EU to Conduct Review of Palestinian Textbooks Containing Anti-Israel Incitement

The European Union will conduct a review of new Palestinian textbooks after a study found that they contained increasing levels of anti-Israel and anti-peace rhetoric. The move comes against the backdrop of the European Parliament’s passage of legislation in April 2018 geared toward eliminating hateful content in Palestinian school materials. In October, the parliament’s budgetary committee called for freezing some $17 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority over the matter. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the initiative would be supervised by an “independent and internationally recognized research institute” with the aim of “identifying possible incitement to hatred and violence and any possible lack of compliance with UNESCO standards of peace and tolerance in education.” Last month, NGO IMPACT-se published a 70-page document claiming the Palestinian curriculum “deliberately omits any discussion of peace education or reference to any Jewish presence in Palestine before 1948,” the year that Israel was founded. “Most troubling,” the researchers concluded, “there is a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades… that extend[s] even into the teaching of science and mathematics.”