Israeli Town and School for Ukranian Refugees

Video Of The Week -Ukrainian Orphans Rescued, Evacuated to Israel - https://tinyurl.com/2732u37b

For the Full Article by By Cnaan Liphshiz/Jta go to: https://tinyurl.com/4mcjcnwz

More than 600 Ukrainians have come to Nof Hagalil since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, setting off a massive migration of Ukrainians to whatever country can give them safety. About 4,000 Jewish refugees have already arrived in Israel, with potentially tens of thousands more expected.

The Ukrainian children who have landed in Nof Hagalil and at Shuvu Renanim were living safe, stable lives just over a month ago. Now they have wound up in a foreign land, usually without their fathers because of Ukraine’s ban on letting men younger than 60 leave the country, and often after experiencing trauma during the war’s early days and their flights from Ukraine.

“It’s horrifying to see a student shuddering in fear whenever a door is slammed too hard or an ambulance wails by,” said Sara Neder, who has been Shuvu Renanim’s principal for 12 years.

Tetiana Denysenko, 36, stayed in Kyiv for as long as possible together with her 10-year-old son, Sasha, and his father in Kyiv.

 “But it became impossible. The constant thud of bombs gave Sasha a trauma, and we saw our happy boy changing before our eyes, one sleepless night at a time,” she said. So they left without Sasha’s father, who expects to be conscripted into the military shortly.

Now she and Sasha are staying in Nof Hagalil’s posh Plaza Hotel, where the city is temporarily housing new immigrants for up to a month as they look for apartments to rent. Buses bring Sasha and other children back to the hotel from the Shuvu school each day, part of a sweeping effort to make the city welcoming for the new arrivals.

At school, the staff talk and devote extra attention to the new arrivals to “try to make them feel as welcome and safe as possible,” said Neder. The school has not offered dedicated trauma counseling, but the newcomers are “doing better than when they first arrived,” she added.

That’s in part because of Shuvu’s experience educating children who have immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The school is part of a network of 75 schools serving 6,000 students in more than a dozen Israeli cities that was established in the early 1990s specifically with the aim of inculcating Jewish values in children from the former Soviet Union.

Shuvu’s founder was Avraham Yaakov Pam, a Litvak rabbi from Brooklyn who was born in the former Soviet Union and who had lobbied for providing religious education to as many Jewish children as possible from the wave of mass immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Having been raised under communism, those children — and their parents — had not had access to Jewish education.

In recent years, as immigration from Russian-speaking countries waned, the schools had shifted to enrolling children from other countries as well as the children of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Now, the war in Ukraine is renewing the network’s original mission.

Shuvu schools are able to choose whom they admit and what they teach, because the schools occupy a category designed for haredi Orthodox schools that allows such institutions to receive state funding while departing from the standard Israeli curriculum.

Formally, Shuvu schools are classified as haredi by the Israeli education ministry, and they have some things in common with yeshivas attended by Orthodox Jews. Female staff members, if married, wear wigs, as is the convention in haredi Jewish communities. Among the students, the girls wear long skirts, and all the boys are supposed to cover their heads with kippahs. The network also accepts only children whose mothers were Jewish, in keeping with Orthodox Jewish law.

But the schools are different from traditional yeshivas in significant ways. “They are not haredi schools because there are boys and girls in the same classrooms and we have students here whose parents don’t keep Shabbat,” Buterman said.

“Look, we don’t force anything on anyone here,” Neder said. “There’s a dress code, sure, there are extra lessons on Judaism, but at the end of the day we accept and love all our students the way they are.”

Some of the parents of the children attending Shuvu attended synagogues — mainly affiliated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement — prior to their immigration to Israel. Others, however, send their children to Shuvu for reasons unrelated to the school’s focus on Orthodox Judaism.

For a tuition of about $62 a month, parents at Shuvu get a school day two hours longer than state schools’ in classes 30% smaller than at public schools, as well as a warm meal and busing from their homes.

Many secular parents are convinced to send their kids to Shuvu because of these benefits, coupled with how hospitable the schools are to Russian speakers.

“Frankly we don’t care too much about all the religious stuff, we don’t keep Shabbat, my husband doesn’t wear a kippah,” said one mother, a woman who immigrated to Israel from Ukraine in 2010 and asked to be quoted anonymously because of her children’s preferences. “But this school is just excellent, nothing comes close.”

Shuvu Renanim does have some serious credentials in the scholastic excellence department.

Last week the Nof Hagalil school won a national math and computers contest for the fourth straight year — a record that Neder, who does not speak Russian, attributes to “the work and study ethics of the homes of most of our students,” she said. Another Shuvu school from Petah Tikva also made it to the top 10 list.

The Nof Hagalil school’s 16 refugees watched with interest as the other students celebrated this feat at a school event featuring balloons, loud music and medals presented to the winning team by a beaming Neder, who came to the school on her day off for the party.

The Shuvu school is only part of the attraction of Nof Hagalil for Ukrainian refugees.

The Plaza hotel and city center offer a stunning view of Nazareth, the predominantly Arab neighbor city, and the lush forests of the Galilee, which have been shrouded in mist from unseasonably late rains this month. (Ira Kapustenyenko, a 9-year-old from Kyiv, said the view is “the best thing that’s happened” to her since leaving Ukraine, where her twin sister Katja said about the early days of the war, “We were so afraid we thought we’d die from fear.”)

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How UK gives support for hate-filled PA education

Video Of The Week - Norway to Cut Palestinian Authority Funding Over Textbook Incitement https://tinyurl.com/3326sm2d

For the full article go to - https://tinyurl.com/ytjkkk37

British taxpayers are continuing to pay for a Palestinian education system in which school pupils are routinely taught incitement, hatred of Israel and glorification of terrorism. Many of the textbooks are written by vetted officials, whose salaries are paid by the UK.

Despite numerous assurances from the Palestinian education minister, detailed reports from the Israel-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) show that as recently as September last year, Palestinian school students were still learning maths by adding up the number of ‘martyrs’, including those who have led suicide bombings on buses and shopping centres. The curriculum is taught in Palestinian Authority and UNRWA schools in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.

Not only does Britain continue to pay – in the past five years it has spent an estimated £105 million on Palestinian education professionals, including on the salaries of teachers who write the textbooks – but it appears to have a blind spot when it comes to challenging the Palestinians on the content of those

The UK and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have a Memorandum of Understanding, or MoU, which supposedly commits the Palestinians not only to “uphold the principle of non-violence”, but to take action against “incitement to violence, including addressing allegations of incitement in the educational curriculum”.

Money paid by Britain to the Palestinian partner is supposedly contingent on the PA’s performance on “curriculum reform”.

However, the UK’s criteria for judging the PA’s performance appear narrow. It deemed an internal government target in the 2017-18 MoU for the PA to carry out “curriculum reform” was met, but then admitted it did not include the actual contents of the curriculum. 

In a letter written shortly before his resignation in March 2019, Alistair Burt, then Middle East Minister, said: “DfiD [Department for International Development] assessed that the PA did meet this KPI [key performance indicator] as the Grades 5-10 pilot textbooks were rolled out by the agreed deadline.” 

But he added: “The content of the textbooks was not covered by a KPI, and DfID was not involved in the selection of material.” 

Ministers have refused requests to publish the government’s annual internal reviews of the PA’s compliance with the MoU. However, they have repeatedly stated that, as Middle East Minister James Cleverly told Labour Friends of Israel chair Steve McCabe last November: “We continue to judge that the PA is demonstrating a credible commitment to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s partnership principles.” 

It is not the first time Cleverly or his predecessor, Burt, has responded in this way. LFI MPs Ian Austin and Joan Ryan, both of whom have now left Parliament, asked on four occasions what Britain was doing. Each time, the government said it judged the PA to be in compliance.  Britain insists that “UK aid does not pay for textbooks in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, a line critics call “civil service speak”.

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UK Taxpayers Fund Inciteful PA Text Books

Video Of The Week - EU Checking Incitement In Palestinian Text Books -https://tinyurl.com/u7jxhot

 For the fulll Article go to -https://tinyurl.com/tpjhql5 

By TOM KELLY INVESTIGATIONS EDITOR FOR THE DAILY MAIL

UK foreign aid is helping fund schools in Gaza and the West Bank that use textbooks on martyrdom in lessons.

Jihadi textbooks in schools funded by £100 million of OUR, British, cash as foreign aid goes on science material that teaches physics in Palestine by showing a slingshot being fired at 'Zionists'

·        1. Foreign aid cash is funding schools where textbooks on radical Islamism used

·        2. Money goes via United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees

·        3. Agency's work includes healthcare, but 58 per cent of funding is for education

·        4. Books include reading exercise for six-year-olds with words 'martyr' and 'attack'

·        5. Nine-year-olds learn maths by adding number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings

Ministers pledged urgent action last night after it emerged that British foreign aid cash is funding schools where textbooks on martyrdom and radical Islamism are used.

The Daily Mail has discovered that tens of millions of pounds of UK foreign aid is helping fund schools in Gaza and the West Bank that use such material in lessons.

The money goes via a UN agency that some other nations have chosen to stop financing because of concerns.

The textbooks include a reading exercise for six-year-olds with the words 'martyr' and 'attack', plus poems for eight-year-olds which include phrases such as 'sacrifice my blood' to 'eliminate the usurper from my country' and 'annihilate the remnants of the foreigners'.

UK foreign aid is helping fund schools in Gaza and the West Bank that use textbooks on martyrdom in lessons. Pictured is a page on Newton's Second Law, used to teach 11-year-olds, showing the image of a boy with a slingshot targeting Israeli soldiers. A caption alongside it reads: 'During the first Palestinian uprising, Palestinian youths used slingshots to confront the soldiers of the Zionist Occupation and defend themselves from their treacherous bullets. What is the relationship between the elongation of the slingshot's rubber and the tensile strength affecting it? What are the forces that influence the stone after its release from the slingshot?'. Textbook examples research and translations by Impact-se. The schools are attended by 325,000 pupils, up to age 16. 

Nine-year-olds learn maths by adding the number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings in textbooks illustrated with pictures of their funerals.

And ten-year-olds learn the most important thing is giving their life for 'sacrifice, fight, jihad, and struggle'. 

Newton's Second Law is taught to 11-year-olds through the image of a boy with a slingshot targeting Israeli soldiers.

The Mail has also learned that teachers who work at them have called for Jews to be murdered, abused them as 'pigs and apes' and praised Adolf Hitler.

And the schools are said to be 'fertile grounds' for terrorist groups to recruit with scores of suicide bombers and jihadi leaders among past pupils.

Other pages from the textbooks - which are funded through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees - show children being taught violence. Next a page teaching reading comprehension with a glorified account of terrorist Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led the 1978 'Coastal Road Massacre' in which 38 Israelis including 13 children were murdered on a bus.

The British aid money goes via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). During the past five years, the UK has given £330million and pledged another £65million for this year.

Although the UN agency's work also includes healthcare, relief and social services, most of the funding it receives – 58 per cent – goes on education.

Of that money, about 62 per cent is for schools in West Bank and Gaza – which means about £120millon of UK funding has gone where the textbooks are used. UNRWA insists these schools have to follow a curriculum set by the Palestinian Authority, which produces and pays for the textbooks.

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UK GCSE textbook on Israel – full of errors, lies, distortion

Video Of The Week - Palestinian Children And Their Textbooks - https://tinyurl.com/y2szp444

by David Collier For the full report, click here

It is not often I am shocked. I have been working through the opening section of a school textbook that is used to teach 16-year olds in the UK about the Arab Israeli conflict. It is part of the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) curriculum.

The Zionist Federation brought this to my attention a few days ago. The ZF provided me with the textbook along with some of their own comments and I said I would take a look. The short downloadable report contains a summary of what I found inside.

I can begin by saying that the fact this textbook is part of the Pearson Library and is taught inside British schools is utterly shameful. The central messages are those that you would find inside an anti-Israel propaganda book. It is carefully constructed and far more subtle, but the longer you read - the angrier you become. How many children inside state funded schools have been exposed to this type of indoctrination? Someone somewhere needs to explain how this can occur without someone raising an issue.

There is nothing right about this textbook. Nothing. With all the authority of a school textbook - who would question its legitimacy?

This book has NO PLACE inside a classroom. It is poisonous - it rewrites history - it whitewashes anti-Jewish violence - and every child who has studied from it - has been exposed to hard-core anti-Zionist revisionist material. Faithfully delivered to them by their teacher, their school and the taxpayer.

First example from the book. The year is 1929.

'In August 1929, angry clashes occurred over holy sites in Jerusalem. These grew into 4 days of bloody riots and mob violence throughout Palestine, leaving 133 Jews and 116 Arabs dead.'

That is how the 'school' book describes the bloody massacres of Jewish communities as Arab mobs ran riot throughout Mandatory Palestine. As 'Arab / Jew' clashes:

The comparable fatality count is more than deceptive. The reason 116 Arabs died, is because the British killed them as they tried to stop them massacring Jews.

A second example. The book spends three pages explaining the Oslo Peace process - and then asks the students to explain the failure of the process - but never once mentioned the exploding buses in Israel's streets - and only mentioned a single terror attack during this period. How can a student possibly explain the failure of Oslo if you don't mention the 100s of Israelis slain in Israeli streets?

A third example. It is impossible to know where some of the text comes from. Whist the book was busy trying to tell students that Arabs and Jews both joined the allied war effort in equal number - no mention was made of the Palestinian leadership's alliance with the Nazis.

Summary

The book continues in similar fashion, Israel is always looking for the 'excuse' to fight. Students are manipulated through imagery, misleading maps and distorted statistics. The book's exercises and suggested activities are all designed to reinforce the story the book is clearly trying to tell. During the Arab anti-British violence, the focus is on Arab victims and the unfair and harsh British attitude. When the Jewish people were violent, sympathies are switched. Suddenly the focus becomes the British victims. The book does describe the violence of the Second Intifada but never uses the word terrorist to do so. Throughout the book, the word terrorist is (almost) exclusively reserved for Jewish actions.

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IS HOLOCAUST EDUCATION FAILING?

Video Of The Week -Holocaust Education: Nuremberg Laws - https://tinyurl.com/yacaaljf

 JPOST - BY MICHAEL FREUND – 29-01-2019

According to a poll of 2,000 people conducted by the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, one in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust occurred.

Over the past 74 years, extraordinary efforts have been made worldwide to commemorate the Holocaust and preserve the memory of the six million holy Jewish souls who were murdered by the Germans and their accomplices.

Museums and memorials have been erected, annual state and communal ceremonies have been held, and countless books, articles and films have been released to ensure that the world never forgets what was done to the Jewish people in the heart of modern-day, 20th-century Europe.

But if the results of two recent surveys are any indication, something is seriously remiss and urgent efforts need to be made to expand Holocaust education.

According to a poll of 2,000 people conducted by the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, one in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust occurred and nearly half of all those questioned said they did not know how many Jews had been murdered. Some 20% of respondents said they thought that fewer than two million Jews had been killed while another 8% asserted that the scale of the Holocaust has been exaggerated.

In its report about the findings, The Guardian noted, “The scale of ignorance about the Holocaust has shocked experts.” Olivia Marks-Woldman of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust told the paper, “I must stress that I don’t think [the poll respondents] are active Holocaust deniers – people who deliberately propagate and disseminate vile distortions – but their ignorance means they are susceptible to myths and distortions.”

Indeed, how is it possible that in Britain, the land of Winston Churchill, who once described the murder of Jews at Auschwitz as “the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” so many people can be so ignorant about what the Nazis did to the Jews?

Moreover, the Holocaust is a subject that is taught in British schools. A national commemoration was held in London this past Sunday on International Holocaust Remembrance Day with senior government officials taking part and numerous events were organized throughout the country as in years past.

Yet somehow, there are still sizable portions of British society that are oblivious to the unparalleled slaughter of Jews that took place.  

No less worrisome is a survey conducted last month in France by the Ifop research group for the American Jewish Committee and two other organizations, which revealed that 10% of respondents had never heard of the Holocaust and 21% did not know when it had happened. 

This, too, is simply difficult to fathom in light of France’s own sordid involvement in the Holocaust, when the collaborationist Vichy regime passed a series of antisemitic laws known as the Statute des Juifs in October 1940 and subsequently began to deport thousands of Jews. In the Vel d’Hiv roundup on July 16-17, 1942, French police arrested 13,000 Jews in just two days. Altogether, more than 75,000 French Jews were sent to death camps, where over 96% of them were murdered, including my grandmother’s first cousin and his wife.

Three French presidents, Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande and the incumbent Emanuel Macron, have all acknowledged to one degree or another France’s responsibility for the persecution and deportation of Jews.

Nonetheless, as in Britain, a not insignificant number of citizens appear to be clueless in regard to the worst act of genocide committed by mankind.

These studies are in line with other, similar surveys in recent years that show a mounting and worrisome trend toward Holocaust ignorance, particularly among the younger generation.

In April 2018, a poll conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany found that 22% of American millennials said they either have not heard of the Holocaust or are not sure if they did, while an astonishing two-thirds did not know what Auschwitz was.
These figures were much higher than those among older Americans, indicating the existence of a generation gap in knowledge about the Holocaust.

It is difficult to ponder these statistics, as they appear to show that Holocaust education is failing to achieve its objectives as a growing number of people are simply uninformed. And as we all know, it is ignorance of the Holocaust which opens the door to its denial.

But not all is bleak and there is a silver lining to be found in the data. In the study conducted in the UK, 83% said that it was important to know about the Holocaust and more than three-quarters of those surveyed said that more must be done to educate people.

Similarly, the April 2018 survey among Americans revealed that 93% believed that all students should learn about the Holocaust in school.
This demonstrates that people are open to learning more and grasp that the Holocaust was a major historical event worthy of study. They are not hostile to the idea of Holocaust education nor do they minimize its value but rather seek to be more knowledgeable.

Our task now is to seize upon this openness and redouble our efforts to make sure that the horrors of the past are not lost with the passage of time.

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Incitement In PA Schoolbooks

So if it weren't scary enough for the children
to be told they have to go out and kill, PA educators teach
them that "heroes" are willing to fearlessly die as martyrs.

By Itamar Marcus, Oct. 24, 2018

Video Of The Week - UNRWA Songs Of Terror -https://tinyurl.com/yaeh8sht

If you want to know why Palestinian children believe that killing Israelis is model behavior, all you have to do is look at a chapter in one of their schoolbooks.

PA schoolbooks have been criticized ever since Palestinian Media Watch wrote the first report on them in 1998, and the newest books in some respects are the worst ever. However, one chapter stands out in its overt promotion of terrorism. This chapter, appearing in the fifth-grade Arabic Language book published in 2017, serves as a window to understanding the PA leadership's profoundly twisted values.

The chapter starts innocently by stressing the importance of heroes to national identity and national pride: "Heroes have an important position in every nation... the people - even if they are divided over many things - they all agree regarding the pride in their heroes..."

The schoolbook continues and teaches students that feeling pride is not enough. Society takes numerous active steps to honor its heroes: "[We] sing their praise, learn the history of their lives, name our children after them, and name streets, squares, and prominent cultural sites after them..."

In short, society assures that heroes are never forgotten. They might have lived in earlier times, but by naming streets and squares after them and singing their praise, these heroes remain in Palestinian consciousness.

The next message is most important: The children are taught that these heroes are not merely memories of the past they are the role models for the future: "Every one of us wishes to be like them."

Until now this messaging is not problematic, however, all that changes when the schoolbook presents the 10 people who PA educators promote as the role models Palestinian children should emulate. The list of Palestinian heroes includes no scientists, no doctors, no engineers, no singers, no athletes, nor any artists. There have been three Muslim Nobel Prize laureates in science and two in literature, but they are not on the list of Palestinian heroes. 

Who are the Palestinian heroes then according to the PA schoolbook? They are 10 Muslim combatants from the first century of Islam through the 21st century. And possibly the worst name on this list of role models is terrorist mass-murderer Dalal Mughrabi.

Mughrabi led a team of terrorists who hijacked a bus in 1978 and murdered 25 adults and 12 children. Among those she murdered when she threw a hand grenade inside the bus was a young Israeli woman Rebecca Hohman and her two sons: Ilan, aged three and Roi, aged six. Mughrabi, a child murderer, is the person Palestinian educators are telling children to see as their role model, someone "everyone wants to be like."

After naming the 10 heroes, the PA schoolbook stresses that there is no one better than these fighters: "These heroes are the crown of their nation, they are a symbol of its glory, they are the best of the best, the best of the noble people."

That's not all that is horrific. Mughrabi was killed during her terrorist attack and others on the list were killed in battle. The PA schoolbook focuses on their deaths and glorifies their willingness to die: "They took their lives in their hands and threw them at the dangers, without losing their determination and without weakening and surrendering. Some of them died as martyrs, some of them died on the way to fulfilling their obligations, as heroes."

So if it weren't scary enough for the children to be told they have to go out and kill, PA educators teach them that "heroes" are willing to fearlessly die as martyrs. The final sentence of the chapter they are taught what this means for them if they don't want to adopt this heroic behavior: "Bravo to the heroes, and scorn to the cowards!"

Tragically, presenting Dalal Mughrabi as a hero and role model is not accidental or in isolation but is part of a broad almost cult-like worship of Mughrabi directed by the Palestinian Authority. The PA Ministry of Education has named five schools as well as sporting events after Mughrabi. City squares and community centers bear her name. Videos with her picture and story are produced and appear regularly on Fatah and PA media channels. Every year on the dates surrounding her mass murder Fatah and the PA make sure her name and face appear regularly up in lights. There was a march in Bethlehem to celebrate the founding of Fatah and three giant posters led the parade. Two posters had pictures of Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas - internationally known and recognized leaders of Fatah and the PA. The third poster had the picture of Dalal Mughrabi. Dalal Mughrabi was not a leader. She was a terrorist murderer who did one thing in life to make her famous. And yet she completes the PA trinity with the PA leaders.

This cult-like worship of murderers is fundamental to the depraved value system that Palestinian leaders have promoted since the PLO's founding in 1965, and upon which the PA has indoctrinated its children since 1994. It is not surprising that so many of the Palestinian terrorists in recent years have been teenagers, including the recent murderer of Israeli-American father of four, Ari Fuld. The Palestinian leadership has been transmitting its "kill an Israeli - be a hero" message for decades, and judging by the results, it is clear that Palestinian children have been listening.

So these are the choices racing through the minds of Palestinian children who just studied one of the worst chapters in their schoolbooks: 

If I, Palestinian child, am willing to kill Israelis and be a martyr, then I will then be the best of the best, the crown of my nation, streets will be named after me and I will be a Palestinian hero; 

if I am not willing to kill Israelis and be a martyr, then I am a coward.

If you were an impressionable child, which path would you choose?

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Teachers funded by YOU tell pupils that terrorists are heroes

Video of the week- Golda Meir speaking; http://tinyurl.com/gpmgdzy

• Palestinian schools funded by British foreign aid are named after terrorists 
• Pictures of 'martyrs' and revolutionary slogans are posted all over the walls
• Despite this millions of pounds of aid continues to pour into the region
• The Mail on Sunday is calling on the government to end foreign aid madness 

By Ian Birrell In Hebron For The Mail On Sunday 11. 3. 2017

For the full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/jasuv4l  

Britain is pumping huge sums of foreign aid into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models.

A Mail on Sunday investigation has found 24 schools named after Palestinian terrorists and evidence of widespread encouragement of violence against Israel by teachers, with terrorists routinely held up as heroes for schoolchildren.

Pictures of ‘martyrs’ are posted on school walls, revolutionary slogans and symbols are painted on premises used by youngsters, sports events are named after teenage terrorists and children are encouraged to act out shooting Israeli soldiers in plays.

In a sick classroom play children at the Al-Surra School surround a classmate dressed as an Israeli soldier to play out a mock 'execution'

Head teachers openly admit flouting attempts by British and European donors to control the curriculum at schools. They print overtly political study aids for pupils, some even denying the existence of Israel, and teachers boast of encouraging pupils to emulate teenage attackers killed in the most recent wave of terrorist attacks in the region.

One senior teacher from a prominent West Bank school, asked what he would say to a pupil threatening to attack Israelis, told this newspaper: ‘I would tell them go in the name of God.’

This is all despite a review of the hundreds of millions of pounds in donations poured into Palestinian public services last year, which came after Western donors raised concerns about the indoctrination of children.

The changes to aid handouts followed a furore sparked by a previous Mail on Sunday investigation exposing how British taxpayers’ cash supported monthly payments to convicted terrorist killers and the families of suicide bombers.

After the soldier was 'shot' dead the photo was posted on the school's Facebook page.

The investigation also discovered that British aid was funding salaries for thousands of civil servants who had not worked for nine years, despite many admitting they had second jobs. These payments were stopped three months ago.

The investigation was part of this newspaper’s long-running campaign against the Government’s commitment to foreign aid which is set to reach £12 billion.

Joan Ryan, chair of Labour Friends of Israel and MP for Enfield North, said she supported sending aid to Palestine but urged Ministers to make the Palestinians stick to funding agreements. She said: ‘We cannot stand idly by while the Palestinian Authority sanctions anti-Semitic incitement which poisons young minds and makes a two-state solution ever more difficult to achieve.’

This year alone Britain is giving £25 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA). It will help fund salaries for 30,000 officials in West Bank health and education.

The EU, which gets one-tenth of its aid budget from Britain, is donating £272 million. More than half of this goes to public servants in education, health and social services in Gaza and West Bank.

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The Israel Narrative Is Wrong

By Evelyn Gordon June 21, 2016

For the full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/h5uo4q9

The standard narrative about Israel these days goes like this: The current government is the most right-wing ever, the public is increasingly racist and anti-democratic, and the prime minister is either a right-wing zealot or a coward afraid to challenge his right-wing base. But the most remarkable part of this narrative is how durable it has proven despite all evidence to the contrary.

The latest such evidence comes from today’s Jerusalem Post report about a massive drop in construction in the settlements. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, housing starts in the settlements plummeted by 53 percent in the first quarter, compared to an 8.1 percent decline in housing starts nationwide. Needless to say, one would expect settlement construction to soar under Israel’s “most right-wing government ever” and a prime minister captive to his right-wing base. Yet in fact, as I’ve written before, the “right-wing” Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently built less in the settlements than any of his left-wing predecessors–a fact that never seems to disturb proponents of the “far-right extremist” narrative.

Even more noteworthy was a pair of reports in the left-wing daily Haaretz earlier this month about two unprecedented moves to boost equality for Israeli Arabs. The first report noted that the Council for Higher Education, chaired by Education Minister Naftali Bennett of the right-of-center Jewish Home party, is advancing plans for Israel’s first ever BA-granting college in an Arab town. Until now, the only institutes of higher education in Arab towns have been teacher’s colleges. But a tender to set up a BA-granting college closed on May 31, and the CHE is now reviewing the five bids it received. The winner is expected to be announced in another few months, and the new institution is slated to open next year. To help it succeed, the government has promised millions of shekels in start-up funds plus an annual budget of 20 to 40 million shekels (depending on enrollment).

The new institution is expected to significantly increase the number of Arabs, and especially Arab women, obtaining BAs, because many will now be able to live at home and commute to college. Not only will this eliminate the expense of renting apartments near campus, but it also solves the access problem for women from conservative Arab families who are barred by social norms from living away from home.

The second report described two moves to ease the housing shortage in Arab communities. First, a government planning committee decided to build a new neighborhood in the Arab city of Taibeh, which “will be one of the largest building plans in the Arab sector to have been approved for many years,” the report noted. Second, the Interior Ministry approved a decision to take land from the Jewish jurisdiction of Misgav and give it to the Arab town of Sakhnin. The report also noted that these decisions are merely the latest in “an increasing number” over the past year and a half intended “to accelerate development in the Arab sector, after many decades of neglect and inaction.”

Like the drop in settlement construction, these efforts on behalf of Israeli Arabs don’t exactly fit the narrative of a government and public mired in right-wing extremism. Indeed, they contradict it so blatantly that even Haaretz reporter Nimrod Bousso couldn’t ignore it. “One cannot help but wonder why this change is finally taking place under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who never seems to miss a chance to demonstrate hostility toward the group that makes up a fifth of Israel’s population … and whose government has a significant number of members with nationalist views,” he wrote in his news story on the Taibeh and Sakhnin decisions.

The answer, of course, is that the narrative is simply wrong on every count. Diplomatically speaking, as I’ve noted before, this government is actually one of the more left-wing in Israel’s history: Though Netanyahu doesn’t consider a two-state solution achievable right now, he does accept the idea in principle; in contrast, during Israel’s first 45 years of existence, all governments from both left and right considered a Palestinian state anathema. And Netanyahu’s policy of restraining settlement construction – which, contrary to his “cowardly” image, he has maintained despite considerable opposition from parts of his base – is consistent with his stated commitment to a two-state solution.

Moreover, as the examples above show, his past three governments have actually been among the most progressive in Israel’s history in terms of their practical efforts to improve Arab integration. And unlike his settlement policy, his efforts to advance Arab equality have sparked no significant opposition from either his cabinet or his electorate, even though Israeli Arabs overwhelmingly vote for his political opponents. 

The reason is simple: Any government which considers Israeli-Palestinian peace unachievable in the foreseeable future has no choice but to invest in Israel’s internal development, in order to ensure that the country is strong enough to survive without peace. And improving Arab integration is crucial to the country’s internal development because Israeli Arabs, currently underrepresented in both higher education and the work force, represent one of the main potential sources of future economic growth.

But proponents of the “far-right-extremism” narrative seem utterly impervious to the facts. So they can only scratch their heads in puzzlement over why Israel’s “most right-wing government ever” is precisely the one that’s taking far-reaching steps to improve the lot of Israeli Arabs.

Video of the week: Syrian Refugees vs. Palestinian "Refugees" http://tinyurl.com/hztocd2

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