UNRWA Teaches Hate

UNRWA Teaches Hate

By: Dr. Joan Lurie Goldberg

The Israeli government’s decision to ban UNRWA from operating in territory governed by Israel is not simply revenge for UNRWA’s involvement in the massacres of Oct 7 and continuing support for Hamas in the year since.

For 75 years, UNRWA, entrusted to educate all Palestinian refugee children, has sought instead in their schools and summer camps to maintain perpetual conflict and train terrorist soldiers. Many would say that banning UNRWA in Israel is a long overdue response to decades of toxic education in the schools provided for Palestinian children and the military training provided to children in UNRWA summer camps.

Instead, many influential people in the UN, US, UK and elsewhere are claiming that UNRWA is a life-line which is needed to educate and support the Palestinians. This inexplicable tendency to overlook the quality of the education provided by UNRWA is deplorable. Palestinian people are kept in a perpetual state of victimhood and endless hatred of Israel and the Jews. Young Palestinians are not trained for jobs but instead for war and martyrdom.

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon told the UN Security Council on Monday: “The UNRWA workers who were killed last week are Hamas terrorists….UNRWA-Gaza has become nothing more than a cartel, fostering hatred and prolonging misery in Gaza.” After pointing out that Israel has provided more than 100 names of terrorists who were Hamas military operatives employed by UNRWA, Danon added: “Yet some here continue to fund this agency as if it were neutral, as if it were part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

Teaching Children to Hate

The current materials used to educate over half a million Palestinian children are a major obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The latest editions of these books take an even more intractable position. For example, in the older (pre-2017) books Israel was vilified by name. Now, in the new books, there is no mention of the word Israel in text or on maps.

Peace is impossible unless books are changed drastically and the teachers retrained. Why? Because these schools have been inciting three generations of young Palestinians to hate and kill Jews, to revere martyrs and aspire to jihad. Parents of current students have been educated in the same schools, as have many of the 30,000 teachers employed by UNRWA.

The Right of Return

UNRWA educates Palestinian students to seek the Right of Return. This is the political position or principle that Palestinian refugees, both first-generation refugees and their descendants (who UNRWA has designated as refugees), have a right to return to villages they left during the war of independence and later conflict. The PA and UNRWA want to apply the Right of Return to all 5.5 million refugees.

The schools and summer camps teach:

· All can return to their ancestors’ towns and villages.

· This will be achieved by war; Palestinians will conquer all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River in this War of Return and murder the remnants of the Zionist entity

While Palestinian children are taught about the Right of Return, it is unlikely that there will be successful negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. While refugees are kept in perpetual poverty and misery by a UN agency and by the Palestinian Authority, negotiation of any peace deal with Israel will remain impossible.

Palestinian Text Books – UNRWA: Stop Teaching Hate

Israel is an internationally recognized sovereign state, and a full member of the UN. Yet a UN agency teaches children that the only means of conflict resolution is one of violence leading to a war to destroy Israel.

Several years ago, the Caucus of JNGOs at the UN in New York decided to take on the challenge of spreading awareness and knowledge about this education. Our efforts were directed at changing the UNRWA curricula to conform to standards of peace and tolerance required by United Nations principles and documents. It is immoral to use textbooks which teach Palestinian children to hate and kill Jews, to glorify martyrdom, to vilify and deny the existence of Israel and to use maps on which Israel does not appear. The main goals of the “UNRWA: Stop Teaching Hate” campaign were reformed textbooks, teachers committed to tolerance and peace, and spreading information.

As we communicated with other groups working to improve the curriculum, we learned that the UNRWA summer camps were, in some ways worse than the schools. Here child soldiers are being trained; a violation of international law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Hope for the Future

Generations of Palestinian children have been taught about the Right of Return, the glory of martyrdom, and to hate and kill Jews. Much of this is child abuse and should be challenged for that reason alone!

I firmly believe that the path to peace between Israelis and Palestinians begins in the classroom. Until we can change the toxic curriculum of hatred being taught in UNRWA schools, we cannot hope for a generation of Palestinians who are willing to embrace peace. In the immortal words of Whitney Houston: “I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way”!

Dr. Joan Lurie Goldberg has been working with Jewish NGOs and campaigning at the United Nations in New York for the reform of UNRWA for the past 20 years.