Friday, February 20, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Dr. Hasan deserves enormous praise. He went to Gaza on medical missions when most of the world was arguing about the conflict from the comfort of their living rooms. He watched a ten-year-old girl take charge of her younger siblings after their parents were killed. And rather than turn away, he built something. He raised money — largely from Jewish donors — hired teachers over WhatsApp, coordinated with Israeli authorities, and replaced lessons glorifying killers with lessons about tolerance, coexistence, and conflict resolution. A math problem that once compared the number of "martyrs" in the first and second intifadas now asks about soccer match attendance. A reading that praised Dalal Mughrabi — who led the 1978 coastal road massacre that killed 38 Israelis, 13 of them children — has been replaced with a reading about a pioneering Palestinian educator. An Islamic studies lesson about Jews trying to kill the Prophet has been replaced with one about the Prophet's expressions of respect for Jews.
The children love it. "No drones or bombs," one 12-year-old told the Times. "The best thing is sitting at a desk and seeing the teacher and the board, and holding a pencil again."
This raises an obvious question: why is this so rare?
The Palestinian Authority's curriculum — the one taught in both the West Bank and Gaza — has been criticized for decades by Israel, the United States, and the European Union for inculcating hatred and antisemitism. That criticism has been thoroughly documented and is not seriously disputed. Yet in all that time, with billions of dollars in international aid flowing to Palestinian educational institutions, no one — not the PA, not UNRWA, not Qatar, not the EU — has made systematic hate-removal a condition or even a priority. Dr. Hasan, a private individual with no background in humanitarian work, did it anyway, and the PA's education ministry reportedly threatened him for doing so without permission.
Think about that: the official custodians of Palestinian education threatened a man for teaching children not to hate.
Which brings us to the social media reaction. Some Gazans have questioned whether Dr. Hasan is "overly aligned with Israel" — because he works with Israeli donors, coordinates with Israeli authorities, and has stripped anti-Jewish content from the curriculum. Others, described as embittered by Hamas, have pushed back and said teaching tolerance is better than teaching children to sacrifice themselves.
Notice what the objectors are actually objecting to. It isn't the food. It isn't the medical care. It isn't the fact that children are learning to read and write again. The complaint is that Jewish people are funding the schools and that hatred of Jews has been removed from the lessons. In other words: the mere participation of Jews in a humanitarian project is treated as a form of contamination. The removal of antisemitism from a classroom is treated as ideological subversion.
This tells you something important about the cultural environment in which these children are being raised — an environment so saturated with the premise that Jews are the enemy that any Jewish generosity is automatically suspect. It also tells you something about what "peace building" is actually up against. Dr. Hasan isn't just building tent classrooms; he's fighting an entire ecosystem of dehumanization that has been deliberately cultivated and institutionally maintained for decades.
That is precisely why what he is doing matters so much — and why the question of its rarity should be answered honestly. It is rare because powerful institutions — the PA, Hamas, the UN, and their international funders — have not wanted it. The hate in the curriculum was not an accident or an oversight. It was a policy. Dr. Hasan's schools prove that it was never a necessity.
Most of all, this is a damning indictment of UNRWA. A man managed to build a network of schools in months, with thousands of students and vetted teachers, that don't teach hate. UNRWA has spent decades arguing that such a thing is impossible in Gaza and that the lessons of hate they teach - which violate UN standards - are necessary (or they deny it.)
Dr. David Hasan's schools prove that all the excuses that justify antisemitism in Gaza are nonsense.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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