A review of Palestinian textbooks for the 2025-2026 school year has found that the Palestinian Authority curriculum persists in inciting Jew-hatred and jihad, debunking assertions in podcaster Tucker Carlson’s interviews that Palestinian children are “not taught to kill.”
Antisemitism remains a “central feature of the curriculum” and teacher guides serve as “manuals for transmitting hate,” a November 2025 investigation by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) found.
While some textbooks present a conciliatory position towards Christianity, the Dogma (Islamic Law Track) for Grade 11 teaches that the Bible “has been distorted” and “an oral message secretly dictated by Christ to his disciples” under “Roman persecution and the Jews’ plots,” brought about the “loss of the Gospel.”
While some textbooks present a conciliatory position towards Christianity, the Dogma (Islamic Law Track) for Grade 11 teaches that the Bible “has been distorted.”
The schoolbook teaches that “when Paul the Jew started preaching to follow Christ, he began to claim that he was the only one with whom true Christianity and the Gospel were entrusted and started introducing into them false beliefs and ancient philosophies to corrupt them.”
The Christian Education textbook for Grade 8 (2018) rewrites 2 Timothy 4:8 to justify St. Paul endorsing jihad by saying: “I have fought the good jihad.” Jihad has nonviolent interpretations, but teaching emphasizes violent struggle as the preferred meaning.
Despite the evidence from textbooks, prominent Christians defending Tucker Carlson, after his interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, insist that Palestinian schools do not teach hatred. During the interview, Carlson mocks Huckabee for suggesting that Hamas uses child soldiers as jihadis.
On February 21, 2026, a day after Carlson posted his interview, Levant Ministries founder-CEO Fares Abraham posted a tweet noting that Huckabee told Carlson that “in Palestinian schools, we are taught from age 5 that ‘the greatest thing is to kill.’”
“Mr. Ambassador, I was one of those 5-year-olds,” wrote Abraham. The Palestinian Christian, who now resides in the United States, accused Huckabee of demonizing Palestinians by depicting Palestinian education as a “fictionalized hallucination.”
Retweeting Abraham’s post, Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor from Bethlehem, well-known for promoting Palestinian Liberation Theology, exclaimed: “No! We do not teach our children to kill. We teach them to live.” X-users posted pictures of Palestinian children in combat uniforms, brandishing assault rifles, and the video of a Hamas TV children’s program calling for the slaughter of Jews, in response.
Anglican priest A. J. Nolte explained why some Christian leaders and textbooks push the narrative of positive relations with Christians. “When you read PA [Palestinian Authority] textbooks that speak of Christian-Muslim coexistence, you’ll notice that the coexistence is always in the context of absolute Islamic political supremacy,” observed Nolte. “Those Christians who are praised are those who have submitted themselves to subordination.”
Nolte, a Regent University professor and director of its Institute for Israel Studies, elaborated:
“The reason many Israeli Christians like Shadi Khaloul and the Aramaic Christian movement reject these textbooks is that Christians remain as tolerated subordinates in a historical narrative of Islamic triumphalism. Zionism explicitly rejects the image of the subordinated Jew, and as such, it is seen as threatening to the narrative of Islamic supremacy. Any Christian self-assertion is viewed similarly.”
Indoctrination is woven into school ceremonies and cultural activities beyond the curriculum.
Meanwhile, a separate review of the Palestinian Authority’s new curriculum for Gaza “confirms that incitement remains a core pillar of Palestinian education in Gaza,” despite the Palestinian Authority’s commitment in July 2024 to removing hate content as a condition for receiving 380 million euros in European Union funding.
The assessment notes that indoctrination is woven into school ceremonies and cultural activities beyond the curriculum. It documents girls performing a dance that supports violence, chanting “We ignited the Intifada, with a stone and a knife” while making throat-slitting gestures.
The curriculum romanticizes terrorism and martyrdom and glorifying jihad as “the peak of Islam” and a direct path to paradise. Even science and mathematics textbooks incite hatred against Israel. While a Grade 3 Mathematics exercise instructs students to spell out in digits the number of martyrs during the First Intifada, statistical lessons include frequency tables tracking the number of “martyrs” killed by Israel.
A reading exercise for the Arabic letter haʾ for Grade 1 students includes the word shahid (martyr). The textbook uses a militaristic figure holding a weapon to teach the letter “Ya.” A Grade 5 Arabic Language textbook teaches grammar using a text glorifying Dalal al-Mughrabi, the perpetrator of the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre—one of the worst terrorist attacks in Israel’s history—in which eleven Palestinian terrorists butchered thirty-eight civilians, including seventeen children.
“The failure to reform the curriculum is not an oversight but a deliberate policy choice,” the review concludes. “This research shows that these newly created materials contain antisemitic content that encourages students to acts of violence, justified on both nationalistic and religious grounds, as has been documented many times in PA textbooks.”
