Members of French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party have tabled a motion calling for education aid to Palestine to be made conditional on the removal of alleged references to violence, incitement to hatred, anti-Semitism and the cult of martyrdom from Palestinian school textbooks – something EU lawmakers in the European Parliament have called for several times but to no avail.
“Palestinian children, like all children in the world, have the right to regard life as precious and peaceful relations with all peoples as essential values”, says the motion for a resolution, seen by Euractiv France.
Signed by around 50 MPs from Macron’s majority group in parliament, the motion was tabled by Paris MP Caroline Yadan, who will present the text on Thursday evening. It will be published on the National Assembly website in the coming days.
“Indoctrination”
“Many Palestinian school textbooks contain messages of hatred and anti-Semitism, which run counter to UNESCO standards”, adds the text. Some twenty extracts from these textbooks, “just a few examples among hundreds of others”, are listed.
The signatories deplore the fact that “many Palestinian children are indoctrinated into hatred and violence, in particular by glorifying the status of ‘martyr’ and calling for the assassination of Jews in the name of the Prophet”.
“This is a form of mistreatment and an abuse of children’s rights,” they argue.
Several supranational bodies have already criticised the content of these textbooks, including the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) and the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination (CERD). The latter “reports anti-Semitic material, hate speech and incitement to violence in Palestinian Authority textbooks taught and used by UNRWA,” which is the UN agency that assists Palestinian refugees, the motion’s authors added.
A problem already raised by the EU Parliament
In May, the European Parliament also recommended that the EU ensure that the Palestinian Authority “rapidly” reform its school curricula and freeze funding for education until anti-Semitic references and incitement to hatred had been removed.
“The Union’s financial support to the Palestinian Authority in the field of education must be provided on condition that the content of school textbooks is brought into line with UNESCO standards”, the MEPs said at the time.
The European Parliament had already expressed concern about the same problem “on several occasions [in] the resolutions accompanying the decisions giving discharge in respect of the implementation of the general budget of the European Union for the financial years 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020”.
The French MPs who signed the resolution added that the UK, Norway and Belgium have already suspended their education funding to the Palestinian Authority.
As funds from EU countries are used to finance the Palestinian education system, the French MPs are calling for a freeze on “all aid or funding to the Palestinian Authority in the field of education”.
They call on the French government to “make the resumption of this funding conditional on effectively removing all references to violence, incitement to hatred, anti-Semitism and the cult of martyrdom”.
(Davide Basso | Euractiv.fr)
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