The Palestinian Authority hopes to supplant Hamas as the governing power in the Gaza Strip and play a central role in the second phase of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan.
This may be a bridge too far as matters stand today.
The Israeli government opposes the participation of the PA in the future governance of Gaza on the grounds that it has not worked diligently enough to eradicate terrorism in areas of the West Bank it administers under the 1995 Oslo Accords.
The United States basically agrees with Israel’s position. Trump, following the lead of his predecessor, Joe Biden, has said that the PA cannot be a participant in this process unless it is revamped from top to bottom.
Head-to-toe reform is necessary because the PA is notoriously corrupt and inefficient. And far too many of its current leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, are in the geriatric range and should step aside for the good of their cause.
One of the reforms urgently required of the PA concerns the removal of unacceptable textbooks in its education system.
According to a recent report issued by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), the current curriculum in PA schools in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem rests on a shaky foundation of problematic texts, which poison the minds of students.
These books, designated for grades one to four and 12 and covering subjects running the gamut from history and Islamic education to geography and science, incite antisemitism and violence, promote jihad and martyrdom, glorify terrorism, reject peacemaking, denounce the two-state solution, demonize Israelis, and erase Israel from maps.
The 290 textbooks and 71 accompanying teacher guides under review were supposed to eliminate such noxious content. Yet no significant changes have been made, despite commitments by the PA to reform the curriculum and despite claims by the European Union that such reforms were already underway.
As an example of the offensive nature of these texts, IMPACT-se cites passages in a tenth-grade history book.
“It expresses the antisemitic canard that Jews control money, the media, and politics … It teaches that after World War II, ‘the Zionists’ shifted their focus to the U.S. once it became a global superpower, and ‘exploited’ their financial, media and political influence to win the support of the U.S. government and political parties for the establishment of ‘the Zionists’ national home,’ or the state of Israel.
“It invokes the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish people holding excessive power in various areas and the antisemitic conspiracy theory that they use this power collectively in illegitimate ways for cynical interests.
“Finally, it effectively delegitimizes Jewish self-determination by ignoring its relation to Jewish identity and portraying it as primarily driven by political and financial interests, implicitly to be contrasted with the natural support the Palestinian cause receives.”
Palestinian educators, enraged by the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 and upset by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, presumably regard this text as the gospel truth.
But nearly eight decades after Israel’s birth, the Palestinians should accept Israel’s existence within the framework of a two-state solution, and in this spirit, rewrite or withdraw texts that run counter to this reality.
If the Abbas and his colleagues are finally ready to do this, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers will presumably be hard-pressed to justify their policy of keeping the PA out of Gaza and opposing the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state.
The ball is now in the PA’s court.
The sooner it overhauls its school texts, the sooner it may be ready to assume a role in Gaza’s future and the closer it may be to achieving Palestinian statehood.