After years of wrangling over the content of Palestinian school textbooks, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unwra) has taken the unprecedented step of reforming its curriculum - and the Palestinians are furious.
So furious, in fact, that the Palestinian Education Ministry has suspended ties with Unwra “until the positions are corrected”, and has called the proposed changes “an affront to the Palestinian people, its history and struggles”.
There has been no formal announcement from Unwra as to the content of its changes, which would affect more than 312,000 school students in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
However, informed leaks in the Arab media suggest that Unwra is going to change the map of “historic Palestine” to exclude references to cities inside Israel as Palestinian cities — a phenomenon that numerous Israeli studies of Palestinian textbooks has described as “incitement.”
