No Books? 'Long Live the Gaza Jihad'

In Gaza ...oops, every time I write the words 'In Gaza', I think I'm losing readers whose eyes glaze o ver. But bear with me. .. Inside Gaza, Palestinians say that they fear the next generation of kids –-and nearly 48% of the territory's 1.5 million people are under age 14-- are growing up full of murder towards Israelis. The next bunch will make today's militants seem like love bunnies.

Of course the Israelis do plenty to make the Gazans mad at them. How can kids in Gaza not be afraid and angry when a missile fired from a plane kills one of their relatives (either a militant or a passerby); their house is either overrun by soldiers or demolished during IDF operations; their brothers are in jail, and their fathers can't find work because Israelis won't allow in supplies to keep the factories chugging.

But it doesn't help that from an early age, Gaza's children are instructed that the heroes of society are the martyrs, not the peace-makers. But that's probably true of any society drumming up resistance against an enemy. And this indoctrination starts early, too. The kiddie show on Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV has a new twist: on March 30th, they aired a puppet show in which a Palestinian boy slips into the White House, slays President George Bush and turns the place into a mosque.

It's savage and vengeful and it's just the kind of thing that make many Israelis nod their heads sagely and say: "Ahh, Golda Meir was right when she said that we'll only have peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

Everyone agrees that education is the answer. Teach Arab and Israeli kids to stop hating each other. Even the politicians pushing the Road Map have figured this one out. The United Nations helped the Palestinian Authority re-tool their textbooks, with less bias towards Israel. Some rightwing Israelis accuse the UN of twisting the facts so that these books really teach hatred towards Israel. Sensitive to such criticism, the U.S. State Department hired an academic to study the Palestinian books. He concluded that the books had cleaned out the old anti-Semitism and didn't "seek to erase Israel, de-legitimize it or replace it with the "State of Palestine".

The sad fact is that when the UN tried to send paper and materials to Gaza to print out these textbooks, the shipments were delayed for months by Israeli authorities at the border crossings into Gaza, no doubt for “security reasons”. The UN looks after the education of 200,000 children in Gaza, and these textbooks would have gone a small ways towards counter-acting the jihadi propaganda against Israel. Says the UN's Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunness: “We think that improving education in Gaza offers an escape from the poverty trap and from radicalism.” How else can you make kids switch channels away from a puppet-show about a pint-sized assassin in the White House?

---by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem