TORONTO — Itamar Marcus, the founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, will tell Canadian parliamentarians in Ottawa this week that school texts produced by the Palestinian Authority are poisoning the minds of some one million children and adolescents and thereby undermining the prospects for peace with Israel.
Itmar Marcus
In a bipartisan event arranged by Liberal MP and former federal justice minister Irwin Cotler, Marcus will say that PA school books in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip portray the Arab-Israeli conflict as a religious and existential struggle rather than as a territorial one.
In an interview in Toronto last week, Marcus said that the only chance for long-term peace is if the PA presents the conflict strictly in territorial terms.
“Then we can negotiate over borders,” noted Marcus, whose organization monitors the PA’s media and education system.
Marcus, who was invited here by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, said the PA’s skewed presentation of the Arab-Israeli dispute stands as “the greatest impediment to peace.”
He said he will tell MPs that Canada – a financial contributor to the PA – should not fund “hate education” and thus perpetuate the conflict.
According to Marcus, Palestinian school texts in every grade deny Israel’s right to exist and demonize Israel.
“This creates hatred,” he said. “Why would Palestinians want to make peace with Israel?
He cited a sentence in a grade 12 text, Arabic Language, Analysis and Criticism: “Palestine’s war ended with a catastrophe that is unprecedented in history, when the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and expelled its people from their cities, their lands and their homes, and established the State of Israel.”
Marcus also cited a PA educational television program on geography recently that described Eilat, Haifa, Ashkelon and Ashdod as “Palestinian ports,” Mt. Meron as the highest mountain in Palestine and the Sea of Galilee as a Palestinian lake.
Nor is there a map of Israel in any Palestinian school book, he added.
“The PA is building a picture of a world in which Israel does not exist,” charged Marcus, who was appointed in the late 1990s by then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to represent Israel at a trilateral forum on incitement that was attended as well by delegates from the PA and the United States.
Accusing the PA of re-packaging anti-Israel messages in its latest batch of school texts, Marcus nonetheless acknowledged that the PA has removed “viciously anti-Semitic” passages from them.
He pointed out that PA texts, which also accuse Israel of inflicting genocide on the Palestinians, are used by the current Hamas government in Gaza.
Fatah, the largest faction in the PA, has grown more extreme, he warned, citing an interview with former Fatah security commander Mohammed Dahlan.
Dahlan, in a reference to Fatah’s ongoing bitter rivalry with Hamas, told PA TV on March 16: “I want to say for the thousandth time, in my own name and in the name of all my fellow members of the Fatah movement: we do not demand that the Hamas movement recognize Israel. On the contrary, we demand of the Hamas movement not to recognize Israel, because the Fatah movement does not recognize Israel even today.”
Dahlan went on to comment that the PA recognized Israel “not out of conviction or sincerity, but in order to receive the needed help of the international community.”
Marcus expressed optimism that Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister-designate, will address the issue of Palestinian incitement after he takes office. “I expect to work closely with him,” he said.
Contrary to statements made by Israel’s outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, Marcus claimed that Israel has no peace partner in PA President and Fatah member Mahmoud Abbas.
“Fatah is not yet a peace partner, because its leadership is producing these inflammatory school texts.”
Marcus criticized Olmert for not taking up this issue.
“Some Israeli leaders say they’ll deal with it in the future. We say we have to deal with it now.”
In closing, Marcus – a resident of the West Bank settlement of Efrat – suggested that Israel should keep areas of the West Bank, such as Gush Etzion, where substantial numbers of Jews have lived since the Six Day War.
But striking a conciliatory tone, he said, “If there was someone on the other side we can talk to, and if we knew that the [West Bank] would not be used as a springboard to attack Israel and Ben-Gurion Airport, we would be very forthcoming on territorial issues.”
