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The European Union has reportedly rebuffed efforts by the Palestinian Authority seeking to overturn a financial aid freeze amid ongoing concerns about the violent and Antisemitic content within its school curriculum.
A delegation from the PA is understood to have visited Brussels recently to try convince EU Council member states to overturn the financial aid freeze.
A Palestinian delegation of officials, from the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministries of Finance, Education and Foreign Affairs, travelled to Brussels to attempt to convince the Council to overturn the 2021 decision to freeze all financial aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). According to reports six countries – France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Malta – supported the Palestinian Authority’s position, and the remaining 21-member states either opposed or abstained during the vote.
The reports state that the EU will overturn the aid freeze, worth millions of euros, on the condition that the PA removes hate and violent content from its textbooks and school curriculums.
The PA Foreign Minister stated that they will make it clear “that we reject the idea of conditionality in return for restoring aid”. In Palestinian media, the PA’s Ministry of Education Curriculum Chief Tharwat Zaid stated his support for the content of the textbooks: he referred to several known Palestinian terrorists, such as Ahmed Yassin the founder of Hamas and Dalal al-Mughrabi who participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, as “our symbols and heroes” stating that “they can only be present in our curricula as heroes”.
He went on to claim that the IMPACT-se, an Israel-based monitor group that studies education materials in the Arab world, are to blame for the EU funding freeze as they are “making attempts to incite against the Palestinian curriculum”.
In February, IMPACT-se published a report that illustrated that, despite promises to change its textbooks, the Palestinian Authority has produced new teaching materials for the current school year that “contain a great deal of violent and hateful content”. A spokesperson for the UK FCDO said that “the UK condemns hatred, violence and antisemitism and are clear it should have no place in education” and that they “continue to urge the removal of such content to the highest levels of the Palestinian Authority”.
