Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that he will be sending a high-level Palestinian delegation to the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to review the Palestinian education curricula.
The aim is to consult with UNESCO to make the Palestinian curriculum in line with the international standards adopted by UNESCO while still “preserving the essence of Palestinian national consciousness.”
The delegation is set to be headed by the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s education and higher education minister.
The announcement followed a phone call between Abbas UNESCO Director General Khaled Al-Anani, who recently assumed the role. Abbas also stated during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this month that the curriculum overhaul would proceed in the next two years.
“We agreed on the importance of reforming school textbooks, which must exclude all hate speech in accordance with UNESCO standards,” Macron announced.
Whether or not the reforms will take place is a different matter entirely.
IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Scheff told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that the PA has made formal commitments or entered into collaborative arrangements to reform its curriculum more than 20 times since 2018.
“We are now in 2025, and as the PA’s approach to UNESCO clearly demonstrates, none of these reforms took place,” he said. “Interestingly, and during the same period, the PA repeatedly and explicitly stated in Arabic, on multiple occasions, that it has no intention of implementing any reforms whatsoever.”
The Israeli government and various NGOs have repeatedly accused the Palestinian educational system of radicalizing pupils and of perpetuating antisemitism.
Most recently, IMPACT-se reviewed the PA’s new curriculum for Gaza in February 2025. It found that despite the PA’s commitments to the European Union (EU) in July 2024 that it would reform its educational content in full adherence to UNESCO’s standards of peace and tolerance, “these newly created materials contain antisemitic content that encourages students to acts of violence, justified on both nationalistic and religious grounds, as has been documented many times in PA textbooks.”
The features of the Palestinian Authority's education fundamentals
Arnon Groiss, Ph.D – director of the Nahum Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research and the author of Genesis of the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA: Road Block to Peace – wrote in 2022 that PA education features three fundamentals:
• delegitimization of Israel’s existence and the Jews’ very presence in the country, which includes denial of their history and the existence of any Jewish holy places there.
• demonization of both Israel and Jews, with implications regarding the Jews’ image in the eyes of children who hail from a traditional society.
• incitement and the absence of a call for peace with Israel.