Palestinian textbooks are promoting antisemitism and glorification of terror, violating an agreement with the European Union to uphold UNESCO’s standards of peace and tolerance.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education analyzed 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides from the Palestinian Authority’s current national school curriculum. 

The report discloses that antisemitism remains a “central feature of the curriculum” and violence and terrorism are “openly glorified, with terrorists who killed Israeli civilians lauded as martyrs and role models for youth.”

The curriculum, which the report states is virtually unchanged despite pledges to America and the European Union, features repeated instances of hate speech and collective accusations aimed at Jewish people, appearing across multiple grades and subjects. 

Jews are portrayed as deceitful, manipulative, or inherently corrupt enemies of Islam, linking Jews and Zionists to greed, global conspiracies, and control of financial and media institutions. 

Palestinian terrorists, who attacked civilian Israelis, are glorified as national heroes and role models for the students, while poems and grammar exercises use “violent and graphic depictions of death, including scenes of dismembered bodies to accompany texts.”

The report highlights numerous examples, such as a fourth-grade math textbook, where counting the number of “martyrs” in the two Palestinian Intifadads (between 1987 and 1993 and between 2000 and 2005) is an exercise in calculus. The figures of killed Palestinians include terrorists, and more than 150 suicide bombers, the report found. 

Fifth graders are taught that Palestinian terrorist Dalal al-Mughrabi, who carried out the  1978 massacre against a bus, which left 38 Israelis, including

thirteen children killed, “drew a portrait of defiance and heroism with her struggle, making her memory immortal in our hearts and minds.” 

“The text in our hands speaks about one part of the journey of her struggle,” the text states accompanied by a picture of her. 

An eleventh-grade history textbook teaches students that the 1972 Munich massacre, where Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli Olympic team members, is an example of “Palestinian resistance.

Palestinian teachers are instructed to teach sixth grade students that “the Zionists are the terrorists of the modern age and that they are fated to disappear” while 10th grade students should be asked “Why do the Jews perpetrate massacres?” 

A 12th grade Islamic Education textbook teaches students that “God Almighty tells His Prophet that by turning their backs on accepting His judgment, the Jews are deprived of guidance because of their sins and transgressions. God then alleviates whatever pain His Prophet may have, because of the Jews’ and the Hypocrites’ disobedience and aversion to the Truth….”

Israel is also erased from maps in textbooks, instead depicting Palestine from the river to the sea, while cities within Israel proper, like Tel Aviv and Haifa, disappear. The Western Wall is described not as Judaism’s holiest site, but as an “Islamic” location falsely claimed by Jews, and Jewish ties to Jerusalem are dismissed as “pretenses used by invaders,” the report states. 

IMPACT-SE chief executive, Marcus Sheff, said that the Palestinian Authority signed a “formal agreement with the European Union — its largest funder — to remove this hate-filled content, a demand also made by the United States, which has consequently sanctioned PA officials.”

“The obvious conclusion of this report is that barring long-overdue, deep and sustained intervention by the international community, the systematic indoctrination of Palestinians via extremist education is here to stay. There is no halt in sight to what is clearly a strategy of indoctrination through extremist education. The curriculum being taught today is a blueprint for future violence and terror,” he added.