Foreign funds back antisemitic, anti-Israel Palestinian education - NGO

On October 7, some 3,000 Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel from the Gaza Strip, murdering, raping, and kidnapping Israeli citizens. All these actions were products of a Palestinian curriculum based in Ramallah that promoted acts of violence, antisemitism, and hatred against Israel.

Over half the terrorists were graduates of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), despite the UN ethos of non-violence. The remainder were graduates of a Palestinian Authority (PA) system that signed the Oslo Accords, committing to peace with Israel.

Although Gaza has been under Hamas control since 2007, its educational system remains largely funded by outside actors.

How foreign funds back the antisemitic, anti-Israel Gaza education

IMPACT SE is an NGO that monitors peace and cultural tolerance in education across the Middle East. According to its website, it promotes “international standards of peace, tolerance, and non-violence, as derived from UNESCO declarations and resolutions, to determine compliance and to advocate for change when necessary.”  

In an evening seminar a week after the October 7 attacks, when most of central Israel was in virtual lockdown, Arik Agassi, chief operating officer at IMPACT SE, revealed in a Zoom webinar to the press that the Gazan gunmen of October 7 were graduates from an educational system full of antisemitic hatred. Examples included a UNRWA-created Arabic reading comprehension exercise for ninth-grade students at UNRWA’s Al-Maghazi Middle School for Boys B in Gaza, which celebrated a Palestinian firebombing attack on an Israeli bus as a “barbecue party.”

An additional example was at UNRWA’s Al-Zaytun Elementary School in Gaza, where fifth-grade students were taught to glorify Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 carried out the bombing of a civilian bus on Israel’s Coastal Road, in which 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed. However, toward the end of the webinar, it was revealed that the funding for this hate material came from Western sources. A follow-up interview with him and CEO Marcus Sheff led to clarifications that hundreds of millions of Western funds contribute to this educational culture of hatred.

The Palestinian educational system was never friendly to Israel. However, until the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Israeli Civil Administration controlled educational materials and could, and often did, censor out hateful content. The antisemitic hatred ballooned in the Palestinian Authority school system in the first curriculum post Oslo after 2000 while Gaza relied on the Egyptian curriculum. Nevertheless, certain elements, such as references to Jewish history and past peace summits with Israel, remained until 2016.

In 2016, the curriculum was rewritten with the support of a populist radical Fatah minister in Ramallah. All references to Jewish history and peace with Israel were removed, and an expansion of antisemitic content was found, according to Agassi. This curriculum, with prolific examples of antisemitic content, is what prevails today.

Despite ruling Gaza as a separate enclave since 2007, the Palestinian educational system in Gaza relies on the Palestinian Authority-controlled Palestinian Curriculum Development Center (PCDC), and the educational system in Gaza, including its teachers, is largely an extension of the educational system in Area A of the West Bank. “Hamas, for their part, are ‘very happy with this curriculum; there were no comments of it not being nationalistic enough’” (despite ruling the Gaza Strip), comments Agassi. Additionally, UNRWA, which is the dominant institution for Gazan children, creates its own materials in-house in Gaza.

IMPACT CEO Marcus Sheff believes that the content that promoted the October 7 attacks was not created in a vacuum. “The PA curriculum is the one taught to 1.3 million children in Gaza, the West Bank, UNRWA, or government school. They are studying for the same matriculation, literally tajihi, matriculation in Arabic, and they are all studying from the same textbooks, which are the Palestinian National School Curriculum.” However, the education is not funded by the Palestinian Authority, despite being its supplier, but from outside sources, mostly from the West. “The funding comes in large part from the West,” Sheff says. “The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education, who write, teach, and examine in this curriculum, are supported by the European Union and individual European countries. UNRWA and the majority of schools in Gaza are supported to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by the US government, and the majority of that amount, 58%, goes to the education budget. So clearly, we have a problem, and the problem is that the international community, the EU through the PA, or the Americans through their ‘gifts’ to UNRWA, are involved in the extreme radicalization of Palestinians. And there is a direct link between their actions and what is in the school curriculum.”

Western funding is twofold. The first is the United States’ direct contribution to UNRWA. In 2023, the United States taxpayer contributed $223 million to UNRWA, where over half of the amount goes toward education.

Agassi explains the difference between funding UNRWA and the PA in Ramallah. “People confuse UNRWA and the Ramallah element. The Taylor Force Act is US legislation that prevents any American funding to go bilaterally to the PA. Because of this legislation, they have stopped giving the money to the PA and instead to UNRWA, which is a UN body. People in America will say, ‘None of their aid goes to Hamas.’ The evidence as to why, how directly (the average citizen) in Kentucky’s money goes to terrorism, and to Hamas in particular, which by law is a terrorist organization in the United States, is as follows. The money that the US admits goes to UNRWA pays salaries of teachers, principals, purchasing of textbooks, teaching of the hate material that is there. The vast majority of the UNRWA students are in Gaza. How do we know that the money goes to Hamas? The direct funding enables a grade 10 Palestinian to be radicalized to such an extent that he is physically and mentally able to decapitate a baby (and other crimes against humanity) in two years’ time after he graduates and becomes a Hamas member, and the Hamas website is proud of the education system that UNRWA has provided.”

Additionally, Agassi emphasizes that despite the main curriculum being created in Ramallah, UNRWA creates its own supplementary material with its own hate. “UNRWA self-creates its own materials. It could be exams, supplementary material, teacher guides. The materials are created in Gaza with the UNRWA logo on it.”

In early November, the US Congress held a hearing about US funding for UNRWA, including education, with a newly released IMPACT SE report titled “UNRWA education: textbooks and terror,” a report publicly available on IMPACT SE’s website. The report found that 82 UNRWA teachers and other staff in over 30 schools were involved in drafting, approving, and distributing “hateful content.” These “violate UN values, UNESCO standards, and UNRWA’s supposed zero tolerance policy for discrimination or for incitement to hatred and violence in its schools, educational materials, or in any of its operations,” according to the report. Top Republican congressmen in particular have pushed for changes; however, as of the time of writing, the US continues to fund Palestinian education in Gaza through UNRWA.

While the European Union also funds UNRWA, including education in smaller amounts, it heavily funds the PA and particularly contributes directly to paying the salaries of the curriculum developers in the Palestinian Curriculum Development Center (PCDC). Agassi explains that this is done through the PEGASE fund, which is a bucket fund to which different member states in the EU contribute, particularly for educational sector civil servants who are part of the PCDC. Whatever originates from this PCDC is taught in the West Bank and Gaza regular schools as well as UNRWA schools. The EU is the biggest financial backer of the PA, giving it $627 million annually.

In terms of oversight, the incitement in the Palestinian curriculum was brought to the attention of Brussels. “There were five resolutions of condemnations by the EU parliament, which has over 700 members representing millions of EU taxpayers, which explicitly condemns the PA over the hate in the textbooks that they created,” notes Agassi. The resolutions triggered the EU commission to fund its own report, which despite controversial conclusions, found that textbooks were full of incitement and hateful content. Following the report, the EU decided to freeze the entire PA budget for 2021 on condition that changes would be made to the curriculum. However, the Palestinians were speaking in double tongues, telling the Europeans in English that they would change, while telling the populace in Arabic that the curriculum would stay as is. “To the EU, they said they would make changes, to the Palestinian media they said they would not make changes, and I quote Palestinian PM Shtayyeh, ‘they would fund the printing of the textbooks without any foreign aid, and if they need, take taxpayer money from water, electricity’ to fund the textbooks.” Nevertheless, the change did not happen, and EU funding was restored to the PA in 2022, including to education, with no change at all to the textbooks.

Sheff believes that “attempted freezes and legislative measures,” such as what was done by the EU in the last few years and then reversed, are not efficient. Rather, the solution should be in direct conditioning of aid to end materials promoting hate. “These countries’ money, including America’s support for UNRWA, should be entirely conditional on an end to teaching hate. It cannot be that you are UNRWA to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, you know the majority of that is going toward what is loosely called education, and we know what that actually means in relation to what that material is. And we know very simply that this kind of financial support should grant the right and responsibility to say, ‘I am no longer paying for hate.’” Additionally, ways of teaching Palestinian national identity should be encouraged without the inclusion of hate. “There are ways of teaching the Palestinian curriculum and taking out the hate. This isn’t a big job. If you are responsible for the dollars or euro to UNRWA or the PA, you have a duty to say, ‘We will no longer be complicit in the teaching of hate.’”

Understanding how average American, European, and other Western taxpayers’ dollars that are sent to what they believe is a UN organization based on impartiality, instead fund material promoting hatred and crimes against humanity (originating in Ramallah but also some independently created in Gaza), is important for progress to happen on the issue, according to Sheff and Agassi.

To this end, Sheff says IMPACT SE has launched a campaign to “leave no stone unturned” so that everyone will see the information that they have been researching. “We will make sure everyone in the US and Europe and elsewhere will see it so they cannot say, ‘We were not aware of it.’” ■