British Aid Used to Promote Terrorism

The European Union finally released its delayed report on Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks on Thursday 17th June, confirming that those textbooks contain anti-Semitism and incitement to violence.

It was released only after the German newspaper BILD published findings from the report early in June, and a group of nearly two dozen European lawmakers wrote to Ursula von der Leyen demanding EU aid be withheld until the incitement and anti-Semitism are removed.

This has now prompted similar appeals for the UK Government to stop funding the PA education programme. One such appeal was made in a letter from Conservative Friends of Israel to the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab. They wrote:

“We seek assurances from the Government that British taxpayers’ money will no longer be used to facilitate this curriculum of hate being produced and taught.”

Now a Parliamentary debate on the EU Review into Palestinian school textbooks has been scheduled for Wednesday 30th June, from 9:25 to 10:55am, in Westminster Hall. It will be opened by Caroline Ansell, a Conservative MP who was formerly a teacher.

It is an appalling blot on the record of the UK Government that the PA education curriculum still contains incitement to violence when the problem was first raised in Parliament 20 years ago.

One example of the misuse of aid money was a recent exhibition in the Elementary School for Girls in Hawara, which was built with donations from the European Commission. The exhibition featured three elements of the PA’s indoctrination:

• Glorifying violence through the inclusion of a model rocket.
• Erasing Israel’s existence on a map.
• Promoting the ‘Right of Return’ for so-called Palestinian refugees to communities they occupied before the 1948 War of Independence.

In a related development, the European Parliament passed a resolution on Wednesday 28th April 2021, demanding that hateful material be ‘removed immediately’ from schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and insisting that EU funding ‘must be made conditional’ on the educational content complying with UNESCO standards of peace, tolerance, coexistence and non-violence.