Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visiting a classroom in Ramallah. (Flash90/Ahmad Gharabli)
IMPACT-se said the report was “plagued by poor comprehension of Arabic, missing terminology, and factual inaccuracies.”
By Josh Plank, World Israel News
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) has pointed out severe flaws in a European Union report on Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks, i24 News reported Tuesday.
IMPACT-se said that the report, which took two years and nearly $260,000 to complete, is “plagued by poor comprehension of Arabic, missing terminology, and factual inaccuracies.”
The purpose of the EU study was to investigate incitement against Israel in the PA school curriculum.
While the report was intended to increase understanding of the PA education system, IMPACT-se claimed that it was instead “a comedy of errors from start to finish.”
The report praised Palestinian textbooks for their “careful consideration” of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
However, IMPACT-se says that the researchers had actually examined Arabic textbooks from Jerusalem, which had already been edited by Israel’s Education Ministry, and erroneously attributed them to being part of the PA curriculum.
The group said, “This is not a particularly complex project. It is hard to fathom how it went so wrong.”
The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research was selected by the EU to conduct the study, which was jointly funded by the EU and UK.
IMPACT-se said, “The institute that has undertaken the project has no previous experience in reviewing the full Palestinian curriculum.”
“Three-quarters of the researched textbooks in the Interim Report are not taught in Palestinian schools,” they said.
“The introduction to the EU’s Palestinian textbook research project, finally released after two years following a Freedom of Information Request application, contained basic Arabic translation errors, left out keywords, showed a lack of familiarity with Palestinian culture, and quoted references to research that does not actually exist,” said IMPACT-se.
The report was initially expected to be released in September 2019, but the EU has repeatedly delayed its publication.
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