Palestinian Textbooks Still Glorify Terror and Anti-Semitism, and Britain Still Pays for Them

At the end of last year, the Norwegian parliament voted to cut its aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) over its refusal to modify the textbooks used in its schools, which teach hatred for Jews and admiration for terrorists. By contrast, the British government, although it acknowledged the problem in 2018, has responded mainly with obfuscation and foot-dragging. Jenni Frazer writes:

Despite numerous assurances from the Palestinian education minister, detailed reports from the Israel-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) show that as recently as September last year, Palestinian school students were still learning math by adding up the number of “martyrs,” including those who have carried out suicide bombings on buses and shopping center. The curriculum is taught in Palestinian Authority and UNRWA schools in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem.

Not only does Britain continue to pay—in the past five years it has spent an estimated 105 million pounds on Palestinian education professionals, including on the salaries of teachers who write the textbooks—but it appears to have a blind spot when it comes to challenging the Palestinians on the content of those books.

The UK and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have a memorandum of understanding, which supposedly commits the Palestinians not only to “uphold the principle of non-violence,” but to take action against “incitement to violence, including addressing allegations of incitement in the educational curriculum.” Money paid by Britain . . . is supposedly contingent on the PA’s performance on “curriculum reform.” [But government] ministers have refused requests to publish the government’s annual internal reviews of the PA’s compliance with the memorandum.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Anti-Semitism, Palestinian Authority, United Kingdom

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society