Review Of UNRWA Curriculum: Palestinian Preschoolers Never Taught To Share

Team members stressed the broad impact of their findings on current understanding of Palestinian society and polity.

Tel Aviv, June 26 – A study of educational materials and approaches in Palestinian kindergartens and nursery schools reveals that whereas other cultures use the preschool age to inculcate values into their children such as sharing, Palestinian-administered preschools encourage no such behavior.

A team of educational psychologists and curriculum specialists visited dozens of Palestinian preschool facilities that function under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Works Administration for Palestine Refugees, and found that accustoming the children to the act of sharing was not included in the didactic goals in any of the institutions. The same held true at preschools run by the Palestinian National Authority.

Team members stressed the broad impact of their findings on current understanding of Palestinian society and polity. “This actually explains quite a bit,” observed Team Leader Mead Atsdom. “If you take a look at the core Palestinian attitude through the last century, even before the term ‘Palestinian’ came to mean an Arab resident of the southern Levant, it involves the inability to accept the sovereignty of another people anywhere around them.”

“Even today, it’s an accepted part of the Palestinian negotiating position that not a single Jew remain in the areas that would become a Palestinian state,” she noted. “Whereas Israel absorbed tens of thousands of Arabs, who today number in the millions. Israel has repeatedly offered and accepted compromises for the sake of peace agreements, whereas the essential Palestinian position remains no sharing of the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. At least not with Jews who insist on a right to protect themselves.”

The same phenomenon explains the dynamic at the Temple Mount, remarked Itze Almein, a clinical psychologist from Munich who advised the team. “While Diaspora Jewry, especially progressive US Jews, make a big deal about the Orthodox monopoly on prayer arrangements at the Western Wall, up behind the wall on the holy plateau there is no Jewish prayer at all,” he commented. “The Palestinians riot every time a Jew so much as moves his lips there, let alone sways, bows, or does anything that might be construed as a ‘Talmudic ritual.’ They aren’t taught to share in kindergarten, so of course they will never agree to share the Temple Mount. The mine-mine-mine attitude is exactly what you end up with: the mere presence of Jews on the Temple Mount becomes a ‘defilement’ of the place, even as Muslims do parkour there, play sports, and moon the Dome of the Rock.”

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