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Despite repeated assurances from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to the UK Government that the content of educational material for Palestinian children is in line with UN values, a new report has exposed UNRWA-produced school materials which “[encourage] jihad, violence, and martyrdom” and promote “antisemitism, and the erasure, demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel”.
The report, published by IMPACT-se, an Israel-based monitor group that studies education materials in the Arab world, also shows that “UNRWA-produced school materials deliberately direct students to pages in Palestinian textbooks containing hateful passages that violate UN values”, despite UNRWA “consistently [claiming] that it instructs teachers to skip these hateful passages”.
The UNRWA-labelled documents and study booklets which are distributed in schools in the West Bank and Gaza are not found on UNRWA’s official online platforms, which “is in itself problematic, as it prevents transparency regarding UNRWA-produced content”, according to IMPACT-se.
“They were drafted, supervised, approved, printed, and distributed to thousands of students by UNRWA teachers and staff, whose names also appear on the materials as contributing to or supervising the content”, IMPACT-se said.
The material includes a grammar exercise teaching that “the Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem”, with other sentences involving “Jihadi warriors” fighting the “occupier” as well as the commitment to “liberate” Palestine and “resisting the enemy courageously”. One poem teaches that to die as a martyr by killing Israelis is a “hobby”, with peace-making presented as a sign of weakness.
The monitor group found that Jews are depicted as inherently treacherous and hostile to Islam and Muslims, with one grammar exercise implying that Jews are impure and that they defile the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel is erased from the UNRWA-produced material and the entirety of the state is labelled as Palestine, with exercises in which children are tasked with naming cities in Israel as Palestinian cities.
IMPACT-se’s CEO, Marcus Sheff, said that UNRWA promised to remove all such content last year, but instead “it seems that the UNRWA has interpreted this as removal from the website where it can be scrutinised, rather than actual removal from classrooms”.
