WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 (UPI) -- The conflict between Israel and Palestine made its way to Capitol Hill last Thursday when Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, joined the Palestinian Media Watch to release the group's report on anti-Israel and anti-Western content featured in eight new Palestinian textbooks.
Clinton, a long-time vocal opponent to Palestine's curriculum, says the textbooks are "a clear example of child abuse" that glorifies violence and martyrdom, alleging they are "an incitement of hate and violence" that will only further agitate the tension in the Middle East.
PMW's report, entitled "From Nationalist Battle to Religious Conflict: New 12th Grade Palestinian Textbooks Present a World Without Israel," asserts that Palestinian textbooks released at the end of 2006 make a religious war out of the conflict between Palestine and Israel, referred to as "Zionist gangs."
"Teaching Palestinian children that the conflict is religious and not territorial will leave no possibility for compromise and could guarantee another generation of conflict," said PMW director Itamar Marcus, who co-authored the report with associate director Barbara Cook.
"Education is one of the keys to lasting peace in the Middle East," said Sen. Clinton. "These textbooks don't give Palestinian children an education, they give them an indoctrination."
Her concerns stem from stories of Palestinian child "martyrs" who carried out suicide attacks against Israeli targets. According to CNN, there have been at least 10 such incidences since 2000. In 2004, one 16-year-old boy narrowly escaped blowing himself up after Israeli forces found he had strapped explosives to himself near a West Bank checkpoint, according to MSNBC.
However, Clinton's accusations against Palestinian textbooks are rather dubious in light of past studies that indicate that Palestine's current curriculum is problem-free.
According to Afif Safieh, representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Mission to the United States, the European Union performed a thorough investigation of the Palestinian curriculum several years ago and found no problems.
"The allegation is totally untrue," said Safieh, who was also quick to cite prominent Israeli journalists, including Akiva Eldar, have reported that current Palestinian curriculum favorably to Israeli textbooks.
"Based on the principle of reciprocity, we should also see what's happening on the Israeli side," Eldar wrote in his Haaretz column in 2004. He found myriad examples of parallel discrepancies between Israeli and Palestinian textbooks.
"What the Israeli books call 'events,' the Palestinian ones call 'uprising;' the 1948 war in the Israeli textbooks is the 'War of Independence,' and in the Palestinian books, al-Nakba (The Catastrophe). Israeli textbooks regard Palestinian nationalism as a political reaction to Zionist and British policy, whereas textbooks in the territories see Palestine as a nation existing of its own accord that is at the same time part of the Arab and Islamic world," Eldar said.
Additionally, the PMW report stated Palestine's latest textbooks deny the existence of Israel entirely, describing Palestine as a state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Red Seas. Years earlier, Eldar found maps in an Israeli textbook "without a trace" of territories under the Palestinian Authority's control.
Safieh responded to Clinton's opposition to Palestine's curriculum with hopes that "there won't be such exploitation of certain issues in the American domestic presidential campaign."
Clinton did state at the report's release she would continue to fully back Israel, as she has for the past several years, and hopes to do so from the White House in 2009.
"American politicians would be well advised not to drag certain issues that were resolved by neutral fact finding organizations," said Safieh. "It's not electorally rewarding to be seen in a position of verbal belligerence to the Palestinian people."
