Gaza City, December 15 – A scathing analysis of the material imparted to Palestinian students at UN-administered schools has generated international pressure to cut from the curriculum incitement against Israel and Jews, leading the organization running the schools to promise to limit its engagement in such incitement to only four fifths of classroom and extracurricular time.
Recent months have seen activists and governments focusing greater attention than before on the content of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) school curriculum and on the attitudes expressed by school staff beyond the classroom. The preponderance of material deligitimizing Israel and engaging in antisemitism has raised red flags among donors to the agency, including prominent American Congressmen. As a result of such unwanted attention, UNRWA has ordered its staff to cut anti-Israel messages in its activities by fifteen percent.
UNRWA runs schools for the descendants of Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, providing services and aid to multiple generations of refugees. The agency is a separate entity from the other UN refugee operation, one that aims to absorb refugees from conflict into other states and thereby secure their future. UNRWA, however, works with Arab states to keep the Palestinian refugees stateless in perpetuity, nurturing the ever-less-likely notion that they can return to the homes their ancestors fled in 1948 and thereby destroy the Jewish state demographically after the combined Arab armies and irregulars repeatedly failed to do so militarily. In keeping with that mission, UNRWA faculty instill in their students an uncompromising refusal to accept the continued existence of Israel as a home for the Jews. The agency also cooperates with host governments in tolerating or facilitating restrictions on Palestinian civil rights, employment, and freedoms.
Initially the agency tried to forestall the consequences of its sponsorship of incitement by expunging some of the online evidence. However, these steps somehow did not satisfy critics, who continued to insist that UNRWA adopt actual reforms and stop teaching children they have a right even as grownups to demand that the world give them everything they demand no matter who suffers, but especially if the people who suffer are Jews.
As a result, UNRWA spokesman in Gaza Chris Gunness told reporters today that modifications would be implemented under which the teachers would be required to limit incitement to eighty percent of classroom time, with membership in an Islamist organization no longer a preferred resume item for employment as an UNRWA teacher.
“These measures demonstrate that our critics are wrong when they call us incapable of making changes,” said Gunness. “But just watch – any minute now the same agitators will call this change insufficient and dismiss the effort this required as if it means nothing.”
Indeed, concessions made by Palestinians in general have gone largely unappreciated in recent decades. “It involves a major sacrifice to openly commit to not trying to kill as many Jews as possible all the time, even if your actual adherence to that commitment is spotty,” explained Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “I’m not sure everyone appreciates the challenge of surviving politically in this region when one is not staunchly devoted to resisting Jewish sovereignty of any sort.”
“The least the world can do to reward us for our pledge not to keep trying to wipe out the Jews is to force Israel to make it easier for us to wipe out the Jews,” he said.
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