A few months into the Israel-Hamas War, I met a group of Palestinian school children from the West Bank on a field trip at the Dome of the Rock, a significant Islamic shrine built in the 7th century over the ruins of Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism.
The moment I pulled my camera out, they instinctively made the V sign, universally recognized as a peace symbol. But for Palestinians, it represents resistance, the “right of return” to Israel, and the promise of the destruction of the Jewish state.
Why these children bear such ill will was revealed by listening to what their teacher told them a few minutes later about Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, an event Palestinians call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe.
In Nakba folklore, Jewish militias attacked Palestinian communities, systematically massacring and ethnically cleansing them.
Yet in reality, five Arab nations, along with Palestinian irregular forces, launched a full-scale attack hours after Israel declared independence – and four months after the Arabs and Palestinians had rejected a UN Partition Plan that Israel had accepted.
Push 'every last Jew into the sea'
The main cause of Palestinian dispossession was Arab armies that told people to temporarily evacuate their homes while they finished off Hitler’s job and pushed “every last Jew into the sea.” Yet against all odds, Israel won. And homecomings are generally not offered to vanquished aggressors.
What I saw and heard on that field trip was not an isolated example of historical revisionism, nor the work of a rogue teacher. It is the raison d’être behind the Palestinian national identity, and the core message of the Palestinian school curriculum.
From the moment they can talk, Palestinian children are indoctrinated with propaganda that promotes endless struggle against Israelis, who they are taught are colonialists with no historical connection to the land. Zionism is an injustice, a crime against God, and the only way to address it is via violence and martyrdom. Coexistence and compromise are impermissible, which explains why Palestinians have rejected offers by Israel to share the land at least eight times.
“All Jews are sh**...” “I want to be ‘shaheed’ [martyr] next week,” and “Hitler is the best,” reads an exercise book found by the IDF in Gaza during the war, in addition to Arabic copies of Hitler’s biography Mein Kampf. The IDF found another copy of the book during a raid on the offices of the Islamic Charity Association in the West Bank city of Hebron in October.
In the Pioneers of Tomorrow, a children’s program with a Sesame Street-like format that was broadcast before the war on Al-Aqsa TV, the Hamas-run television channel, a host dressed in a bee suit spoke on the phone with a child, encouraging him, if he sees Jews, to “turn their faces into tomatoes in order to liberate Palestine.”
'I will shoot the Jews'
In another segment, the host, this time a young girl in a hijab, interviews two other children, one of whom says she wants to be a mass murderer when she grows up.
“I will shoot the Jews!” she says.
“All of them?” the host asks.
“Yes.”
“Good,” the host answers.
It is not only Palestinian children who are brainwashed in this way. From Cairo, to Damascus, to the wastelands of Yemen, antisemitic schooling is par for the course in the Middle East.
In Iran, while attending the Al Quds march in the city of Shiraz – an annual government-sponsored event to express solidarity with Palestinians that school children and university students are forced to attend – I saw billboards and posters featuring swastikas and gross antisemitic cartoons of Jews with big noses stirring witches’ pots.
When I asked a group of teenage boys about their beef with Israel, they exhibited astonishment at my ignorance, describing Israel as manifest evil and a black mark on humanity that had to be wiped off the map.
UNRWA Education
Palestinian schools are unique in that most of them are run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an agency funded by liberal democracies in the EU. The US, formerly UNRWA’s biggest donor, cut funding in January 2024 under the Biden administration following allegations by Israel that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the massacre of October 7.
Australia, where I live, which had historically kicked in about 20 million Australian dollars a year to UNRWA, followed suit.
Israeli evidence included video footage of UNRWA staff loading the body of a slain Israeli civilian into a UN vehicle to take it to Gaza to use as a bargaining chip – as well as of a terror tunnel right below UNRWA headquarters in Gaza, where electricity and data cables run underground to power computer servers forming a Hamas intelligence node.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini claimed, “UNRWA did not know what is under its headquarters” and fired a handful of terrorists. Yet, it was not a case of a few bad apples as he suggested.
Most of the 3,000 terrorists who raided Israel on October 7, killing, torturing, hacking off limbs, and raping with abandon, were graduates of UNRWA schools.
One terrorist rang his parents, boasting about how many Jews he’d killed with his bare hands, according to an audio file captured by the IDF. His parents’ pride and joy are palpable in the recording.
The IDF also got its hands on a Telegram channel connecting 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza who praised and celebrated the massacre, and called for more bloodshed. “Let’s execute the first settler near here. Wait, sons of Judaism,” wrote UNRWA teacher Wasim Ula on the channel.
“We make the connection into what they were indoctrinated to believe day after day, and those appalling acts they committed. It is not difficult to make that unfortunate connection,” Marcus Sheff, CEO of the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, told i24NEWS.
As part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 reforms, antisemitic tropes that describe Jews as ‘treacherous’ and the descendants of “monkeys and pigs” were removed from school textbooks in 2024, along with material that incites violence and martyrdom.
Saudi Arabia understands this connection. However, Australia, apparently, does not.
After a two-month hiatus, Canberra reopened the cash spigot for UNRWA and tossed in another A$6 million, saying there was insufficient evidence to back up Israel’s claims. Canada and donors in the EU have also reinstated and bolstered funding.
UNRWA schools are now coming back online in Gaza, breeding new generations of psychopaths. Hamas is not demilitarizing. It is remilitarizing in accordance with the Islamic jurisprudence which accepts deception as a legitimate strategy against infidels. It’s likely only a matter of time until the IDF reacts with another full-scale land invasion, though it doesn’t have to be that way.
“We need to look at the future, and the first thing we need to be absolutely committed to is that these teaching materials can no longer be put in front of young people in Gaza. There needs to be a reformed curriculum in Gaza,” Sheff said.
Regarding “Those who have been through those UNRWA schools,” he said, “I genuinely do not know how that deradicalization works. But we need to start somewhere.”
The writer is an Australian freelance journalist with 25 years experience who has reported from 50 countries, including conflict zones in Israel, Ukraine, Papua New Guinea and East Timor.