistic studies of the Palestinian curriculum.
In 2019, IMPACT-se – characterised by Professor Nathan Brown of George Town University as the ‘incitement lobby’ – was instrumental in the freezing €15 million of EU funds for Palestinian education for 13 months.
Previously in 2018, a bipartisan bill was passed in the US Congress to instigate an annual review of Palestinian schoolbooks for ten years after the US cut funds to UNRWA in 2018, which were only reinstated in 2021 but have yet again been suspended since October 7.
IMPACT-se has carried out a whopping 12 studies on the Palestinian curriculum and 5 more in its previous incarnation as the Centre for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP). Although IMPACT-se is often described as an international or London-based organisation, it is in fact Israeli and all its board members are Israeli or have close connections to Israel, as do its research team.
Its founder is Yohanan Manor who coordinated the campaign to revoke the UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. Board member, Jay Ruderman worked to educate Israeli leaders on the American Jewish community and after a stint in the IDF, returned to AIPAC as its leadership director in Israel. Another board member, Nancy Epstein, is an active supporter of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) and AIPAC. Many of the research team are or were based at the Hebrew University. Sara Kabilo, who is head of programs, led the Jerusalem based Speakers Bureau at AIPAC-AIEF (AIPAC‘s Educational Foundation) managing the Israeli operations at AIPAC’s annual policy conference.
Marcus Sheff, the CEO of IMPACT-se, was previously editor at the Jerusalem Post before heading the strategic communications firm, The Word Shop, and was also a Major in the reserves in the IDF Spokesperson Unit. He is the former CEO of The Israel Project (TIP), which hosted briefings with Israeli officials and would deliver a continuous stream of pro-Israeli talking points to the editors of international news outlets, creating relationships with top journalists, with over 300 taken on ‘intelli-copter’ aerial tours of Israel. TIP’s advocacy resulted in millions of media consumers being fed the Israeli perspective on the ‘peace process’, settlements and more.
UNESCO standards
It is not difficult to conclude that Sheff and his team would not be the best people to conduct ‘impartial’ research on the Palestinian curriculum. In fact, it is quite incredible that EU and US donors to the education of Palestinian children should base their funding decisions on such a partisan organisation’s appraisal.
The EU froze its funding based on IMPACT-se’s 2018 report while commissioning an additional study from the well-respected Georg Eckert Institute (GEI). The premise of the brief given to GEI was, however, problematic says Brown as it had to be organised “around a series of issues raised by the incitement lobby (maps, violence, martyrdom). Thus, “the analysis is written as if Palestinian textbooks cannot be understood except by relying heavily on how Israelis might view them — but without giving Israeli textbooks the same treatment.”
Despite this loaded presupposition, the GEI findings did not agree with the claims made by IMPACT-se.
The study found that the Palestinian textbooks adhere to UNESCO standards including a strong focus on human rights, and explicitly highlight a universal notion of these rights. It also stated that “the textbooks are produced and located within an environment saturated with ongoing occupation, conflict and violence, which they reflect”.
Nathan Brown suggests that IMPACT-se’s approach is to search for anything in the books that “it can portray negatively and dismisses contrary evidence, interpretation, or study that undermines its incitement charge”.
On the basis of GEI’s findings, EU funding was restored but the pervasive cognitive dissonance among IMPACT-se researchers could not accept the report’s conclusions.
Ultimately, the ongoing campaign against the Palestinian curriculum aims to weaken and eliminate Palestinian identity and national consciousness and to silence the historical wrong done to the Palestinian people.
Ben White highlighted a key Israeli policy strategy, initiated at the 2010 Herzilya Conference, which is a closed-door annual gathering of Israel’s top political, security, intelligence and business elite, where there was a new push to promote ‘Brand Israel’ as a tech hub and land of achievements. This was in order to combat the BDS movement which was gaining momentum. Talks at the conference, included, ‘Winning the Battle of the Narrative’ and ‘Delegitimising the Delegitimisers’.
If articulating the truth about the history of the ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid and massacres of Palestinians delegitimises Israel, so be it. Sooner or later the truth will come out.
Palestinian children cannot forget their historical narrative because they experience its consequences daily. They live under occupation and apartheid, in refugee camps in the occupied territories and in diaspora. Now they are victims of a horrific genocide. In the face of this, every Palestinian parent and teacher cannot but help tell the story of Palestine and impart hope for its liberation in every Palestinian child.
Israel may have the power and resources to force changes upon the curriculum but the Palestinian narrative is indestructible and will live on in every new generation.
Dr. Anna Saif is an independent researcher and formerly lectured at the Universities of Surrey, Portsmouth and Birzeit. Her principle research interests focus on textual and visual colonial discourse analysis with particular interest in the Arab world.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
