No Child Left Behind

Walk into a classroom in Gaza or the West Bank, and you’ll see kids just like anywhere else—backpacks, notebooks, noisy chatter. But look a little closer at the textbooks, the posters on the walls, or the stories they’re asked to write, and something starts to feel alarming. The lesson isn’t just math or language. It’s identity. An identity of resistance.   

Schoolbooks include poems that glorify death in battle. Students memorize the names of suicide bombers, not as criminals but as heroes. Maps in their textbooks have no mention of Israel. And year-end kindergarten parties can include reenactments of kidnapping and lynching Jews.

During the summer months, kids’ camps include simulated combat training—crawling through tunnels and carrying mock rifles. Fighting the enemy is good, but dying as a martyr is even better.   

This isn’t accidental. It’s strategic. It is also why in just the last few months Hamas was able to recruit 30,000 new Palestinian fighters—mostly teenagers. And with over 40% of Gaza’s population under the age of 15, and a birthrate of 3.38 children per woman (among the highest in the world), the supply of new soldiers is seemingly endless.

What drives this ideology isn’t just politics—it’s theology. Radical Islamic doctrine teaches that Islam will one day rule the world. Thus, peace with Israel isn’t just undesirable—it’s heretical. Islam’s Allah especially detests the God of Israel—and therefore Christians are also near the top among the list of the despised.

Of course, many Muslims around the world do not practice this extremism. But the ones in charge of Gaza and West Bank schools do. 

The West Bank (Judea and Samaria): The PA’s Parallel System

While the violent approach of Hamas is hard to miss, the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority’s (PA) approach is more difficult to detect because it is more subtle. It strives to annihilate Israel intellectually and legally. Its textbooks erase Jewish history, glorify terrorists, and categorically deny Israel’s historical and current legitimacy.

This is the Palestinian Authority that claims they are offering to take control of Gaza! As is well known, the PA in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) gives the highest respect to their top prisoners with monthly salaries for them or their families. The amount increases the more Jews a terrorist has killed or wounded.

Subtle-not-so-subtle messaging includes naming schools after terrorists. For example, Dalal al-Mughrabi Girls’ School in Hebron is named after the woman behind the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre, which killed 35 Israelis. Or try Amin al-Husseini Elementary School in Ramallah which honors the Grand Mufti who collaborated with Nazi Germany. In raids and military operations, Israeli soldiers often find copies of Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Jewish children’s books in Muslim homes and schools. 

This system poisons little children who by the time they can put a few words together, will tell you they are ready to die a martyr. It’s worth noting this training doesn’t just begin in school. It is not uncommon to see parents holding their toddlers declaring their hope that one day their child will become a martyr. This is arguably the worst case of mass child abuse happening today. But of course, those mothers and fathers went through the same school system. 

A Fact that Shapes the Middle East

Here is a fact created by the United Nations that few people are aware of, outside UN officials.

Children born to refugees from any nation in the world are not also considered refugees—unless in special case. UNHCR, the Refugee organization for all nations except the Palestinians, does not define refugee status as hereditary. Instead, their mission is to integrate all refugees locally into host countries, or resettle them in third countries if they cannot return to their original home. That is the law. The goal is to not perpetuate refugee status across generations.

However, UNRWA, the UN organization for Palestinians only, allows all descendants of Palestinian refugees to automatically inherit refugee status. Even if a Palestinian is born in another country and has never lived in or fled from Israel, he automatically becomes a Palestinian refugee. That’s the Law. As of now, forever.

With their high birthrate, Palestinians living in the Middle East and elsewhere are almost 15 million people. Hundreds of thousands of them have citizenship all over the world, but are still claimed as refugees by the Islamic and atheistic nations of the UN which do not recognize the historical nature of the Bible. To them, Israel is a tiny obstinate, illegitimate country.   

The New Palestinian People

But we must ask a very basic question: Where did these Palestinians come from?

Ironically, “Palestinian” was the term used to describe all locals living in the region including Jews before 1948. It had been used by the Ottoman Empire, and later the British—but never to identify a people group—until the rebirth of the Jewish nation. After 1948, Jews abandoned the term “Palestinian Jews” for “Israeli Jews”. 

With no one in modern Israel using the term anymore, “Palestinian people” was appropriated in 1964 by Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian-born leader who decided to unify the local Arabs who had migrated from the surrounding Arab nations. In 1974, he addressed the UN General Assembly presenting his new ‘tribe’ with a name that would strategically and irrevocably tie their identity with the land.    

I Saw It Happen

In reality, Palestinian history is recent enough that I remember watching the transformation myself when I immigrated to Israel in the 1960’s. At that time, no Arab was calling himself a “Palestinian.” They identified as Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians, Turks or wherever they came from. If they had been in the Holy Land a couple of generations, they would usually consider themselves as Arabs who were British citizens. If you look, you’ll even see the UN 1947 Partition Plan was legally defined between “Arabs and Jews,” as the concept of indigenous Palestinian Arabs had not yet been birthed.   

Then Arafat declared that Arabs were the descendants of the Philistines from the ancient city of Gaza and had lived there for thousands of years. Never mind that the true Philistines never lived in or ruled over the entire land of ancient Israel. But today, even well-known Arab professors insist this is true, though any honest historian knows the Philistines disappeared from Gaza and history in the 7th century B.C.     

Who Were The Original Philistines?

Certainly, historians know the Philistines of old were not Arabs. Among the latest researchers investigating the Philistines’ origin was the Leon Levy Expedition in 2019 which published results of genetic testing on ancient remains in the Philistine city of Ashkelon. Their genetic testing concludes they originated from Crete or the Aegean region which is now southeastern Europe.  

The first time the Holy Land was renamed “Palestina” instead of Judea was in 135 AD—centuries after the Philistines disappeared—by an angry Roman Emperor named Hadrian, who wanted to blot out all memory of the land and people of Judah.   

Regardless, there is ample historical evidence that a few Jews maintained a continuous presence in Jerusalem and other villages since the destruction of the Temple. And there were Bedouins who wandered with their flocks following the seasons under the friendly eyes of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. But there was no Palestinian people, nation or government, and certainly no Palestinian Arab people.  

Nevertheless, this myth of modern Arab Palestinians persists because it serves the core objective of the Islamic curriculum for children:  Deny the State of Israel the right to exist.

The Return!

Everything began to change when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the British took over. A few years earlier, Jews had begun to trickle into their ancient homeland, and then the stream became stronger as Jews fled the pogroms of Russia.

As the Jews began to rebuild the land, Arabs from neighboring countries migrated to take part of the new economic opportunities. However, when influential Arabs understood the religious ramifications of Jews buying up the barren land they had claimed for centuries, they began violent protests and battles against the Jews. 

To stop the fierce violence of the Arabs, Britain, which was overseeing the region of Palestine after the end of World War I, simply banned Jewish immigration to its homeland for many years while allowing Arabs to enter freely.  

In 1948, the Jewish population stood at 650,000. The Arab population was 1.3 million.

If Britain had not made such a heinous decision, there would have been several million more desperate Jews fleeing the Holocaust that could have reached the shores of Israel. My mother-in-law and her family were among those denied entry when fleeing Europe.

UNRWA: A Global Engine of Radicalization

But why would the United Nations, full of elite intelligent representatives, fall for a fairytale rendition of an ancient tribe now living in Gaza? Why would European and Western nations give tax money from their own people to Palestinian leaders who knowingly groom children to love death?

UNRWA—a United Nations agency that exists only for Palestinians—has funneled billions into Palestinian education systems by nations that know Hamas promotes terrorism and whose total reason for living is to destroy Israel. In 2023 alone, UNRWA sent $450 million directly into Palestinian schools, and $1.46 billion total in aid. That figure rose to $1.6 billion in 2024. Remember, all this money is going to only about 5 million Arabs in the disputed areas of Gaza and the West Bank.

Despite widespread evidence of extremist materials and indoctrination, UNRWA continues to operate with international funding. (Though, for the first time—just this past month—Israel finally moved to shut down UNRWA schools in East Jerusalem!) Whether one likes Israel or not, all should agree that the UN should support the raising of kids to live and love life as a fundamental human right. 

Few Westerners are really aware that virtually all United Nations’ agencies, programs and their affiliated entities have been infiltrated by militant Islamic-influenced organizations and their staffs. 

How can this be? Simple. Fifty-three nations out of the UN’s 193 are Islamic. They belong either to the Arab League or the Organization of Islamic States. And with a little help from their friends, they control almost the entire United Nations’ activities—since most of the time, the majority of European countries go along for the ride! 

How else would you explain that between 2015-2025, the UN General Assembly adopted 164 resolutions against one nation, Israel, versus 85 resolutions against the other 192 nations including North Korea and Iran?

It is a system that is working exactly as the UN wants it to work. That is why the Palestinians are the only “refugees” in the history of the world that have remained refugees for 75 years. Today, the average period for uprooted people from any country in the world remaining refugees, is 20 years.

Embrace Your Calling

My husband often says, “There is no blessing from God for a people who take on the name and mission of Israel’s ancient enemies.” But beyond that, when one appropriates another’s identity, by default they lose their own. The Philistines already experienced the ultimate curse for a people of assimilation and extinction. Arabs on the other hand are still destined to be blessed.  

Jews and Arabs are both descendants of Abraham. God did not give them the land of Canaan—He actually gave them way more land! (Consider Israel’s 22,072 sq km vs. the land mass of Arab nations: 13,132,327 sq km). 

Christian Zionists and Jewish believers alike must embrace that a fight for the heart and mind of the Arab world is also a fight for Israel. And that fight just may begin with raising awareness of the educational system in the Arab world—especially Gaza and the West Bank. Without a doubt, until their Jihadi schoolbooks are removed from the mainstream, Islamic extremism will never be eradicated.  

God loves the Arab people and wants to see salvation brought to the 21 Muslim Arab nations—not excluding the other 35 Muslim nations! He is searching for Partners to pray and seek His face—that no child will be left to grow up as a mere weapon in the hands of evil men.