“There is truly no bottom to the barrel of terrorism”

IN

“Grim Lessons from Phase One of the Israel-Hamas Hostage Deal,” the Hoover Institute’s Peter Berkowitz discusses a new book by Eyal Tsir-Cohen, a former member of Israel’s negotiating team with Hamas: The Untold Story: How We Lost in the Negotiations Despite the Military Victory in Gaza. Among the key mistakes made by Israeli planners, according to Tsir-Cohen, was the assumption that as the fighting intensified, a rift would develop between Hamas and the general Gazan population.

That never happened to any great degree, and for one simple reason: Israeli planners and negotiators failed “to appreciate how thoroughly Hamas jihadi spirit is woven into the fabric of Palestinian society and how tightly bound it is to Gazans’ identity.” Referring to Hamas’s ability to recruit new young Gazans to replace Hamas fighters killed by Israel, Tsir-Cohen concluded, “There is truly no bottom to the barrel of terrorism.”

Frankly, it is a bit surprising that any Israeli would be surprised by the depths of the hatred directed at us. Just read the words (from Palestinian Media Watch) of one of the October 7 terrorists, as he called his parents in an ecstatic, almost drug-induced, state to describe the murder of ten Jews with his own hands:

Terrorist son: Hi, Dad, I’m talking to you from [Kibbutz] Mefalsim, open my WhatsApp and see all the killed people. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!

Father: Allahu Akbar! May Allah protect you.

Terrorist: Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone, I killed her and killed her husband. With my own hands I killed ten!

Father: Allahu Akbar.

Terrorist: Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, Dad … Dad, I’m inside Mefalsim, Dad I killed ten! Ten! Ten with my own hands, Dad! Their blood is on my hands! Honestly, ten with my own hands….

Mother: I wish I was with you.

Terrorist: Mom, your son is a hero. Kill, kill, kill! Kill them! …

Terrorist’s brother: Mahmoud, where are you?

Terrorist: I’m inside Mefalsim. I killed ten, ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone.

Terrorist’s brother, Ala: You killed ten?

Terrorist: Yes, I killed ten, by Allah … I was the first [to get in] by Allah’s grace and help. Lift your head , Dad, lift your head. Inside the [Jewish] town. See on WhatsApp the ones I killed!....

Come back? There’s no coming back! It’s victory or martyrdom. My mother gave birth to me for the sake of the religion….

The vast majority of Israelis have long since given up on the two-state delusion precisely out of recognition that another generation of Palestinian children has been whipped into a frenzy of hatred of Jews and the desire to eradicate them from every inch of Israel. The residents of the communities surrounding Gaza were among the last holdouts. But the nightmare visited upon them has cured them as well.

The hatred is inculcated pervasively — in mosques, in summer camps, at home, and in schools. The Palestinian Authority (PA), for instance, instructed preachers in its mosques, in the weeks just prior to October 7, to stress the duty to kill Jews wherever they are to be found.

DAVID BEDEIN of the Center for Middle East Policy Research has been focused on the Palestinian educational system for decades. Not long after his arrival as a new oleh in Israel in 1970, just three years after the reunification of Jerusalem in the Six Day War, he had an opportunity to meet with Jerusalem’s legendary Mayor Teddy Kollek. He asked Kollek what had been the most traumatizing aspect of the war for him, and the former replied without hesitation that it had been the discovery of Palestinian schoolbooks and how they indoctrinated children for a war to eliminate Israel.

At the outset of the Oslo process in 1993, there was a general expectation in Israel that there would be a dramatic revision of Palestinian textbooks, in light of the “peace process” that had been launched. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres announced that the Palestinian Authority had created a peace curriculum. The Israeli civil administration claimed the same. But in his meetings with Palestinian Authority educational officials, Bedein was repeatedly told no such curriculum had been adopted.

On August 1, 2000, PA education minister Naim Abu Hummus provided Bedein with four sets of the first 14 textbooks produced by the Palestinian Authority. He gave one set to Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio in Jerusalem, and another to Jack Patwa, the international chairman of the Anti-Defamation League. The archbishop, who read Arabic, was shocked to find that the new textbooks were silent with regard to promoting peace. Those textbooks became standard in the PA, Hamas-run schools, and those under the auspices of UNRWA.

As the number of PA-produced textbooks increased, Bedein raised funding in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to translate them into a number of languages, under the direction of Dr. Arnon Groiss, former head of the Israel Broadcast Authority’s Arab language division. To date, all 226 textbooks currently in use in PA, Hamas, and UNRWA schools have been translated, and Dr. Gross and Bedein have given numerous briefings on the content to members of Congress, the German Bundestag, and the British, Canadian, and European parliaments.

It is fair to say that the general parameters of the Palestinian educational materials are now known, due in large part to the work of the Center for Middle East Policy and other groups such as Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI. Among the 26 videos produced by the Center on UNRWA-run schools and summer camps, many could serve as dress rehearsals for the Simchas Torah slaughter.

The Trump administration has once again cut off funding of UNRWA, at least in part because of the continued incitement in the textbooks used in its schools. After a 2017 meeting with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, his staff declared that it was unacceptable that UNRWA schools should use texts glorifying Dalal al-Mughrabi, the leader of the 1978 coastal road massacre in which 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed after the terrorists hijacked and blew up a bus. (Mughrabi herself threw a Jewish child into the flames.) The textbook was removed for a while but later reemerged quietly.

Still, there is a lot more that Bedein would like to see done with his material. The 2024 annual report of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study on International Affairs lists 135 countries that donate to Palestinian education. Not one conditions that aid on a cessation of the promotion of the elimination of Israel.

Bedein is not only critical of foreign governments. After a recent briefing for representatives of the European Parliament just before Pesach, a number of those briefed wondered aloud why the Israeli government never brings up the subject of educational incitement, but rather emphasizes the autonomy of the Palestinian educational system. Finally, Bedein would like to see more Jewish groups make use of his materials in their lobbying of public officials. Only the Simon Wiesenthal Center has done so to date in a consistent fashion.

THOSE MATERIALS are indeed shocking. They not only delegitimize Israel; they remove Israel entirely from their maps and replace it with some fictional entity called the State of Palestine. Any Jewish connection to the land is denied, as is the historicity of Jewish holy sites, such as the Beis Hamikdash or the Kosel. As a teacher’s guide for sixth-grade social studies puts it, “The [occupier] has built for himself an artificial entity that derives its identity from fairy tales, legends, and fantasies, and tried in various ways to create living material evidence for these legends... but in vain.”

There is no suggestion that Jews also have a connection to the land, or even that the land might conceivably be divided one day. On the issue of whether Palestinians could ever accept UN Security Resolution 194, which contemplates the return of some refugees to their former homes, the grade ten teacher’s guide is clear: The teacher should instruct his class, “I do not accept it because it affirms the existence of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.”

Above all, the textbooks emphasize that the goal of Palestinian nationalism is the total elimination of Israel, and that the drive to do so is the product of a religious war between Muslims and Jews. The teacher’s guide to high school geography asserts, “Palestine has been occupied since 1948, not 1967.”

The struggle between Jews and Palestinians is repeatedly described as a religious war. Jihad, defined as G-d’s cause “for the liberation for the homelands from the occupation’s contamination,” is encouraged. “G-d urges the believers to jihad and its financing and warns them against being occupied with worldly life,” urges a ninth-grade Islamic education course. In one poem taught in seventh grade, Jews are portrayed in explicitly satanic terms: “Where are the horsemen [who will ride] to the Al Aqsa Mosque to liberate if from the fist of infidelity, from the Devil’s aides.”

All the world’s communities and races suffer along with the Palestinians from the Zionists and their racial discrimination, “as they claim to be G-d’s chosen people,” says another textbook. The highest grades in a unit on the massacres allegedly perpetrated by the Jews in 1948 are only for those who identify Jewish religious thought as the driving force behind the massacres.

The poems children are taught to sing emphasize the all-or-nothing nature of the war to be fought with the occupier. “To Haifa, to Jaffa, to Al Aqsa, to the Dome of the Rock,” goes one ditty for second-graders. The next year, the schoolchildren are taught to sing: “I swear I shall sacrifice my blood in order to water the land of the noble ones. And remove the usurper from my country and exterminate the defeated remnants of the foreigners.” The Jews must be eliminated in toto.

Terrorism is celebrated as martyrdom. After a four-page unit on the aforementioned Dalal al-Mughrabi, students are required to write a report about her, and the deeds of terror that “have made her memory eternal.” Violent struggle against the oppressor is everywhere celebrated.

A chant for first-graders reads in part: “With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my revenge... /In the wind’s storm and the weapon’s fire.../ Palestine is my revenge and the land of steadfastness.../ By the oath under the flag’s shadow/ By my people’s determination, and by the pain’s fire/ I shall live as a fidai and I shall continue as a fidai/ And I shall die as a fidai until I return.” (A fidai is a self-sacrificing person, and today refers almost exclusively to terrorist members.)

The terror, of course, is fully justified by the perfidy of the Jews, who have based their entity on “terror, extermination, and colonialization.” A ninth-grade social studies curriculum bids the students to compare what the Jews did to Palestinians to what Rome did to Carthage and the Mongol hordes to those they conquered. Among the points of comparison are “the destruction of villages, massacres, causing emigration, and forced plunder.

“A Letter by a Palestinian Girl to the Children of the World” plaintively asks, “Why did they slaughter my childhood in front of me and murder the roses in the fields? Why did they kill the butterflies in our gardens and scare the birds away? Why did they hide the sun, spread darkness and block the roads?”

Even math problems emphasize the depravity of the Jews: “The number of martyrs during the First Intifada was about 1,392. The number of the Al-Aqsa Intifada reached 4,673. What is the total number of martyrs?”

The constant reiteration of these messages in every class from first grade through high school hardly sounds like a “peace curriculum,” nor does it augur well for the prospects of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, in this generation or the coming one. —

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1059. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)