The Palestinian Schools That Teach Children Hate and Death
A new report shows exactly what Palestinian children are being taught. The silence from much of the West shows exactly what we’ve chosen to ignore.
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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, who writes about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and Zionism.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Some stories stay with you, some demand to be told, and some matter because of what they mean for the children who will inherit whatever world we leave behind. That, ultimately, is what all of this comes down to.
I want peace — real, lasting peace — for Palestinian children and Israeli children, Muslim and Jewish. Not theoretical peace, not performative peace, not hashtag peace, but an actual peace that sees lives lived free of fear, classrooms without indoctrination, and futures without funerals.
But peace doesn’t come from wishing for it. Peace comes from telling the truth, even when the truth is the very thing nobody wants to confront.
And the truth is this: You cannot build peace while one side is teaching its children to hate, to murder, and to die. A new report shows exactly what Palestinian children are being taught. The silence from much of the West shows exactly what we’ve chosen to ignore.
Recently, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education released a report on the Palestinian Authority’s textbooks. What it exposes isn’t an educational problem; it’s a generational crisis. A curriculum that “systematically violates UNESCO-derived standards.” A curriculum funded by Western nations, including Britain, despite promises and pledges that it would be reformed. A curriculum that teaches antisemitism, glorifies jihad, and prepares children not for life, but for martyrdom.
Marcus Sheff, the Institute’s CEO, described the findings as a “stark and disturbing reality.” He went on to say that, “Virulent antisemitism, the glorification of jihad and incitement to violence remain deeply embedded across all grades … There is no halt in sight.” He’s right, but the details somehow make even that feel like an understatement.
The Palestinian Authority curriculum is taught in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, including in UNRWA-run schools. (UNRWA is the UN agency exclusively for Palestinians.) UNRWA alone provides education to some 545,000 children in its schools. UNRWA’s commissioner general testified before the European Parliament in 2021, acknowledging that antisemitism and glorification of terrorism do indeed exist in Palestinian Authority textbooks.
In July 2024, the Palestinian Authority signed a Letter of Intent with the European Union, committing to curriculum reform and the removal of inciting content to align with UNESCO standards of peace and tolerance. Despite receiving over 380 million euros from the European Union, funding that was intended to be conditional on meaningful reforms, the Palestinian Authority has used this support to sustain and deepen incitement rather than eliminate it.
In Gaza, despite the destruction, suffering, and loss endured by its population since the Hamas-led massacre and kidnappings on October 7, 2023, “the education system remains a tool for cultivating future generations steeped in violence rather than a bridge toward reconciliation. The continued prioritization of incitement over education not only betrays the commitments the Palestinian Authority made to international donors but also ensures that the cycle of conflict will persist, fueled by an education system designed to radicalize rather than educate,” according to the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education’s report.
To grasp the scale of this crisis, you have to follow the curriculum the way a Palestinian child does, from their first attempts at reading to their final year of school. What emerges is not education but a ladder of indoctrination, each year building on the last, each lesson pushing them further from peace and closer to martyrdom as their imagined destiny.
It begins at just 6 or 7 years old, when one of their earliest vocabulary words is šahīd — martyr. Not “apple,” not “friend,” but martyr. Death, introduced before literacy itself.
By age 7 or 8, they are reciting poems urging them to “give [their] lives to the revolution” and “carry its flame” to Haifa, Jaffa, and Al-Aqsa. They are told that they are “lion cubs” destined to fight and die. While children elsewhere learn simple stories, Palestinian pupils learn the jihadist romance of sacrifice.
By 10, they are colouring in a Palestinian flag dripping with blood beside a map that erases Israel. They are told they must “protect Al-Aqsa” and that one day they will raise that bloodied flag over Jerusalem. This is not schooling; it is symbolic militarisation.
A fourth-grade math exercise asks students to calculate the number of martyrs (including those who have led suicide bombings on buses and shopping centers) in Palestinian uprisings accompanied by a photograph of raised coffins at a mass funeral. In grade 6, teachers are instructed to teach students that “The Zionists are the terrorists of the modern age, and they are fated to disappear.” Newton’s Second Law is exemplified by an image of a masked Palestinian boy aiming a slingshot at approaching soldiers, and students are asked, “What are the forces that influence the object after its release from the slingshot and the spring?”
By 12, they are taught to venerate Dalal Al-Mughrabi, who led the massacre of 38 Israelis including 13 children, after Palestinian terrorists hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murdered its occupants in 1978. Al-Mughrabi’s “heroism” is immortalised; a mass murderer becomes a role model. At the same age, Jews are described as “terrorists of the modern age,” an eliminationist worldview presented as fact.
By 13, teachers recount invented atrocities of Israelis “bashing children’s heads” and mutilating women for jewellery, and students are told to draw the scenes. While British pupils sketch fruit bowls, Palestinian pupils sketch fantasies of Jewish barbarism.
By 14, reading comprehension consists of suicide bombers wearing explosive belts, knives slashing Israeli throats, and burned Israeli bodies — material students are told “not to forget.” This is not memory; it is psychological conditioning.
And by 17, the message becomes explicit. Violent jihad is taught as “the highest peak of Islam,” rewarded with paradise. Students are asked when jihad becomes a personal obligation and urged to return to Israeli cities “with a weapon in your hand.” By this age, the path laid out for them since Grade 1 is complete.
And yet, the rot runs deeper:
Antisemitic grading instructions tell teachers to deduct grading points from students who fail to tie the perpetration of Zionist massacres to Jewish religious thought.
Teachers are instructed to ask students, “Why do the Jews perpetrate massacres?”
Students are taught that those who die as martyrs fighting infidels (Christians, Jews, polytheists) will go to paradise where Allah will raise their status.
Jihad “for the liberation of Palestine” is presented as a “private obligation for every Muslim.”
Palestinian girls are encouraged to kill, be killed, and send their children to die, and they are told that the first woman who was martyred in the name of Islam was a woman who stabbed a Jew to death.
What becomes unmistakable, when you look at the curriculum as a whole, is that none of this is accidental. The indoctrination is sequential, it is cumulative, it is intentional.
From the moment they can read, Palestinian children are taught the vocabulary of death. By early primary school, they are introduced to the romance of revolution. By late primary, they are shown blood and maps without Israel. By middle school, they are absorbing graphic fantasies and drawing imagined Jewish barbarity. And by their mid-teens, they are told outright that jihad may be their personal duty, that martyrdom is not only valid but exalted.
By the time they reach early adolescence, many have been guided, step by step, year by year, to believe that their greatest life ambition is to die. This is not a curriculum; it is a conveyor belt, a production line of hate. It is a system designed to ensure that the next generation cannot imagine peace, only sacrifice, violence, and the glorification of their own destruction.
But here’s the real scandal: Where is everyone?
Where are all the self-appointed moral guardians who fill our streets, our screens, and our institutions with their lectures on justice and liberation?
Where is Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, so tireless when it comes to accusing Israel of every crime under the sun, yet suddenly mute when faced with documented child indoctrination? Where is Huda Ammori and Palestine Action, forever eager to vandalise buildings in London but apparently uninterested in confronting the psychological vandalism of Palestinian children?
Where is Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, so quick to moralise, so quick to hashtag, so strangely silent now? Where is Jeremy Corbyn, who had time to run phone banks for a New York candidate celebrated by antisemites, but has no time to condemn a curriculum that teaches children to slit Jewish throats?
Where is Zarah Sultana, whose lapel badge demanding the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state is always perfectly positioned for the cameras, but who cannot muster a single breath to criticise the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for poisoning an entire generation?
Where are the rest of the UK politicians, those who love to posture, to grandstand, to condemn Zionism with operatic fervour, yet fall silent when the story involves Palestinian leaders harming Palestinian children?
And beyond Britain: Where are the tireless performers in Hollywood’s genre of performative morality? Where are all those so quick to sign letters accusing Israel of genocide? Those so eager to boycott Israelis but strangely unwilling to speak out when Palestinian kids are being primed for martyrdom?
Where are all the influencers, actors, journalists, and cos players, who tripped over themselves to denounce Israel, to shame Jews across the industries, to declare their righteous solidarity? Where is that energy now? Where is that courage? Where is that moral clarity?
Or does child indoctrination not generate enough likes on Instagram?
Here’s the real question they cannot escape: Is this treatment of Palestinian children, this abuse, this indoctrination, this theft of their futures, something they would ever accept for their own?
Of course not. They would be rightly outraged, they would be on television within hours, posting on social media, demanding resignations, inquiries, government action. They hold their own children to a standard of safety, dignity, and innocence that they happily deny to Palestinian children. And that double-standard is the most revealing and shameful part of all this.
Because, if you will not fight for Palestinian children to receive the same protection, the same education, the same basic moral decency you expect for your own, then you are not an ally of the Palestinian people. You are an enabler of their suffering.
I opened with children because they are the beginning of this story and the victims of its ending. My children will not inherit my silence and Palestinian children should not inherit their leaders’ hatred.
But when you read what the Palestinian Authority is teaching the next generation, one thing becomes impossible to deny: They hate my children more than they love their own, and much of the West has become their enabler.
The politicians who won’t speak, the activists who won’t look, the celebrities who denounce Israel while ignoring the indoctrination of Palestinian children, they are part of the problem, and there will be no peace until this ends. Peace cannot grow in classrooms where death is taught as destiny.
This is child abuse disguised as education, subsidized by Western guilt and enforced by cowardice. You cannot preach peace while teaching children that martyrdom is destiny and Jews are targets. That isn’t culture—it’s conditioning. The most obscene part isn’t the curriculum; it’s the silence of those who claim to care about Palestinian children yet refuse to confront the machinery poisoning them. You don’t liberate a people by teaching their kids to die. You don’t build a future by erasing life. Any movement that glorifies child sacrifice has forfeited moral standing. And any Western government funding this indoctrination is complicit. Peace dies first in classrooms that teach hate.
The West does not confront the Palestinians’ radicalized education system for the same reason the West pays only lip service to the Palestinians’ “pay for slay” program - to do so will force the West to admit and acknowledge that the Palestinian national movement is one of destruction (of Israel) not construction (of a Palestinian state). The Palestinians have rejected all offers of a two-state solution, because to accept anything less than everything will be an admission that Israel is legitimate, that Israelis are not settler colonialists, that Jews have a right to live in their historical homeland. And, when the Palestinians did have self-rule - in Gaza - they built a terror enclave from which to attack Israel. It should surprise nobody that the sole objective of the education system described in the article is to reinforce the Palestinian narrative that Israel must be destroyed. Unless and until the reality of Palestinian nationalism is accepted and confronted by the West, Palestinians will continue to teach and reward their children to die in their forever war against Israel.