Norway again cuts PA funding over Palestinian hate education

Norway's aid budget to the PA was slashed by 30 million krone.

By DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS
Updated: DECEMBER 12, 2020 22:50
TEXTBOOKS SAID to be produced by the Palestinian Authority which contain anti-Israel and anti-Western bias are put on display on Capitol Hill by the NGO Palestine Media Watch. (photo credit: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES/JTA)
TEXTBOOKS SAID to be produced by the Palestinian Authority which contain anti-Israel and anti-Western bias are put on display on Capitol Hill by the NGO Palestine Media Watch.
(photo credit: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES/JTA)
Norway’s legislature has backed cuts in aid to the Palestinian Authority amounting to some 30 million Norwegian krone, equivalent to $3.4 million. The move comes in response to the Authority’s failure to reduce incitement to violence against Jewish Israelis in its school curriculum.
European leaders have grown increasingly concerned that their aid money is being used to fund a curriculum which routinely teaches Palestinian children to hate Jews, reject Israel and aspire to martyrdom.
The Norwegian Storting (legislative body) was this week the most recent to translate this concern into policy, when lawmakers opted to cut the state aid budget to the PA.
The move was spearheaded by the Progress Party. Explaining their decision, the party’s deputy leader MP Sylvia Listhaug said: “The Palestinian school curriculum abounds with calls for violence and hatred against Israel and for martyrdom to be glorified. It is quite clear that Norway cannot support this – therefore we want to cut this item.”
Geir Toskedal, an MP and Christian Democrat member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, was in agreement, saying: “We have long been uneasy about both textbooks and teaching programs in the Palestinian territories. It is very important that the school focuses on peace and cooperation.”
This is not the first time Norway has withheld money from the PA over hate education. In June, Foreign Affairs Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide announced that the government would withhold half of the year’s funding due to the PA’s education system unless it stopped using textbooks which incite hatred and violence.
Søreide also said that she raised the issue in a meeting with PA Education Minister Marwan Awartani on May 21 and in February with Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh.
This decision followed a cross-party endorsement by the Storting in December 2019 to withhold funding from the PA. That decision was made following a report issued by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), which the coalition of MPs said displayed “examples of content in the school books” that were “devastating to the peace process and the development of democracy in the region.”
This year, IMPACT-se returned to the Storting, along with the Norwegian pro-Israel group With Israel For Peace (MIFF), to present updated findings to the Norwegian Foreign Affairs Ministry and the body’s Foreign Affairs Committee, among others.
Commenting on this week’s decision to again withhold funding, IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff said: “Last December, the Norwegian parliament voted to withhold funds to the Palestinians until the textbooks were changed. That change did not happen. This year, parliament has again shown its responsibility by endorsing a cut to the PA aid budget.
“Norwegian legislators from across the political spectrum are simply not satisfied with the same worn platitudes coming from Ramallah and parroted in Europe about improvements to the textbooks being imminent: It is clearly not.” he said. “And until the hate and incitement is removed from Palestinian textbooks, the EU and European nations need to take note of Norway’s leadership on the issue, and to stop being a party to the daily incitement of Palestinian schoolchildren and to the embarrassing abuse of their own taxpayers’ funds.”
Indeed, an analysis of the current curriculum, released in September of this year, found no substantive changes for the better, despite assurances earlier this year that egregious examples of antisemitism and hate education would be eliminated. Rather, of the 152 modifications made to the books from the previous school year, 88% either kept the problematic material intact or amplified it.
“Not a single krone should go to Palestinian education until this is clarified and they have stopped [hate education],” Progress Party MP Himanshu Gulati said in reference to this week’s decision, saying he regretted “that it has taken us so many years to take a strict line against these things, it is very good that it is now happening” and that he “regrets that it has taken us so many years to take a strict line against these things.”
Marcy Oster contributed to this report.


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