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The blood-soaked and sadistic pogrom of 7th October 2023 did not happen in a vacuum. A generation of Palestinian children have been subjected to indoctrination in schools, trained to reject peace and hate Jews.
Consider geography and the issue of maps alone. According to the report ‘Revealing Maps: The Palestinian Vision as Taught in PA [Palestinian Authority] Schools’ by Dr. Arnon Groiss, ‘there is not even one map in the entire corpus of maps in use in PA schools today that shows the State of Israel.’
Instead, Palestine replaces Israel. One map is called ‘Map of the Arab Homeland’ and another labelled ‘Palestine is Arab and Muslim’. Yet another ‘presents the map of the whole country against the background of Al-Aqsa Mosque and a veiled face of what might be regarded as a member of a terrorist organization, under the title "Palestine is the heart of the nation”’. You get the gist; and so do Palestinian school children.
47% of the population of Gaza is under 18. At best, they’ve grown up on a diet of rejectionism and, at worst, radicalisation.
The problem is more serious than fantasy-land maps: Hamas and the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency (UNRWA) have deliberately cultivated virulent antisemitism in schools.