Thursday, May 23, 2013
Elder of Ziyon
Schoolchildren in UNRWA schools follow the host authorities’ curricula and textbooks. UNRWA supplements these with its own materials on human rights.
The Hamas ministry of education just announced that they will create a new curriculum in the coming school year. Junior high school students will be taught about the "legitimacy of resistance," which is the Hamas word for terrorism.
Since Hamas is the effective host authority in Gaza, this means that UNRWA will be teaching support for terrorism in their schools, even as they add their own modules on human rights.
UNRWA is not likely to censor the official Hamas textbooks.
It will be interesting to see if UNRWA pushes back or if it will embrace the new curriculum.
Keep in mind that UNRWA schools in Gaza have been teaching the virtues of jihad, martyrdom and Jew-hatred based on an examination of their school websites I did in 2010. Since then, those websites have been removed, probably out of embarrassment, but there is no indication that anything has changed in the schools themselves.
Even so, having a school website contain essays on jihad is one thing - but officially teaching the legitimacy of terror attacks as an official part of the curriculum is far worse.
