Jewish News
A senior UAE official has reportedly criticised the controversial school curriculum taught to Palestinian students by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as being “a threat to Palestinians…and the whole region”.
During a panel event hosted by the Atlantic Council to discuss promoting tolerance in the Middle East through education, UAE official Dr Ali Rashid Al Nuaimi condemned UNRWA for its handling of the curriculum and textbooks used in the Palestinian Territories. UNRWA’s curriculum is produced by the Palestinian Authority and has faced growing condemnation for its promotion of Antisemitic ideology and glorifying terrorists.
Dr Al Nuaimi, who is a Member of the UAE Federal National Council and Chairman of the Defence Affairs, Interior & Foreign Affairs Committee at the Council, stated that the curriculum that UNWRA delivers is “a threat to Palestinians” that will eventually become a “threat to the whole region”. He went on the detail that “our European friends” should make UNRWA funding “conditional to promoting peace”, highlighting that there is a need for “real international community engagement”.
The importance of scrutinising the UNRWA curriculum, Dr Al Nuaimi explained, is the lasting effect of growing up being taught hate; he argued that even if Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed a peace treaty, there are over 1.3 million students who were raised on intolerance and taught violence through their textbooks and school curriculum, meaning that “we won’t end up having peace”.
Along with Dr Al Nuaimi, on the expert panel was the first Chairman of Hedayah, El Mehdi Boudra, founder and chairman of the Mimouna Association, and Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se an Israel-based monitor group that studies education materials in the Arab world.
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”. Mr Sheff said that the PA had “doubled down on teaching the hate that donor nations said they could no longer tolerate”.
Following the publication of the report, CFI Parliamentary Chairman Rt. Hon. Stephen Crabb MP stated that the “material is extremely detrimental to the wellbeing of Palestinian children and makes peace harder to achieve”. He urged the Government to reconsider its aid strategy to UNRWA “to ensure that UK taxpayers’ money promotes peace” in Palestinian schools.
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”.
