If you want to understand the next generation of a society, read the books they give their children.
Some stories stay with you, some demand to be told and some matter because of what they mean for the children who will inherit whatever world we leave behind. That, ultimately, is what all of this comes down to.
I want peace, real, lasting peace, for Palestinian children and Israeli children, Muslim and Jewish. Not theoretical peace, not performative peace, not hashtag peace, but an actual peace that sees lives lived free of fear, classrooms without indoctrination and futures without funerals.
But peace doesn’t come from wishing for it. Peace comes from telling the truth, even when the truth is the very thing nobody wants to confront.
And the truth is this:
You cannot build peace while one side is teaching its children to hate, to murder, and to die. A new report shows exactly what Palestinian children are being taught. The silence from the West shows exactly what we’ve chosen to ignore.
This week, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, Impact-SE, released a new report on the Palestinian Authority’s textbooks. What it exposes isn’t an educational problem, it’s a generational crisis.
A curriculum that ‘systematically violates UNESCO-derived standards’. A curriculum funded by Western nations, including Britain, despite promises and pledges that it would be reformed. A curriculum that teaches antisemitism, glorifies jihad, and prepares children not for life, but for martyrdom.
Marcus Sheff, Impact-SE’s CEO, described the findings as a ‘stark and disturbing reality’. He went on to say, ‘Virulent antisemitism, the glorification of jihad and incitement to violence, remain deeply embedded across all grades… There is no halt in sight.’
He’s right, but the details somehow make even that feel like an understatement.
What Palestinian Children are Being Taught: A curriculum of hate from the moment they learn to read.
To grasp the scale of this crisis, you have to follow the curriculum the way a Palestinian child does: from their first attempts at reading to their final year of school. What emerges is not education but a ladder of indoctrination, each year building on the last, each lesson pushing them further from peace and closer to martyrdom as their imagined destiny.
It begins at just six or seven, when one of their earliest vocabulary words is šahīd — martyr. Not ‘apple,’ not ‘friend,’ but martyr. Death, introduced before literacy itself.
By seven or eight, they are reciting poems urging them to ‘give [their] lives to the Revolution’ and ‘carry its flame’ to Haifa, Jaffa and Al-Aqsa, told they are ‘lion cubs’ destined to fight and die. While children elsewhere learn simple stories, Palestinian pupils learn the romance of sacrifice.
By ten, they are colouring in a Palestinian flag dripping with blood beside a map that erases Israel, told they must ‘protect Al-Aqsa’ and that one day they will raise that bloodied flag over Jerusalem. This is not schooling, it is symbolic militarisation.
By twelve, they are taught to venerate Dalal Al-Mughrabi, who led the massacre of 38 Israelis including 13 children. Her ‘heroism’ is immortalised; a mass murderer becomes a role model. At the same age, Jews are described as ‘terrorists of the modern age’, an eliminationist worldview presented as fact.
By thirteen, teachers recount invented atrocities of Israelis ‘bashing children’s heads’ and mutilating women for jewellery and students are told to draw the scenes. While British pupils sketch fruit bowls, Palestinian pupils sketch fantasies of Jewish barbarism.
By fourteen, reading comprehension consists of suicide bombers wearing explosive belts, knives slashing Israeli throats, and burned Israeli bodies, material students are told ‘not to forget’. This is not memory; it is psychological conditioning.
And by seventeen, the message becomes explicit. Violent jihad is taught as ‘the highest peak of Islam’ rewarded with paradise. Students are asked when jihad becomes a personal obligation and urged to return to Israeli cities ‘with a weapon in your hand’.
By this age, the path laid out for them since Grade 1 is complete.
The Pattern is Clear, the Pattern is Deliberate
What becomes unmistakable, when you look at the curriculum as a whole, is that none of this is accidental. The indoctrination is sequential, it is cumulative, it is intentional.
From the moment they can read, Palestinian children are taught the vocabulary of death. By early primary school, they are introduced to the romance of revolution. By late primary, they are shown blood and maps without Israel. By middle school, they are absorbing graphic fantasies and drawing imagined Jewish barbarity. And by their mid-teens, they are told outright that jihad may be their personal duty, that martyrdom is not only valid but exalted.
By the time they reach early adolescence, many have been guided, step by step, year by year, to believe that their greatest life ambition is to die.
This is not a curriculum, it is a conveyor belt, a production line of hate. A system designed to ensure that the next generation cannot imagine peace, only sacrifice, violence, and the glorification of their own destruction.
Most Shameful Isn’t the Curriculum, it’s the Silence
Here’s the real scandal: Where is everyone?
Where are all the self-appointed moral guardians who fill our streets, our screens, and our institutions with their lectures on justice and liberation?
Where is the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, so tireless when it comes to accusing Israel of every crime under the sun, yet suddenly mute when faced with documented child indoctrination?
Where is Palestine Action, forever eager to vandalise buildings in London but apparently uninterested in confronting the psychological vandalism of Palestinian children?
Where is Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, so quick to moralise, so quick to hashtag, so strangely silent now?
Where is Jeremy Corbyn, who had time to run phone banks for a New York candidate celebrated by antisemites, but has no time to condemn a curriculum that teaches children to slit Jewish throats?
Where are the rest of the UK politicians, those who love to posture, to grandstand, to condemn Zionism with operatic fervour, yet fall silent when the story involves Palestinian leaders harming Palestinian children?
And beyond Britain
Where are the tireless performers in Hollywood’s genre of performative morality? Where are all those so quick to sign letters accusing Israel of genocide? Those so eager to boycott Israelis but strangely unwilling to speak out when Palestinian kids are being primed for martyrdom?
Where are all the influencers, actors, journalists, and cos players, who tripped over themselves to denounce Israel, to shame Jews across the industries, to declare their righteous solidarity? Where is that energy now? Where is that courage? Where is that moral clarity?
Or does child indoctrination not generate enough likes on Instagram?
But here’s the real question they cannot escape: Is this treatment of Palestinian children, this abuse, this indoctrination, this theft of their futures, something they would ever accept for their own?
Of course not. They would be rightly outraged, they would be on television within hours, posting on social media, demanding resignations, inquiries, government action.
They hold their own children to a standard of safety, dignity, and innocence that they happily deny to Palestinian children. And that, that double-standard, is the most revealing and shameful part of all this.
Because if you will not fight for Palestinian children to receive the same protection, the same education, the same basic moral decency you expect for your own, then you are not an ally of the Palestinian people.
You are an enabler of their suffering.
You can Support Palestinian Rights Without Supporting Palestinian Leaders who Teach Children to Die
I opened with children because they are the beginning of this story and the victims of its ending. My children will not inherit my silence and Palestinian children should not inherit their leaders’ hatred.
But when you read what the Palestinian Authority is teaching the next generation, one thing becomes impossible to deny: they hate my children more than they love their own and the West has become their enabler.
The politicians who won’t speak, the activists who won’t look, the celebrities who denounce Israel while ignoring the indoctrination of Palestinian children, they are part of the problem and there will be no peace until this ends.
Peace cannot grow in classrooms where death is taught as destiny, so if children truly do matter, then follow these simple steps:
Speak the truth loudly.
Drag the apologists into the light.
And stop offering cover to people who sacrifice children for their politics.
