The (deepening) problem with Palestinian textbooks

Making Israel Disappear - Vincent Carroll (Denver Post)

* "In the world inhabited by Palestinian children there is no Israel," says Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch (palwatch.org) in Jerusalem.

* The anti-Israeli content of Palestinian textbooks has been a longstanding concern for anyone who yearns for a permanent political settlement, but surely those books have improved since Yasser Arafat's death in 2004. Not really, says Marcus. If anything, he says, they devote more space than ever to depicting conflict with Israel as a solemn religious duty aimed at liberating a Muslim land.

* Remember, we're talking about textbooks chosen by the Palestinian government led by the allegedly moderate Mahmoud Abbas, not the overtly jihadist Hamas. The PA media are full of similar Islamist references that offer no room for compromise, and that honor terrorists and suicide bombers as national heroes.

* No less ominous is what Marcus describes as the PA's "infrastructure of hate," the relentless depiction of Jews as evil - as conspirators spreading AIDS, for example, or undermining the foundations of the Al-Aqsa mosque.

* Naturally, Jews poisoned Yasser Arafat, too - or at least that is what children are told. In a TV tribute to Arafat earlier this month, one youngster unconsciously presented the essence of this paranoid vision: "He died from poisoning by the Jews. Well, I don't know what he died from, but I know it was by the Jews."

As covered in the Daily Alert Nov. 23, 2009

New York Times Magazine Whitewashes Palestinian Kids' TV
By Eric Rozenman, for CAMERA.org October 7, 2009 Selected excerpts.

"Can the Muppets Make Friends in On the West Bank?" avoids the real story — 16 years of anti-Israel incitement, based largely on distortion and outright falsehood, aimed at Palestinian Arab children by both the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority broadcasting and the Hamas-run Al-Quds channel. ...


Hamas TV preaches the need for Palestinian children to eliminate the filthy Jews.... PA TV children's shows routinely teach that Haifa, Tiberias, Jaffa and other Israeli cities are part of "Palestine" and that "resistance" (terrorism) is laudable.

Palestinian Media Watch (www.pmw.org.il) has chronicled the coverage.

[In her article, the author offers] no explanation of the intifada, no intimation of Palestinian responsibility....

[The author] skates over a 1990s effort to produce a joint Israeli-Palestinian version of Israeli Television's ... spin-off of American public broadcasting's "Sesame Street." She notes that "the official Palestinian TV station was unwilling to show 'Shara'a Simsim' because it was produced jointly with 'Rechov Sumsum,' the Israeli version of 'Sesame Street.'"