Despite pledge by Ramallah to revise curriculum, materials provided to Gazans continue to glorify martyrdom, feature antisemitic rhetoric in
By Nurit Yohanan
Education to martyrdom in math classes
Among the passages flagged by IMPACT-se is an 11th-grade history text that claims Zionists “used false claims” to justify their connection to the land while establishing a “Zionist settlement in Palestine.”
These “false claims” include “first, that Jews, despite belonging to various countries and societies, represent a single national group characterized by Semitic ethnic traits… and that there is no solution to the Jewish problem other than the establishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land (Palestine).”
It also refers to the Jewish settlement of the land as “Zionist colonialism… in Palestine.”
A map of the Arab world in a Grade 11 Geography textbook. (courtesy IMPACT-SE)
Educational material for 12th graders on Islam includes a religious text interpreting the Quran that portrays Jews as liars and deceivers. A discussion question asks whether a warning about resisting “the temptation of enemies” refers only to Jews.
According to IMPACT-se, the textbooks glorify martyrdom and violence, including a first-grade reading exercise that uses the word “shahid,” or martyr, to teach an Arabic letter. In a second-grade Arabic textbook, a poem tells of a boy and girl pledging to “carry the flame of the revolution,” as they go from Haifa to Jaffa to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque.
An 11th-grade reading exercise includes “Martyrs of the Intifada” by Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, which praises stone-throwers during the First Intifada. An 11th-grade history textbook describes the high Palestinian death toll in the First Intifada as “fuel that powered the uprising.”
“The blood of every martyr gave the Intifada the strength to continue,” the text reads.
Archive: Clashes in Ramallah during the first intifada (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
The glorification of jihad and martyrdom extends even into arithmetic, IMPACT-se found. Fourth and ninth-grade math textbooks include problems requiring students to calculate the number of martyrs killed over a given period.
Meanwhile, at least three maps found in the textbooks omit Israel, instead terming the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as Palestine. An 11th-grade map also refers to 1988 as the year that Palestine was founded, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s largely nugatory declaration of independence that year.
Glorification of the war on the class chalkboard
Beyond the online textbooks, the IMPACT-se report claimed to find images and videos from schools that opened since February in which students are exposed to materials and other content inciting violence against Jews or Israel.
According to Mahmoud Matar, the PA Education Ministry’s representative in Gaza, 93% of all schools in the Strip were destroyed in the fighting that was sparked on October 7, 2023, with Hamas’s deadly invasion of southern Israel.
But in February, as a ceasefire took hold, the PA announced that it was opening 680 learning centers across the Strip. To cope with demand, students must attend in shifts, going for a limited number of hours a few days a week.
