Blunders in EU Review of PA Textbooks

The European Union’s long-awaited Interim Report into content of the Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks has been classified despite many requests for it to be made public.

But an extensive presentation about the Interim Report has been given and obtained by IMPACT-se, an Israeli NGO which recently renewed concerns over the content of the PA textbooks. IMPACT-se have now revealed that the Interim Report reviewed the wrong books!

Israeli textbooks used in Arab schools run by the Jerusalem Municipality have been reviewed instead of the ones produced by the PA. Thus the review fails completely to inform European governments about Palestinian education using their own textbooks which indoctrinate hatred and violence.

On seeing the comments by IMPACT-se, Conservative Friends of Israel immediately called on the UK Government to publish the Interim Report. Writing to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, they expressed ‘serious concerns’ that researchers wrongly analysed Israeli Arabic textbooks, categorising them as Palestinian Authority textbooks.

They note that this raises fundamental questions about the whole inquiry which:

 “seems likely to fall far short of the standard the UK Government and Parliament can reasonably have expected.”

What is even more troubling is a revelation by the Times of Israel today. They state that an initial 177-page summary of the Interim Report, which has been removed from the research institute’s website, shows identical research to the first Inception Report and an identical staff team. That team was headed by Aurelia Streit.

It turns out that Aurelia Streit was formerly an intern at the House of Commons working for the Labour MP Afzal Khan, who is a member of Labour Friends of Palestine.

This revelation clearly raises the troubling possibility that what is supposed to be an impartial review of deeply troubling textbooks has been led by someone who may have sympathies with the educational authorities in question.