Why Are PA Textbooks Still Teaching Antisemitism Despite Reform Agreements?
- Ofek Kehila
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
A recent review of the Palestinian Authority’s national school curriculum for 2025-2026 found incitement of antisemitism and violence, promotion of jihad, glorification of terrorism, and rejection of peace. What are the contents of Palestinian textbooks? How has the PA weaponized education against Jews and Israel? And why is the PA still teaching antisemitism despite reform agreements? Let’s delve into what might be the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: education.
Disturbing contents of PA textbooks
IMPACT-se, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, is an international research and policy organization that monitors and analyzes education.
Recently, the organization released a comprehensive review of the Palestinian Authority’s national school curriculum for 2025-2026. This review sheds light on significant violations of UNESCO principles and educational standards in Palestinian textbooks, including incitement of antisemitism and violence, promotion of jihad, glorification of terrorism, and rejection of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Antisemitism is a central feature of the PA curriculum, as hate and collective accusations toward Jewish people appear across grades and subjects. Palestinian textbooks depict Jews and Israelis as deceitful, manipulative, greedy, and corrupt. In a nutshell, PA’s pedagogy endows Palestinian children with prejudice and hatred against Jews in the classroom, turning antisemitic stereotypes, imagery, and terminology into the centerpiece of its curriculum.
For example, an 11th-grade history lesson on colonialism includes a cartoon that heavily draws on antisemitic imagery of Jews controlling the world. Another history book teaches Palestinian tenth-graders that Jews control money, the media, and politics, harnessing global power for their own benefit. Finally, a guide for Arabic language teachers instructs educators to explain to sixth-grade students that “The Zionists are the terrorists of the modern age and they are fated to disappear” (Arabic Language Teacher Guide, Grade 6, 2018-2025, p. 207).
Palestinian textbooks are not only filled with antisemitic content but they also echo disturbing libels and conspiracies: students are taught to dehumanize and demonize Israel and the IDF (Social Studies, Grade 9), that antisemitism is a fabrication invented to generate sympathy toward Israel (History Studies, Grade 11), and that Zionists have no regard for human values (Arabic Language, Grade 10).
The PA curriculum actively glorifies violence and encourages martyrdom and jihad. Textbooks exalt terrorist attacks as “heroism,” dehumanize Israeli soldiers, and involve violent storytelling and graphic depictions of killing. See, for instance, the following illustration of Israeli soldiers shot dead by a Palestinian gunman, included in an eighth-grade Arabic language textbook (p. 40):
In summary, PA textbooks include the politicization of science and math, justification and glorification of violence, active encouragement of violent jihad, antisemitism and libels, hate and dehumanization of Jews and Israelis, and non-recognition of the state of Israel.
Weaponizing education against Jews and Israel
The PA’s national curriculum is used in schools in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, including UNRWA schools. This gives the curriculum a leading role in forming and influencing the education, opinions, and beliefs of the entire Palestinian youth throughout many generations.
Mainstream Palestinian textbooks contain an overwhelming amount of antisemitism, violence, dehumanization, and hate, suggesting that the PA has weaponized its school system against Jews and Israel. Rather than a tool for peace and tolerance, education has been transformed into a weapon in the service of escalating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In words of IMPACT-se’s report: “Rather than a mere aspect of the conflict, the PA curriculum has arguably become one of the major obstacles to peace in the region. Palestinian students, from the moment they enter primary school until they graduate Grade 12, are denied the means by which they may resolve the disputes of their predecessors. Instead, they are taught to escalate the conflict and prolong it indefinitely, through the indoctrination of hate, glorification of violence and death, distortion of reality and historical facts, and dehumanization of those different from them.”
Thus, child education stands out as one of the core components of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As long as the PA curriculum continues to teach Palestinian children to hate Jews and glorify violence, any solution to the conflict will be beyond reach.
Read more: Is Anti-zionism antisemitism?
Why is the PA still teaching antisemitism?
Following the release of the PA school curriculum review, IMPACT-se CEO, Marcus Sheff, said to Mideast Journal: “This comprehensive report exposes a stark and disturbing reality: virulent antisemitism, the glorification of jihad, and incitement to violence remain deeply embedded across all grades of Palestinian Authority textbooks.”
Time and time again over the recent years and decades, the PA was urged by Israel, the US, the EU, and others to carry out extensive reforms in its school curriculum.
However, despite reform agreements, PA textbooks are still preaching violence, hate, and antisemitism. Sheff stressed: “To be clear: 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.”
Sheff links the way PA has weaponized education against Jews and Israelis with the October Hamas-led massacre: “Palestinian Authority textbooks conditioned the thousands of Hamas-led Gazans who carried out the vile massacres of October 7.”
It is unclear why the PA is still teaching antisemitism across Palestinian schools. Does it lack the will or even the ability to change? Be the reasons what they may, the fact remains that PA’s actions help perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “The obvious conclusion of this report is that barring long-overdue, deep and sustained intervention by the international community, then 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,” Sheff concludes.
Wrap up
Unfortunately, the PA is not the only one that has weaponized child education against Israelis and Jews. IMPACT-se points to similar and sometimes even worse cases of antisemitism and anti-Israeli propaganda in Iraqi, Jordanian, and Egyptian textbooks. Insofar as indoctrination of Palestinians and others via extremist education is here to stay, a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, and the Arab-Israeli conflict in general, appears to be more unattainable than ever.
Ofek Kehila (Israel, 1987) is a scholar of Spanish Golden Age literature and Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. His research bridges the gap between those traditions, highlighting their aesthetic, cultural, and historical dialogue. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2022) and was a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2023-2025).