UAE-funded research institute incites against Palestinian school curricula
SANAA, Dec. 04 (YPA) – The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), known for receiving regular funding from the UAE, has criticized Palestinian school curricula, claiming they incite what it calls violence.
In a recent report, the institute stated that Palestinian textbooks for the 2025-2026 academic year “remain replete with content inciting and glorifying violence, despite pledges made by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to the United States, the European Union, and French President Macron to completely remove such content in compliance with international agreements and commitments.”
The institute claimed that its 400-page report, based on an analysis of 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides across all educational levels from first to twelfth grade in the West Bank, Gaza, and occupied Jerusalem, confirms the continuation of hate speech without any real change.
The institute’s report discussed what it described as “the continued presentation of violence, jihad, and death as supreme religious and national values, portraying jihad as an individual ‘duty’ to liberate Palestine, and glorifying martyrdom through religious promises and rewards in paradise.”
The report also addressed the inclusion in Arabic language textbooks of texts glorifying perpetrators of Palestinian resistance attacks and displaying drawings documenting the killing of Israeli soldiers, describing Palestinian national figures like Dalal Mughrabi, presented as heroic role models to fifth-grade students, as “terrorists.”
The report also claimed that science materials are exploited to convey incitement messages, whereas physics lessons are explained through examples of stone-throwing, biology through images of a “martyred Palestinian child,” and chemistry through representations of hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
The report by the UAE-funded institute accused the Palestinian Authority of failing to meet its commitments to the European Union, which announced that Palestinian textbooks would be free of “incitement” by September 2024.
The UAE-funded research institute’s findings align with Israeli incitement against Palestinian school curricula, linking them to what Tel Aviv describes as incitement to violence in the context of resistance operations against the occupation.