An investigation of the Palestinian Education System
Americans are often led to believe that Palestinian textbooks teach hatred and violence, but rarely are presented with concrete evidence.

Nathan J. Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, undertook a comprehensive investigation of the Palestinian curriculum and textbooks to discover the truth about this oft-repeated criticism.

Below are excerpts from Brown?s report entitled ?Democracy, History, and the Contest over the Palestinian Curriculum,? which was prepared for the Adam Institute, November 20011.

By Nathan J. Brown
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, The George Washington University Excerpts from ?Democracy, History, and the Contest over the Palestinian Curriculum?


Almost any discussion of education in the Middle East posits it as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Those who seek peace, democracy, or economic development generally claim that existing educational institutions and practices stand in their way.

Palestinian education is particularly notable for the number and variety of its detractors. Outside the country, critics charge that it incites rather than educates; Palestinian critics claim that education does little to foster democratic and productive citizens.


The external and internal critics may be placing an unrealistic burden on what any curriculum and cadre of teachers can accomplish. Palestinian political and economic realities are often grim, and schools hardly have a monopoly on communicating ways to interpret such realities, especially in matters that are so deeply felt and encountered on a daily basis.

Still, the critics charge, the Palestinian educational system, and especially the curriculum, exacerbates existing problems...
...he Palestinian curriculum is not a war curriculum; while highly nationalistic, it does not incite hatred, violence, and anti-Semitism. It cannot be described as a ?peace curriculum? either, but the charges against it are often wildly exaggerated or inaccurate...
After 1948, the West Bank was annexed to Jordan and Gaza was administered by Egypt. Accordingly, West Bank schools followed the Jordanian curriculum, while Gazan schools adopted the Egyptian. In 1967, Israel occupied both areas and maintained the existing curricula for Palestinian schools.

It did attempt unsuccessfully to bring its own curriculum into Jerusalem, and it also reviewed Jordanian and Egyptian books, censoring material that it found objectionable. In 1994, Palestinian education in the West Bank (including, to a limited and unacknowledged extent, Jerusalem) and Gaza was transferred to the new Palestinian National Authority (PNA). The PNA immediately established a ?Curriculum Development Center? to formulate its own approach. While the Center was working, two interim measures were taken. First, the Jordanian and Egyptian curricula were restored temporarily in their entirety.

Second, a supplementary series of texts covering National Education was hastily written for grades one through six to compensate for the non-Palestinian nature of the temporary curriculum...


Any treatment of Palestinian education must confront at the outset the oft-repeated claims that Palestinian textbooks instill hatred of Israel and Jews. In a sense, this issue is at most tangential to this paper, which focuses on internal Palestinian politics and portrays textbooks as outcomes of domestic struggle more than producers of international conflict. But virtually every discussion in English on Palestinian education repeats the charge that Palestinian textbooks incite students against Jews and Israel. It may therefore come as a surprise to readers that the books authored under the PNA are largely innocent of these charges.

What is more remarkable than any statements they make on the subject is their silence?the PNA-authored books often stubbornly avoid treating anything controversial regarding current Palestinian national identity, forcing them into awkward omissions and gaps. The first generation of Palestinian textbooks written in 1994, the National Education series, make no mention of any location as Palestinian outside of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967; those books go to some lengths to avoid saying anything about Israel at all and the few exceptions are hardly pejorative.

The second generation of books?issued beginning in 2000?breaks some of that silence but with neither the consistency nor the stridency that critics of the textbooks allege.


Then where do persistent reports of incitement in Palestinian textbooks come from? Virtually all can be traced back to the work of a single organization, the ?Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace.? The Center claims that its purpose is ?to encourage the development and fostering of peaceful relations between peoples and nations, by establishing a climate of tolerance and mutual respect founded on the rejection of violence as a means to resolving conflicts.?2

Critics charge that the Center?s real purpose is to launch attacks on the Palestinian National Authority, and it would be difficult to contest such a conclusion. They point to the identity of the Center?s first director, Itamar Marcus, to support their suspicions.3


The Center?s own reports suggest such suspicions are well-founded. The Center began operation by issuing its first report in 1998 on Palestinian textbooks that might best be described as tendentious and highly misleading.

When the PNA issued a new series of books for grades one and six in 2000, the Center rushed out its second report that passed over significant changes quite quickly before presenting its allegations of ?delegitimization of Israel?s existence,? implicit ?seeking of Israel?s destruction,? ?defamation of Israel,? and ?encouraging militarism and violence.? However, in contrast to the alarm and alacrity with which it studied Palestinian textbooks, the Center?s work on Israeli textbooks showed a far more generous spirit and proceeded at a far more leisurely pace, taking years rather than months.

The report on Israeli books followed a very different method: rather than quoting example after example of offending passages with little historical context or explanation (a method that would have produced a very damning report indeed), the report on Israeli textbooks is nuanced and far more careful. Incendiary quotations are explained, analyzed and contextualized in the report on Israeli books; they are listed with only brief and sensationalist explanations in the reports on Palestinian books.

In short, the Center is fair, balanced, and understanding for Israeli textbooks but tendentious on Palestinian books.


The Center?s work has been widely circulated: its reports are the source for virtually any quotation in English from the Palestinian curriculum. Indeed, its influence has begun to be felt in policy circles, and has informed congressional and presidential statements in the United States, numerous newspaper columns, and?more recently?a decision by some external donors to cut off funds for Palestinian education. Recently some European parliamentarians have begun to press their governments and the European Union as a whole, and an Israeli cabinet minister has spoken of taking the issue to the United Nations.

Since the Center?s reports have dominated the public debate with considerable effect and little contestation, it makes some sense to examine them.


While often highly misleading and always unreliable, most of the contents of the Center?s reports are not fabricated. Clearly false statements are rare, though when they do occur they are far from minor. For instance, the Center?s first report on Palestinian textbooks, issued in 1998, included the statement that: ?PA TV is a division of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education,? which allowed the report to saddle the Palestinian educational establishment with any statement broadcast on Palestinian television.

The statement was false, however. In its second comprehensive report on Palestinian textbooks, issued in 2000 on the new books for the first and sixth grades, the Center claims that ?the PA has rejected international calls? to modify books for the other grades. In fact, as will become clear, the plan to replace the textbooks in question was as old as the PNA itself and was proceeding according to a well-published schedule when the Center?s report was issued. Several lesser errors occur throughout the Center?s work.


But the real problems with the Center?s reports lie elsewhere. In particular, three sets of flaws characterize its work (and much of the public debate about Palestinian textbooks more generally). First, the Center generally ignores any historical context in a way that renders some of its claims sharply misleading. In its 1998 report, the Center adduced numerous incendiary statements about Israel and Jews from books in use in Palestinian schools.

The statements quoted were accurate. Some indeed were highly offensive to Jews and sharply anti-Israeli.4 Yet they came not from books authored by Palestinians but from Egyptian and Jordanian books used in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively.5 The books were distributed by the PNA, to be sure, but they antedated its establishment. (The Center?s report does hold the PNA responsible for distributing the Egyptian and Jordanian books and therefore holds Palestinians responsible for the content. Here it displays an odd double standard: it does not note that Israel has distributed the exact same books in East Jerusalem, removing only the cover.

The only books that the Israelis refused to distribute after 1994 were those authored by the PNA?the National Education series?even though those books were free of the content that Israel objected to. The likely reason for this odd policy is that Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem?implied by using PNA-authored books?was far more problematic for Israel than anti-Semitism.)


By sharp contrast to the Egyptian and Jordanian books, the 1994 National Education series, actually authored by the PNA, verged on blandness. The first generation of books made no mention of any Palestinian area within the 1967 borders (the second generation of books?written after the Center?s first report?reversed this policy). Indeed, the 1994 books went to some length to avoid any controversial matter whatsoever. An organization claiming to ?monitor the impact of peace? might be expected to compare the older, non-Palestinian books with the newer, Palestinian ones.

Indeed, such a task would seem basic to its mission. The Center goes beyond failing to live up to its name; its reports are written to obfuscate the distinction between the old and new books. It does not simply fail to note the change, but, in one of its rare falsehoods, the Center claims that in the 1994 series, Israel does not exist.6 (The treatment of Palestinian history in the 1994 books is extremely brief, but Israel is indeed referred to; remarkably, the 1994 texts resorts to awkward phrasing to avoid citing Israel in some negative contexts.)

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Center was far more interested in criticizing the PNA than in an honest assessment of the changes produced in Palestinian education by the Oslo Accords.


The second problem with the Center?s work is its prosecutorial style. Its reports offer little more than brief themes and then list statement after statement purporting to prove the point. Any evidence that contradicts the Center?s harsh message is ignored, obscured, or dismissed, such as maps that clearly draw Palestinian governorates as covering only the West Bank and Gaza, an extended and laudatory treatment of Gandhi?s nonviolence, or a tour of Palestinian cities that includes only those under PNA rule.

Other evidence is interpreted inaccurately. For instance, a topographical map of Palestine (inserted most likely to avoid drawing any sensitive political issues regarding borders) is presented as a denial of Israel?s existence.

Many of the selections included are presented in a highly tendentious manner: a unit on tolerance is criticized for omitting Jews, while a reading of the entire unit makes perfectly clear that its topic is tolerance within Palestinian society.7 ?Izz al-Din al-Qassam is mentioned in texts as a Palestinian national hero; the Center?s 2000 report explains:


The primary terrorist organization operating against Israel since the signing of the Oslo Accords is the Hamas, whose members terrorized Israeli citizens with suicide attacks, primarily on buses. The terror wing of the group is called the ?Az Aldin Al Kassam? squad, named after the terrorist who fought the British and Jews before the establishment of the State of Israel.

The new PA schoolbook glorifies Kassam...
In essence, the Center provides a context for the mention of al-Qassam that, while accurate, is irrelevant to the text: it deliberately obscures how the text itself presents al-Qassam or how Palestinians would understand a reference to him. Al-Qassam was killed at the beginning of his attempt to organize a rebellion against the British mandate. Subsequent generations of Palestinians have been able to read various dimensions into his short career: for mainstream nationalists, he is a rebel against the British, for Islamists, a warrior for Islam, and for leftists, he is a mobilizer of the popular classes.

To imply that mentioning al-Qassam is an implicit endorsement of suicide attacks and bus bombings is thus based on a hostile, inaccurate, and even dishonest reading?what matters is not whether the textbooks cite him but how they present him. Palestinian texts mention him only as a martyr in the struggle against British imperialism.8


In short, the purpose is clearly to indict the textbooks and the PNA rather than analyze and understand the content of the books. Were the Center to take a similar approach in other countries, including Israel, it could easily find comparable material.9


The final and perhaps the largest problem with the Center?s work lies not simply with the reports themselves but in how they have been read. The Center?s conclusions may be unsupported by the evidence it presents and undermined by the evidence it overlooks. But it does include some qualifications and elliptical wording that usually prevent its reports from outright falsehood. When its reports gain wider circulation, however, the buried qualifications get lost.

The Center?s 2000 report actually admitted that changes had occurred in the Palestinian-authored books but then attempted to undermine its own admission:

A few changes were noted in the new PA books. The open calls for Israel?s destruction found in the previous books are no longer present. However, given the de-legitimization of Israel?s existence, together with teachings such as the obligation to defend Islamic land, the seeking of Israel?s destruction has merely been shifted from the explicit to the implicit.

Another change is that certain overtly anti-Semitic references defining Jews and Israelis as ?treacherous? or ?the evil enemy?, common in the previous books, are likewise not present. However, given the books? portrayal of Israel as a foreign colony that massacred and expelled Palestinians, the defamation of Israel continues even if the word ?enemy? has been removed.

In short, the new books removed the earlier offensive material, but the Center acknowledged the change only by denying its significance. Thus it is not surprising when public references to the textbooks based on the Center?s report lose any subtlety and make erroneous claims about the new books. Charles Krauthammer claimed that since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians had ?intensified the propaganda, the antisemitism, in their pedagogy and in their media? and that while Israel had ?assiduously? changed its textbooks to prepare for peace, ?on the Palestinian side, the opposite was happening.?10 Rather than lauded for having removed offensive material, the Palestinians were criticized for introducing it.

A Jerusalem Post columnist falsely claimed ?The incitement to hatred of Jews and the destruction of Israel, which has always been part of the Palestinian school curriculum, was intensified.?11 A spokesperson for Israeli settlers in the West Bank introduced the puzzling charge which would probably have made even the Center?s staff blush: ?We teach our children to respect life, while they teach that if you die with Jewish blood on your hands you go to heaven and are fed with grapes by 15 virgins.?12 The European Commission came under fire in the press for supporting the books (it did not, though some member states did support the Palestinian Curriculum Development Center), leading an exasperated spokesman to declare: ?The Commission utterly rejects the promotion of intolerance or hatred, as it rejects poor journalism...?13


The Palestinian textbooks were such a politically attractive target that even those who were better informed as to their content criticized them. Hillary Clinton, running for the U.S. Senate, criticized Palestinian textbooks in a way that buried her acknowledgement that the new first and sixth grade books, authored by the PNA itself, were different: ?All future aid to the Palestinian Authority must be contingent on strict compliance with their obligation to change all the textbooks in all grades?not just two at a time.?14 After her election, her comments lost even this subtlety: in June 2001 she joined with her fellow senator from New York, Charles Schumer, in a letter to President George Bush, introducing the false charge (clearly based on a Center report): ?A book that is required reading for Palestinian six graders actually starts off stating, ?There is no alternative to destroying Israel.??15 As the second intifada took on diplomatic as well as violent dimensions, the Israeli government cited textbooks as evidence of Palestinian bad faith and hostile intentions. Others held international donors responsible for not forcing changes or even for funding new sources of incitement.16


The Center?s reports were the clear source for most of these charges, whether cited or not. A member of the United States Congress wrote to The New York Times:
According to the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, today?s sixth-grade Palestinian students are required to read the textbook ?Our Country Palestine,? which has a banner on the title page of Volume I that reads, ?There is no alternative to destroying Israel.?17
The charge was false, though it was widely repeated and even displayed in an advertising campaign by an organization calling itself (with unintended irony) ?Jews for Truth Now.? No textbook included such a phrase.

The member of Congress and others had read the Center?s carelessly-written report in a careless manner. The original report had actually claimed: ?An old book introduced into the PA curriculum is filled with virulent anti-Semitism.? It then claimed that there is a banner on the title page stating ?There is no alternative to destroying Israel.? The Center?s claim was misread and may have been inaccurate. The book ?Our Country Palestine? was an old geographical guide to Palestine begun in the 1940s and published in some subsequent editions.

Those looking for the supposed banner could not find it (nor could I). Certainly the edition available to the textbook authors did not include the phrase.18 Further, the claim that the book was introduced into the curriculum is highly misleading. Its author?s evacuation from Jaffa in 1948 was described, and, at the end of the unit, students are given a suggested activity of looking up the name of their town or village in the book. To leap from this suggested activity to a charge of inculcating

virulent anti-Semitism seems?to put it politely?curious indeed.

It was not merely members of Congress who were misled by careless reading of the Center?s reports. Even sloppy academics were led astray. One analysis of Palestinian textbooks reproduced quotations from the Center?s reports (without attribution), mistakenly claiming that all the texts came from Palestinian-authored books (whereas most came from the Egyptian and Jordanian books being phased out).19 An equally groundless, though far more bizarre analysis of Palestinian textbooks begins with wholesale (though unattributed) borrowings from the Center?s reports and then adds:


Public acclaim, a non-ending orgy of sex and all the booze you can drink, constitute a powerful combination of incentives for igniting the imagination and motivation of pubescent youth, aged 12 and up. Along with the emotionally charged scenes of actually stoning Jews and Jewish property, what more is needed to convince them that killing Jews is a worthy and honorable vocation?

The PA is certainly preparing a huge army for the future that, socially and psychologically, will be trained to commit unmitigated violence against Israel and the Jewish People on behalf of Islam, the Arabs and Palestine.20

The vitriolic and often inaccurate criticisms of Palestinian textbooks should not obscure that those books do treat Israel with a remarkable awkwardness, reticence, and inconsistency. Exploring the relationship between Palestinians on the one hand and Israel, Zionism, and Jews on the other might logically be seen as central to any attempt to educate Palestinians about their past, their present, and even their geography. But such topics are treated only at the margins.


Indeed, the textbooks often take on the same kind of awkwardness adults often assume when addressing subjects they would prefer to avoid. In explaining the concept of species, one of the new books explains that animals that are not alike cannot ?marry? and have children?a rather Victorian presentation. Discussions of sensitive political topics often show a similar reticence to sensitive topics...


In short, far from inciting schoolchildren, the books generally treat sensitive political questions as tangential. There are some exceptions to this rule, but not in any sustained way. Palestinian educators have decided not to supply either a coherent narrative or a set of conceptual tools for understanding such issues. History is presented with very different ends in mind...


REFERENCES
1. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance and comments provided by the late Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Sam Kaplan, ?Ali Jarbawi, Elie Podeh, Lara Friedman, David Matz,Khalil Mahshi, Isma?il Nujum, Maher Hashweh, Rif?at Sabah, and Fouad Moughrabi. This research was funded by a Fulbright grant and a grant from the United States Institute of Peace. The opinions expressed are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Fulbright or the USIP.

2. See the Center?s website, edume.org

3. An Israeli resident of the West Bank settlement of Efrat, Marcus previously lobbied to keep West Bank aquifers under Israeli control. His work on textbooks led Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to appoint him to a joint committee with the Palestinians on incitement. He then went on to found an organization that searches Palestinian media for anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish statements, following a similar method to that followed for textbooks.


For an example of a criticism of the Center?s work that focuses on Marcus personally, see the document submitted by the PLO to the Mitchell Commission, ?Third Submission of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee,? 3 April 2001, nad-plo.org p. 22.

4. The report?s method of listing large number of statements from the books led it to include all sorts of material under the anti-Israel rubric. For instance, any mention of a Palestinian character to Jerusalem was listed as questioning the Israeli nature of the city. Since Jerusalem was designated as a matter for final status negotiations, the idea that the Palestinians questioned Israeli annexation should have been unsurprising. What is more surprising?and unremarked in the report?is that all mentions of locations in Jerusalem in the Palestinian-authored books refer only to the Old City and a few Arab neighborhoods. If textbooks are taken as indications of negotiating positions?an implicit assumption of the report?then the Palestinians showed far more willingness to compromise on Jerusalem than Israel.

5. The Center?s report does include some excerpts from the 1994 Palestinian-authored books but none can fairly be viewed as hostile to Israel or to Jews. The texts are examined in more detail below.

6. www.edume.org

7. My son attended a Tel Aviv school which celebrated ?tolerance day,? assuring all students that Israelis can be religious or secular, light-skinned or dark-skinned, and Jewish or Arab. Following the Center?s methodology, such a unit might be lambasted for failing to include Palestinians who do not hold Israeli citizenship and for denying Palestinian identity (by not mentioning it).

8. To follow the Center?s methodology, an American textbook from the late 1930s mentioning Abraham Lincoln might be seen as carrying a pro-Communist message because of the role of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Certainly the Center?s logic could be used to cite any Israeli textbook mentioning Yitzhak Shamir as encouraging massacres of Palestinians and political assassinations of British and UN officials.

9. The Center eschews such a prosecutorial approach in its treatment of Israeli textbooks. Were it to be more consistent in its approach, it could easily (and, to some extent, unfairly) smear the efforts of Israeli educators. My own son?s experience in a fourth-grade class in Tel Aviv can bear this out. He was given maps that included all the PNA territories in Israel and none that excluded them. (With Israel not having determined its borders or recognized Palestinian sovereignty, this is understandable, but the Center hardly approaches Palestinian textbooks with such sympathetic understanding). A unit on the history of the land included no significant material on the Palestinian population and the only treatment of Muslims (the Ottomans) was negative. A biblical text (Joshua) was presented that defined the borders promised to the Jews ambitiously covering much of Jordan and Syria. While the text itself could not be changed, the edition given to my son included notes designed to ensure the students understood the nature of these borders (the same book was reticent only when dealing with an incident involving a prostitute: the commentary indicated that the word ?prostitute??an unfortunately common playground epithet at my son?s school?really meant ?vegetable seller.? In short, the edition showed embarrassment when the text mentioned sex, but not when it dealt with borders.) Perhaps most shocking, my son was given a song sheet during a unit on the history of the city of Tel Aviv that advocated beating and even the death of Arabs (the song lauded a guard for beating up Arabs and quoted him saying, ?Get out of here, ?Abd Allah, you should die, God willing, but just not in Tel Aviv.?) My point here is not that Israeli textbooks are racist (my vague impression is that the secular educational establishment is to be commended for steadily growing sensitivity over how such matters are to be taught). I only wish to observe that a report using the same selective techniques as the Center could easily portray them extremely negatively. (A completely fair account here should mention that the offensive verse in the song was not taught to the students in my son?s class after my wife and I complained to the teacher, who apologized profusely and expressed extreme embarrassment that she had circulated a song with such words.) A full and fair-minded treatment of Israeli textbooks is forthcoming from Elie Podeh, The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Israeli History Textbooks (Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 2001).

10. Without a hint of irony, Krauthammer simultaneously denounced the Israeli changes, favorably citing a book that covered the issue ?in rather great and shocking details.? See the transcript of remarks delivered at the American Enterprise Institute, ?Is the Israeli/Palestinian Peace Process Dead, and if so, What?s Next,? 6 November 2000, aei.org.

11. Berl Wein, ?Illusions,? Jerusalem Post, 26 October 2000.

12. Christina Lamb, ?Intifada: The Next Generation,? Sunday Telegraph, 15 October 2000, p. 26

13. Commission of the European Communities, ?Statement on behalf of Commissioner Patten on press reports regarding alleged EC funding for text books used by the Palestinian Authority,? press release, 27 April 2001. The statement came after a story in the European Voice on the textbook controversy.

14. ?Hillary Clinton: Link PA Aid to End to Antisemitism,? Jerusalem Post 26 September 2000.

15. The text of the letter can be found at www.senate.gov.

16. Gerald Steinberg criticized European assistance and diplomacy for ineffectiveness in 1999, writing that ?new Palestinian textbooks dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict contain the same myths and hostility.? (See The European Union and the Middle East Peace Process? Gerald M. Steinberg, Jerusalem Letter, No. 418, 15 November 1999. Steinberg?s description of the books published by 1999 is unsupportable even by the tendentious standards of the Center.

17. Steve Israel, letter to The New York Times, 10 June 2001, Section 4, p. 14.

18. Two Palestinians (Khalil Mahshi and Fouad Moughrabi) looked for editions in the libraries in Ramallah and found the editions there?the ones that would have been available to the textbook authors?did not contain the banner. I located an edition published in 1991 that also lacked the banner (Mustafa Murad Dabbagh, Biladuna Filastin, Kafr Qara?: Dar al-Huda, 1991). In short, while it may or may not be true that one edition of the book contained the banner, most editions?including the one authors most probably relied on?do not. And the Center makes other mistakes: it claims the book is dedicated to ?those who are battling for the expulsion of the enemy form our land!? In fact, the dedication is to ?those who strove for maintaining the Arabness of Palestine.?

19. Raphael Israeli, ?Education, Identity, State Building and the Peace Process: Educating Palestinian Children in the Post-Oslo Era,? Terrorism and Political Violence 12 (1, Spring 2000), pp. 79-94.

20. Shlomo Sharan, ?Israel and the Jews in the Schoolbooks of the Palestinian Authority,? in Arieh Stahv, Israel and a Palestinian State: Zero-Sum Game (Shaarei Tikva: Ariel Center for Policy Research, 2001), available at www.acpr.org.il p. 57.





www.minfo.gov.ps
Allegations Unfounded: Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education

There has been a flood of accusations for several years over the content of Palestinian textbooks; that the textbooks incite children to hatred and violence towards Israeli Jews, and fail to promote the values of peace, tolerance and coexistence. This claim has been widely accepted as a fact mostly in the United States and Israeli official circles. Such claims are largely based on reports by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), a Jewish organization with links to extremist and racist Israeli groups that advocate settlement activities in the Palestinian territories, expulsion (transfer) of Palestinians from their homeland, and claims that Palestinians are all "terrorists" that peace with them is not possible.

Israel's supporters now are intensifying their orchestrated crusade against Palestinian education, in preparation for the House International Relations Committee's planned consideration of the Foreign Relations Authorization bill, FY 2006-2007.


The issue of Palestinian incitement "is going to be a very big issue for Congress as we move ahead to the next few years," said Ester Kurz, legislative strategy and policy director of the influential pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), according to Jewish American paper The Forward, 27 May 2005.

Senator Hillary Clinton has continued to criticize Palestinian textbooks since her first Senate campaign. ?All future aid to the Palestinian Authority must be contingent on strict compliance with their obligation to change all the textbooks in all grades?not just two at a time,? she insisted five years ago.

Unfortunately, she fails to realize that leading the campaign against what she calls "new generation of terrorists" is in itself an act of incitement to hate and racism. (?Hillary Clinton: Link PA Aid to End to Antisemitism,? Jerusalem Post 26 September 2000)
A member of the United States Congress wrote to The New York Times: "According to the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, today?s sixth-grade Palestinian students are required to read the textbook 'Our Country Palestine,' which has a banner on the title page of Volume I that reads, 'There is no alternative to destroying Israel.'" (Steve Israel, letter to

The New York Times, 10 June 2001, Section 4, p. 14). Had Congressman Steve Israel checked his sources before making his declaration, he would have found that there is no such banner in the textbook.


However, in their rush to judgment, some American politicians repeated the allegations without bothering to verify such claims. Thus, and consequently, victimizing the Palestinian people and children further. In the words of Alice Rothchild, co-chair of Visions of Peace with Justice, in a speech given at World Fellowship Center August, 2001: "The campaign of the CMIP has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that is devastating to the peace movement." And she asked: "What does this tell us about our own stereotypes, racism, power relationships and knee jerk responses?"


Criticism of Palestinian textbooks has been largely based on claims by Israeli government sources and CMIP, who's work has been criticized as "tendentious and highly misleading" by Nathan Brown, Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has also published his own studies on this subject. According to Prof. Brown, CMIP's "method was to follow harsh criticisms with quotation after quotation purporting to prove a point?In short, the CMIP reports read as if they were written by a ruthless prosecuting attorney anxious for a conviction at any cost? Exaggerated rhetoric, charges of anti-Semitism and racism, and denial of the significance of existing changes in the curriculum will hardly convince anyone further improvements are worth the effort." (Nathan J. Brown, Getting Beyond the Rhetoric about the Palestinian Curriculum, 1 January 2002)


CMIP's claim that the European Union was funding Palestinian textbooks with anti-Semitic content infuriated Chris Patten, on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, and External Relations Commissioner. He declared: ?It is a total fabrication that the European Union has funded textbooks with anti-Semitic arguments within them in Palestinian schools. It is a complete lie.?


The European Union, responding to the false allegations, issued a statement on 15 May 2002 which asserted that: "Quotations attributed by earlier CMIP reports to the Palestinian textbooks are not found in the new Palestinian Authority schoolbooks funded by some EU Member States; some were traced to the old Egyptian and Jordanian text books that they are replacing, some to other books outside the school curriculum, and others not traced at all. While many of the quotations attributed to the new textbooks by the most recent CMIP report of November 2001 could be confirmed, these have been found to be often badly translated or quoted out of context, thus suggesting an anti-Jewish incitement that the books do not contain? Therefore, allegations against the new textbooks funded by EU members have proven unfounded."


In "A Study of the Impact of the Palestinian Curriculum", commissioned by the Belgian Technical Co-operation at the end of 2004, and conducted by education experts, Dr. Roger Avenstrup and Dr Patti Swarts, they found that: "In the light of the debate stirred by accusations of incitement to hatred and other criticisms of the Palestinian textbooks, there is no evidence at all of that happening as a result of the curriculum. What is of great concern to students, teachers and parents alike is that although they wish it, students find it difficult to accept peace and conflict resolution as a solution to the conflict, and teachers find it difficult to teach, while soldiers and settlers are shooting in the streets and in schools and checkpoints have to be braved every day. It would seem that the occupation is the biggest constraint to the realisation of these values in the Palestinian curriculum."


In his evaluation of Palestinian Civic Education, Dr. Wolfram Reiss, University of Rostock, Germany, at the Conference on "Teaching for Tolerance, Respect and Recognition in Relation with Religion or Belief," Oslo, 2-5 September 2004, Wrote: "t must be said first that, in general, the Palestinian textbooks cannot be considered a ?war curriculum?. At least these textbooks of Civics Education convey visions of society, in which tolerance to other religions, human rights, peace, pluralism, democracy and other values are encouraged and fostered much? There is no hatred or incitement against Israel, the Israeli people or Judaism. The textbooks do not contain anti-Semitic language."


Dr. Reiss added that "civics education textbooks do not only avoid hatred and incitement against the West, but foster very much Western values: democracy, human rights, the individual rights, the education for peace and tolerance of all religions, the rights of women and children, the civil society and the protection of nature? From a Western perspective the civics education textbooks therefore have to be highly praised indeed."


Finally, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), in their June 2004 report, "Analysis and Evaluation of the New Palestinian Curriculum" (30 books for Grades 4 and 9), commissioned by the US Congress and submitted to the Public Affairs Office of the US Consulate General in Jerusalem, concluded that: "There is, moreover, no indication of hatred of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition or the values associated with it," and that "the textbooks promote an environment of open-mindedness, rational thinking, modernization, critical reflection and dialogue."


The report also confirmed that the textbooks "promote civil activity, commitment, responsibility, solidarity, respecting others? feelings, respecting and helping people with disabilities, and... reinforce students? understanding of the values of civil society such as respecting human dignity; religious, social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and political pluralism; personal, social and moral responsibility; transparency and accountability."


Palestinians welcome having their own textbooks examined and scrutinized from an academic, not prosecutorial stand point, but it is also fair and legitimate to ask those rushing to prosecute to look at Israeli curricula and compare how each side views the "other". Incidentally, the United States Congress has an ongoing program to fund research on Palestinian school books, but is on record as refusing to pay a dime for research on Israeli school books. Concern about

Palestinian education and curricula, however, can gain credibility if it is not seen as blatantly one-sided and totally political.


Israeli Incitement

Those who are critical of what Palestinian children are learning should try to find out how Israeli children are taught to hate Arabs, and trained to kill them?


Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronot, May 7th 2002, published a letter titled ?Dear Soldiers, Please Kill a Lot of Arabs,? that came from Israeli children who sent such letters to Israeli soldiers serving in the Tulkarm area during the so-called ?Operation Defensive Shield?. The letters sent by Israeli school students encouraged soldiers to disregard rules and regulations and to kill as many Arabs as possible. According to ?Yedioth Ahronoth?, dozens of the letters were sent to soldiers, mostly from children in the 7th through 10th grades, attending religious schools.


Egyptian researcher Safa Abdel-Aal studied the Israeli curriculum and media, and published her findings in a new book entitled Racist Education in the Israeli Curricula in which she found that Israel's educational curricula incite the new generation for war, and racism against the Arabs. Abdel-Aal's book analyses eleven history and five geography books for elementary school from grades three to six.


She thought that these books deliberately paint distorted pictures of the Arabs, giving them such derogatory descriptions as "Arab thieves" or "embezzlers", and saying they are "bastards, thirsty for Jewish blood" or that they are "underdeveloped Bedouins" and "vagrant highway robbers," and "house of Arab reptiles".


Abdel-Aal said that Arabs are maliciously described as murderers and thieves. In one example she quoted the following from one Israeli textbook, "despite a harsh climate and strange environment full of attacks by Arab embezzlers, thieves and terrorists". And in another citation that refers to the city of Tiberias where "a feeling of insecurity and fear of the Arab murderers spread among the residents of the city."


Ruth Firer and Sami Adwan, an Israeli and a Palestinian scholar, who conducted research comparing Palestinian and Israeli textbooks, March 2002, wrote that the Israeli books "strongly emphasizing the collective values connected to the history of the Jewish nation in 'their land' and God's promises to the Jews that give them an absolute right on the land. The land of Eretz Israel described in the books includes the territories of the PNA from 1967."


A study by Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel-Aviv University reviewed 124 Hebrew language books approved for use in 1994 by the Ministry of Education. The study concludes that "the majority of books stereotype Arabs negatively." In one children?s book, Bar-Tal offers this sampling, "We were lonely? pioneers surrounded by a sea of enemies and murderers." In elementary school books, according to Bar-Tal, Arabs are often stereotyped negatively and portrayed as "uneducated people and enemies."


In a report titled "Israeli Textbooks and Children?s Literature Promote Racism and Hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs," journalist Maureen Meehan concluded that "Israeli school textbooks as well as children?s storybooks, portray Palestinians and Arabs as 'murderers,' 'rioters,' 'suspicious', and generally backward and unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule rather than the exception in Israeli schoolbooks." (Washington Report for Middle East Affairs September 1999)


In a study presented at the hearing of the political committee of the European Parliament, 24 October 2003, titled "The attitude towards Palestinians in Israeli textbooks," Dr. Nurit Elhanan, of the Hebrew University, revealed that "the Palestinians are absent from all textbooks, The Occupation is never mentioned, and the area where Palestinians live is presented in the maps either as an empty space referred to as 'an area without data' (Man and Space maps) or it is incorporated into the state of Israel (The Geography of the land of Israel maps). In both cases use of the term 'occupation' is out of the question, since you cannot occupy illegally what is yours anyway and you cannot occupy illegally an empty space."


Dr. Elhanan added: "When reference is made to date in the West Bank it is only to Jewish colonies or to main cities like Nablus, Hebron or Beth Lehem as Israeli tourist sites?In Israel today there is already a second generation of children who don?t know there are occupation, illegal domination and illegal settlements."
A report by an Israeli research institution, The New Profile, entitled Child Recruitment in Israel, 29 July 2004, by: Amir Givol, Neta Rotem, Sergeiy Sandler, reveals the extent of the militarization of the Israeli education system. It states:


"To begin with, militarised education naturally feeds on the militarism prevalent in society at large. In a country where various kinds of weaponry are permanently displayed in public places and the status of the military is used to promote anything from cheese to political candidates, militarised education comes natural. One absorbs militarism at home and on the street. The military is physically present in schools and school activities. Soldiers in uniform are stationed in schools, many of them are actually teaching classes. Other teachers, and especially principals, are recently retired career officers, without proper teacher training. High schools normally have a display on one of the walls in the school building with the names and photographs of ?the fallen? among their graduates. School field trips, at all ages, are often made to military memorials set up on former battlegrounds. "Official curricula and textbooks also reflect the militaristic attitudes inherent in the Israeli educational system, all the way from kindergarten to the last years of high school, where there is a mandatory programme for all Jewish state-run schools called ?preparation for the IDF,? that in most cases includes actual military training. Whole curricular subjects are often described to the pupils, and in official documents, as having the aim of preparing pupils, or some of them, to military service.

Glorifications of the military and military conquest, and negative or skewed representation of Palestinians, are to be found in many Israeli textbooks."


Education Under Occupation
Roger Avenstrup, who is an international education consultant and has worked in various countries in conflict and post-conflict situations, wrote in the International Herald Tribune, December 18, 2004, that the "biggest constraint, in the words of a Palestinian parent, is that Israeli tanks and soldiers are shooting in the streets outside while teachers are trying to promote peace in the classroom."


Since September 2000, according to the Palestinian State Information Service (SIS), Israel has killed over 4,032 Palestinians, including 750 children; and wounded over 45,000 as of April 30, 2005. Denial of access to medical facilities at checkpoints caused the death of 131 civilians. Of a population of 3.5 million, the Israeli occupation still imprisons 8,500 Palestinians, including 350 minors; 69,843 homes were damaged, 7,438 of those were completely destroyed.


Haim Yavin, Israeli Popular TV Anchor since 1968, commenting in the first segment of a five-part documentary he produced, after listening to settlers insisting that God gave them the lands, admitted: "Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people?We simply don't view the Palestinians as human beings." And "At one point, according to AP report "Yavin shifted the camera toward the Israeli soldiers to ask why they weren't letting people through. 'I look for danger in these people and I can't find it,' Yavin said in the film." (Associated Press, May 31, 2005) Fouad Moughrabi, director of the Qattan Center for Educational Research and Development, Ramallah, Palestine, wrote, ?I find no evidence of brain washing or anti-Jewish incitement in the new texts produced by the PA.? He noted that ?Israel?s occupation of Palestinian lands breeds more hatred and mistrust than any schoolbooks can."


The Convention on the Rights of Child of November 1991, Article 2, obliges State Parties to ?respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present Convention to each child within their jurisdiction.? Israel has repeatedly violated these rights and ignored it obligations. In its 20 November 2004 press release, Defense for Children International (DCI), appealed "to the international community and world leaders to abide by their declared commitment to protect the rights of all children, including the children of Palestine. We urge them to bring pressure on the Israeli government, to abide by international law and end the occupation which is incompatible with any declared commitment to promoting and protecting the basic human rights of all."


In the same press release (20 November 2004) DCI reported that: "Since the start of the second Intifada on 29 September 2000, Palestinian children have borne the brunt of the upsurge in Israeli violence. Over the course of the past four years, more than 660 Palestinian children have been killed and almost 9,000 injured ? hundreds of whom have been left with permanent physical disabilities. Many thousands more are suffering psychological trauma from the daily horrors they witness. An estimated 3,000 children have been arrested during this Intifada, while currently there are still 335 children being held in Israeli prisons and detention centers."


Conclusion


The First Palestinian Curriculum Plan of 1998 stated that
the principles of the Palestinian curriculum are that Palestine is a democratic state, ruled by a democratic parliamentary system; Palestine is a peace-loving state, working towards international understanding and cooperation based on equality, liberty, dignity, peace and human rights; Palestinian national and cultural identity must be fostered and developed; social justice, equality and the provision of equal learning opportunities for all Palestinians, to the limits of their individual capacity must be ensured without discrimination on grounds of race, religion, color, or gender; opportunities must be provided to develop all Palestinians intellectually, socially, physically, spiritually and emotionally, to become responsible citizens, able to participate in solving problems of their community, their country and the world.


Palestinian opposition to Israel must be understood in the context of their opposition to Israeli occupation and oppression, their quest for freedom and self-determination, self preservation, and national liberation. Ruth Firer, of the Hebrew University, who carried out research on Palestinian textbooks was quoted in Americans for Peace Now published interview as saying "we were surprised to find how moderate the anger directed toward Israelis in the Palestinian textbooks is, compared to the Palestinian predicament and suffering."


Experience has shown that changes in school textbooks and syllabi are not at all the necessary ingredients for the fulfillment of a meaningful peace agreement between states in conflict, but rather the sincere will and commitment of both parties for achieving such an agreement. For over fifty years Palestinians have tried reconciliation and compromise. They declared a state on 22 percent of their original country for the sake of peace and security, through the Palestine National Council Conference of 1988 in Algiers, and accepted all U.N. resolutions regarding the Palestinian issue.


In 1993 the PLO signed the Oslo Agreement which called for ending the Israeli occupation and implementing the two-state solution. The Israelis responded by expanding settlement activities, in violation of international law and the Oslo Agreements at a frantic rate, with more violence, more land expropriation and house demolitions, incitement, deionization, and eventually the canonization of the Palestinian population in apartheid-like ghettos. More recently, the (apartheid) Wall, which was condemned by the International Court of Justice at The Hague and by the international community, has added to the inciting nature of measure taken by the Israeli government against the Palestinian population under occupation.


As long as Israel continues to look for excuses attacking Palestinian institutions to smoke screen it brutal military occupation, and to deny the Palestinians' self-determination, freedom, and human rights, in violation of international law, and all U.N. resolutions, the conflict will continue. Palestinians need peace more than any other nation on earth, but peace must be based on mutual respect and justice for all.



THE POLITICS OF PALESTINIAN TEXTBOOKS

BY FOUAD MOUGHRABI

The Journal of Palestine Studies, V. 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 5-19.

This article analyzes the attempt by extremist Israeli groups to frame the issue of content in Palestinian textbooks in a manner that is consistent with their overall political agenda of discrediting the Palestinian Authority. It suggests an alternative way of examining the content of these texts on the basis of established professional literature in the field of education. It also explores the Israeli and Palestinian debates about what historical narratives should be included in textbooks and what images of the "Other" these texts need to present.___________________________ _____________


CONTROVERSIES OVER THE FORM and content of school textbooks are not new. Over the years, right-wing groups in the United States have launched numerous campaigns against textbooks deemed ideologically offensive or antipatriotic. In the 1930s, for example, such groups targeted Harold Rugg's Man and

His Changing World on the grounds that the book was anti-American, antibusiness, and socialist. In the mid-1970s, Kanawha County in West Virginia witnessed a heated controversy over schoolbooks led by conservative parents and religious and business leaders that eventually resulted in school boycotts and violence.

More recently, in Japan, government approval of a history textbook casting the Japanese invasion and occupation of China and Korea in a positive light led to anti-Japan protests in countries formerly occupied by Japan and even the recall of the South Korean ambassador from Tokyo. At issue was the fact that the new textbooks, produced by a nationalist Japanese organization, failed to mention a number of contentious issues for the Chinese and Koreans, including that of "comfort women," a euphemism for Asian women forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II.


These examples illustrate important dimensions of the politics of textbooks. In the first instance, controversies within countries such as the United States represent a form of struggle over what constitutes "legitimate knowledge." As Michael Apple has argued, what counts as legitimate knowledge--namely, whose knowledge is most worthy--is often "the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable class, race, gender/sex, and religious groups." In other words, by focusing on what is included and excluded in school textbooks, these controversies serve as proxies for wider questions of power relations in society.


In the second instance, the issue of school textbooks is an aspect of the ideological and political conflicts among states previously at odds over the uses of history. Asian protesters want the Japanese government to make a full disclosure of Japan's war crimes, admit its complicity in them, make appropriate reparations to the victims, and teach the truth in textbooks so the crimes are not repeated. How the past, especially a contested one, is interpreted often makes a statement about the present and the future.


It should come as no surprise, then, that what textbooks Palestinian school children read and what they are taught have emerged as issues in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. One could argue that raising this issue is appropriate if the contending parties are making steps toward peace and reconciliation.

Under such circumstances, it is fair to examine whether the Palestinians are making a serious effort to promote values of peace and coexistence in their new curricula. It is equally valid to examine whether Israeli curricula also are trying to promote these same values. In essence, each party's view of the "Other" goes to the heart of the conflict and heavily influences the modalities of its possible resolution.


THE NEW PALESTINIAN TEXTBOOKS

The Palestinians, who are still not masters of their own destiny, assumed control of their own educational system only in 1994, following the Oslo Accord that gave them limited autonomy. Until then, they had to rely on Jordanian textbooks in the West Bank and on Egyptian texts in the Gaza Strip. These books were severely censored by the Israeli occupation authorities until 1994: The word "Palestine" was removed, maps were deleted, and anything Israeli censors deemed nationalist was excised. Furthermore, the Palestinians inherited from the Israeli authorities a dilapidated educational system badly in need of repair. No investments in educational infrastructure had been made since the beginning of Israeli occupation in 1967, resulting in a significant decline in the quality of education as well as in access to educational resources.


In 1994, the Palestinians established the first curriculum center on the basis of a formal agreement between UNESCO and the newly established Ministry of Education of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The center, directed by the late Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, began its work in October 1995 with a team of researchers analyzing the existing curriculum. They consulted with educators and teachers throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip and produced a blueprint containing the basic principles that should govern a unified Palestinian curriculum.


Birzeit University professor Ali Jarbawi, a member of the team, carried out a comprehensive analysis of history and social science textbooks, conducted workshops with teachers to obtain their assessment of the texts in use, and analyzed questionnaires that had been sent out to a random sample of history and social science teachers. Specifically in terms of writing Palestinian history, Jarbawi was guided by the following questions:


What Palestine do we teach? Is it the historic Palestine with its complete geography, or the Palestine that is likely to emerge on the basis of possible agreements with Israel? How do we view Israel? Is it merely an ordinary neighbor, or is it a state that has arisen on the ruins of most of Palestine? This may well be one of the most difficult questions, but the answer to it need not be the most difficult. The new Palestinian curriculum should be creative, pragmatic, and truthful without having to engage in historical falsifications.


Since that time, new textbooks-language, history, science, civic education, national education, etc.-have been prepared for grades one and six and introduced in September 2000; the PA Ministry of Education's plan is to introduce new textbooks for two more grades every year (grades two and seven in September 2001, grades three and eight in 2002, grades four and nine in 2003, and so on). In preparing the books, the ministry has tried to incorporate five basic principles suggested by Jarbawi. The first of these principles is that the curriculum should be predicated not on giving students facts as if they were eternal truths that must be memorized, but on encouraging them to become critical thinkers. Second, students should be encouraged to make independent judgments and intelligent choices, with careful attention to be paid to individual differences within the classroom. Third, the new curriculum should generate a concept of citizenship that emphasizes individual rights and responsibilities and that establishes a linkage between private interests and the public good so as to encourage responsible and intelligent political participation. Fourth, democratic values such as justice, personal responsibility, tolerance, empathy, pluralism, cooperation, and respect for the opinions of others should be emphasized. Fifth, students should be taught how to read primary texts, to debate, link ideas, read maps, interpret statistics, and use the Internet as well as how to verify facts, sources, and data critically and scientifically.


In the application of these principles, the new textbooks--as can be seen from the two grades that have been issued so far--rely less on facts and more on a student-centered approach. By and large, they avoid dealing with unresolved political issues. They do not provide a map of Israel because the latter has yet to define its borders, and they do not provide a map of Palestine because its borders remain to be negotiated. The texts do, however, reflect the Palestinian narrative, which is basically that of the native in conflict with a settler colonial movement. The narrative presents the establishment of the State of Israel in most of Palestine in 1948 as a disaster (nakba) for the Palestinians, a majority of whom became uprooted and were forcibly expelled from their homes.


The Palestinian narrative, while not contested by objective non-Arab and non-Zionist scholars or even Israeli scholars associated with the "new historians" revisionist interpretations of 1948, is one that mainstream, and especially right-wing, Zionists reject.

It is therefore probably inevitable that the new educational materials used in the schools under the PA would attract the attention of Israeli and pro-Israeli groups that view even benign attempts to depict the Palestinian narrative as evidence of an "anti-Israeli bias." The most prominent of these is a Jewish-

American nongovernmental organization called the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), whose research director, Itamar Marcus, lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.


FRAMING THE ISSUE
On the eve of the al-Aqsa intifada, CMIP issued a report that claims to be an "evaluation" of Palestinian textbooks. Entitled "The New Palestinian Authority School Textbooks," the report states the following principal conclusion:


Ever since the PA became responsible for education in 1994, Palestinian children have been learning from their schoolbooks to identify Israel as the evil colonialist enemy who stole their land. . . . The new PA schoolbooks fail to teach their children to see Israel as a neighbor with whom peaceful relations are expected. They do not teach acceptance of Israel's existence on the national level, nor do they impart tolerance of individual Jews on the personal level.


This message soon took hold in policy circles to the extent that, in the midst of an uprising in which more than 500 Palestinians and a hundred Israelis have been killed, in which the fragile Palestinian economy has been wrecked, and in which an entire population is forced to live under virtual siege conditions, what textbooks Palestinian students read has become a major theme in the debate on how to end the violence. President Bill Clinton drew attention to the issue just before leaving office in remarks at the Israel Policy Forum in New York, when he called on the Palestinians to change the "culture of violence and the culture of incitement that, since Oslo, has gone unchecked." The president went on to say, "Young children still are being educated to believe in confrontation with Israel." Six months later, his wife, by that time Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, held a joint press conference with fellow New York senator Charles Schumer to denounce the "hateful, anti-Israel rhetoric in official Palestinian . . . schoolbooks."

CMIP's report is the result of a joint research project with the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace of the Hebrew University, a partnership that endowed it with a measure of academic respectability. Even before the report was completed in the fall of 2000, CMIP had studied temporary textbooks introduced by the PA on an experimental basis for the 1998-99 academic year and presented its findings to a Washington gathering of members of the U.S. Congress and the Clinton administration in September 1998. To American politicians inclined to be reflexively pro-Israeli, CMIP's summary analysis of the PA curricula struck a chord. Pro-Israeli lawmakers demanded that
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright use her good offices to make sure that UNESCO and the World Bank stop funding the publication of textbooks by the PA. The U.S. Congress also demanded that UNRWA stop using these textbooks in UNRWA-run schools.

In response, UNRWA made clear that its mandate required it to use books approved by the host country, though it can and will produce enrichment materials focusing on human rights, democracy, peace education, and creative conflict resolution that can supplement existing textbooks. It added that it would conduct a comprehensive review of textbooks in