The West's continuing blind eye to Palestinian incitement - by Melanie Phillips

The latest incompetence, reviewing the wrong textbook used for children, seems hard to believe. Why do people find it so difficult to acknowledge Palestinian violence and bigotry against Israel and the Jews?

Melanie Phillips..
Israel Hayom..
04 September '20..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-wests-blind-eye-to-palestinian-incitement/

Why do so many well-meaning people committed to ending abuses of power ignore the evidence of who is actually committing these abuses and blame their victims instead?

An official investigation funded by Britain and the European Union into textbooks used in Palestinian schools has descended into farce.

In April 2018, finally responding to concerns about anti-Israel incitement in Palestinian-Arab schools, the United Kingdom pushed the EU to commission a report on Palestinian textbooks from the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany.

In April last year, the Institute published as a preliminary what it called its "Inception Report." This, it said, developed a framework for "an academically rigorous review" of "how peace, tolerance and an understanding of the other are incorporated into Palestinian textbooks."

This report, however, was itself riddled with so many mistakes that the European Union ditched it. Bafflingly, however, the EU has continued to use the Georg Eckert Institute to finish the project.

Its final report is due out next month. But it has now produced an interim report, which the EU is choosing to keep secret.

Marcus Sheff, chief executive of the Jerusalem-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, managed to obtain a presentation of this interim report. This has shown the project lurching from bad to worse.

Calling the review "a comedy of errors from start to finish," Sheff says the researchers have looked at the wrong textbooks. They have actually used as examples textbooks that are used in Israel's Arab schools in Jerusalem, praising them and presenting them falsely as part of the Palestinian Authority's curriculum.

On the basis of this egregious mistake, the researchers have claimed that the Palestinians' educational materials have been "transformed" for the better.

They make no mention of the vile language and images used in many of the Palestinian textbooks, such as describing the burning of Jewish bus passengers with Molotov cocktails as a "barbecue party," or teaching Arabic through a story promoting suicide bombings and illustrated by a Palestinian gunman shooting Israeli soldiers in a tank.

The incompetence seems hard to credit. Why do people in the West appear to find it so difficult to acknowledge Palestinian hatred and incitement against Israel and the Jews?

Clearly, they resist acknowledging anything that will undermine the narrative on which EU and UK foreign policy has been based for decades – that giving the Palestinian Arabs a state would end the "Middle East conflict."

The new Palestinian Authority textbooks are even worse than the old ones - by Ken Cohen

Those who doubt any imminent resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need look no further than the new Palestinian school books to become even more pessimistic.

Ken Cohen..
FLAME/JNS.org..
24 July '19..

There was great hope and anticipation several years ago when the Palestinian Authority announced that it was completely replacing its K-12 school textbooks. But new editions merely confirm obsessive Palestinian hatred of Jews and rejection of peace with Israel.

The older Palestinian textbooks were filled with ugly anti-Zionist—and anti-Semitic—propaganda. Shockingly, this pervasive spirit of distortion and hate wasn’t only employed in history textbooks, but also dominated language, math and even science lessons.

The original P.A. textbooks were in use for about 20 years, having been published following the Oslo Accords. (Prior to that, Palestinian schools had continued to use Jordanian textbooks published before the 1967 Six-Day War.)

Over the past three years the P.A. has released the full set of new textbooks—and they are even worse than the old ones in teaching Jew-hatred, fictionalized history and a profound glorification of martyrdom, terrorism and hate. Though Western liberals continue to place the onus of peace-making on Israel, these materials make clear the Palestinians’ dedication to waging war.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) recently published its reports on the textbooks—replete with examples—that demonstrate the horrific indoctrination being inflicted on Palestinian youth by their educators.

(Continue to Full Column)

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Hamas’s New Textbooks and Their Significance

...The new high school textbooks, we are told, “do not recognize modern Israel, or even mention the Oslo Peace Accords.” What will a “peace process” be like with a Palestinian polity raised to believe there was never any such thing? Looks like we’re about to find out.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
04 November '13..

The Hamas-Fatah civil war’s impact on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has long been a blind spot for reporters who seek to cover the conflict as a two-dimensional struggle between identifiable enemies. And so it is encouraging to see today’s highly-placed New York Times story on the new Hamas textbooks–a story which covers a second common blind spot for the media: Palestinian incitement and officially sanctioned anti-Semitism.

Today’s Times story explains that schools in Gaza are using new textbooks that, for the first time since Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, deviate from the Palestinian Authority’s standard texts “as part of a broader push to infuse the next generation with its militant ideology.” I’m not sure what is worse: that until now the official PA curriculum was anti-Semitic enough and sufficiently bloodthirsty for Hamas, or that Hamas is looking to ratchet up the hate even further. Either way, this should raise the alarm because in this (and just about every other) respect Gaza is not Vegas: What happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza.

The significance of textbooks for propaganda purposes is not lost on the Times:

“When a leader says something, not everyone is listening. But when we talk about textbooks, all the children, all of a particular peer group, will be exposed to a particular material,” he added. “This is the strongest card.”

What Gaza teenagers are reading in their 50-page hardcover texts this fall includes references to the Jewish Torah and Talmud as “fabricated,” and a description of Zionism as a racist movement whose goals include driving Arabs out of all of the area between the Nile in Africa and the Euphrates in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

“Palestine,” in turn, is defined as a state for Muslims stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. A list of Palestinian cities includes Haifa, Beersheba and Acre — all within Israel’s 1948 borders. And the books rebut Jewish historical claims to the territory by saying, “The Jews and the Zionist movement are not related to Israel, because the sons of Israel are a nation which had been annihilated.”

The reaction to stories like this is usually a mix of low expectations and the sunny search for a silver lining by noting that the situation is better in the West Bank, where Israel’s “peace partners” reside. And the response to the latter part of that reaction is, but for how much longer?

Distorting the research and giving incitement the stamp of approval

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Times of Israel..
10 February '13..

It all began as a worthy initiative of the “Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land.” The Council includes Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and Muslim and Christian religious leaders and aims to advance understanding and dialogue between the different religions. It decided to sponsor a research project that would examine the way Israeli and Palestinian Authority school text books portrayed the other, in order to promote changes and improvements as need be. Professor Bruce Wexler from the United States took up the challenge and obtained half a million dollars from the US State Department to support the study. He brought on board Professor Daniel Bar-Tal from Tel Aviv University and Professor Sami Adwan from the Palestinian side, and the project got underway.

This topic was not new to the researchers. They had dealt with the subject in the past and in fact had already formulated their opinions. The results of the research, one may suspect, were never in doubt. Its conclusions are that both sides’ school books are plagued by bias and a negative portrayal of the other side, even if the bias displayed by the Palestinian books is slightly greater. Most importantly, the “research” absolves the Palestinians of the accusations made against them regarding incitement. Thus another well-worn Zionist myth, which claimed that the Palestinians’ text books educate for hatred, and that Israeli text books are much more reasonable, was, as it were, disproved The Israeli Ministry of Education made clear that it would not cooperate with the research, due to its severe biases and distortions, and rejected the study’s findings from the outset.

Distorting the research

In response to the Education Ministry’s reservations, Bar-Tal rides out to defend his honor. The very idea that someone would think of raising doubts regarding the sacred truth coming out of his school of thought is scandalous. So allow me to raise several question marks regarding the quality of the professor’s research, whose academic work is difficult to separate from his political opinions. For example, in a study which claimed to analyze Israeli public opinion, Bar-Tal examined the public’s perception of the Partition Plan. The majority of Israelis, he notes, know that the Arab side opposed the plan. This view, Bar-Tal opines, reveals that the Israeli collective has adopted a “simplistic approach.” Why? Because “26.6% of Israelis did not know that the Partition Plan offered 1.3 million Palestinians 44% of the territory, and six-hundred thousand Jews 55%.” One has to strain to decipher the connection between this piece of information and the celebrated scholar’s conclusion that this indicates a “distortion of memory” on the part of the Israeli collective.

In reality it is not the memory that is distorted but the research. First of all, on the factual level, the majority of the territory which was designated for the Jewish state consisted of the Negev, much of which was an uninhabited desert. Even the city of Beersheba, as well as the majority of the fertile territory, was designated for the Arab side. Second, the Partition Plan was based on, among other things, the clear understanding that hundreds of thousands of Jews were waiting to enter the Jewish state, whether Holocaust survivors or Jews from Arab lands, who by then were already suffering from increased persecution (for this very reason British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who insisted that Holocaust refugees be rehabilitated in Europe, opposed the Partition plan.) And finally, even according to Bar-Tal, 74% of the Jewish population was aware of the facts regarding population numbers and territory percentages. Where then is the “distortion”? Rather, what Bar-Tal presents in this research is nothing but a highly-questionable attempt – one that is political, misleading and mistaken – to explain, and in essence to justify, the Arab rejection of the Partition Plan.

A report so far removed from reality as to render it useless

A Study in False Moral Equivalence

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
04 February '13..

The New York Times reports today that a new study is attempting to downplay the role that incitement to hatred in Palestinian schools is playing in fueling the conflict. The study is the product of the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, a left-leaning ecumenical group that is partially financed by a grant from the U.S. State Department. The group claims as its goal to promote peace and understanding and their study’s conclusion purports to be as even-handed as their approach to peace.

But the report’s claim that there is a rough moral equivalence between the attitudes of the Israeli and Palestinian education systems toward the promotion of hate is so far removed from reality as to render it useless as a measure of the problem. That study, which was rejected by a number of the academics who were part of the group commissioned to analyze the issue, must therefore be considered a contribution to the propaganda war against Israel rather than an effort to pave the way for accord between the two peoples.

As the Times noted:

Arnon Groiss, another Israeli member of the advisory panel, an Arabist, and the researcher and author of many previous reports critical of the Palestinian Authority textbooks, also refused to endorse the report, saying last week that he had not seen a final version. But he insisted that the authority’s textbooks “prepare the pupils for a future armed struggle for the elimination of the state of Israel.”

To seize on two points brought up in the Times article highlights the dishonesty of such a conclusion. The report claims that both school systems publish textbooks with maps that do not always show the other side’s claims. In practice this means that some Israeli books have maps that do not show the “green line” that marks the border between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel while all Palestinian books depict both Israel and the territories as the state of Palestine.

That sounds like the same thing but it really isn’t. Israeli books depict the reality that the Jewish state does have control over the entire area. Asking them to show maps that show a state of Palestine that doesn’t already exist is absurd. On the other hand, what the Palestinians are showing not only contradicts reality but also shows their dream of destroying Israel.