The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has urged the European Parliament to cease aid to Mahmoud Abbas’ anti-Jewish hatred-inciting Palestinian Authority (PA), a measure which is currently under consideration. The EU is the largest financial donor of the PA.

The European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee is due to vote in late October on an amendment to its draft budget which, if approved, would freeze more than 15 million euros (US $17 million) in aid to the PA unless it removes incitement to hatred and murder against Jews and Israel in its school textbooks.

The Committee’s resolution states correctly that “The textbooks published by the PA in 2017, which are financed by the EU … contain, across all subjects, numerous examples of violent depictions, hate speech – in particular against Israel – and glorifications of jihad and martyrdom.”

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT-se, which has analyzed the new PA textbooks, presented a report to the European Parliament which says that they “encourage Palestinian children to sacrifice their lives in the name of religion” and “glorified martyrdom and violent resistance,” a fact which has led IMPACT-se’s CEO, Marcus Sheff to state that PA textbooks present “only a vision of one [Arab-dominated] state from the river to the sea, which is not EU policy.”

Radicalization of the Palestinian school curriculum since the PA took over control of education in the territories it controls since the 1990s has already led to an international review of PA textbooks by donor countries. Last month Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo stated that “as long Palestinian schools are named to glorify terrorism, Belgium can no longer cooperate with the Palestinian Education Ministry and will not contribute to budgets for the construction of schools” (Yossi Lempkowicz ‘European Parliament to vote on freezing aid to Palestinian Authority over textbook incitement,’ JewishWebSight.com, October 2, 2018).

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “We welcome the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee’s review of the immoral and disastrous policy of funding Mahmoud Abbas’ PA and its school curricula materials. 

“The generous international funding of the PA has enabled the Abbas regime to poison the minds of Palestinian Arab youth through the promotion of hate, Muslim supremacism, jihad and nationalist extremism.

“This poisoning of the minds of the rising generation of Palestinian Arabs is perhaps the most baleful, tragic outcome of the Palestinian Arab society coming under the control of the PA under the Oslo Accords. PA rule has resulted in the radicalization of Palestinian Arab society and particularly of Palestinian Arab youth, making the prospect of peace even more remote than it was in 1993 when Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords.

“While we are aware that the European Parliament will hold election in eight months, and that the effects of this particular budget will not extend far into the next five-year electoral cycle period, it would set the correct and long-overdue precedent of penalizing the PA by refusing to fund its anti-Semitic hatred and anti-peace education.

“The European External Action Service (EEAS), which is the European Parliament’s body responsible for the distribution and oversight of funds to the PA, has shamefully argued in the past that that the glorification of violence and martyrdom in Palestinian school textbooks and payments to convicted terrorists do not amount to institutionalized incitement or radicalization.

“It is high time for the EEAS to be reformed and the flow of European funds to the PA to cease. We commend the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee resolution to cease funding the PA and strongly urge it to pass it.”