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PA: Palestinian curriculum ‘sovereign issue’

June 24, 2021 at 2:34 pm

Palestinian students revise before entering their school for their final exams in the West Bank city of Hebron on 30 May 2020. [HAZEM BADER/AFP via Getty Images]

The Palestinian Authority (PA)yesterday reiterated that the Palestinian curriculum is a “sovereign issue and any decision related to it will remain an independent and national one,” it said in a statement.

The Ministry of Education continued: “The Palestinian curriculum will continue to keep up with the Palestinian national principles, the Palestinian references and the international treaties and conventions.”

Efforts are ongoing “to immunise it against external interference and maintain its independence,” it continued.

Israeli pressure on the ministry to change its education system “is one of the forms of systematic wars on the Palestinian curriculum and its content.”

The PA has come under repeated attack following claims its curriculum incites against Jews and is anti-Semitic, this in spite of an EU-funded study have “just concluded the Palestinian textbooks adhere to UNESCO standards & found virtually no instances of antisemitism”. The report on the textbooks doesn’t claim “incitement” and found just one chapter in one textbook (across 150+ reviewed textbooks) with ant-Semitic motifs – which has since been altered.

This comes as Israeli youth marched through the streets of occupied East Jerusalem changing “death to Arabs” and “a second Nakba is coming” in reference to the destruction of the Palestinian homeland by Jewish militias to make way for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Many have since questioned the participants’ own education and where they had been taught to hate Arabs in such a manner.

READ: Another textbook scandal exposes EU’s selective outrage