Ending the "indoctrination" of Palestinian schoolchildren into glorifying the murder and murderers of Jews and Israelis is key to undermining the Palestinian Authority’s Pay-for-Slay program, panelists at a Monday StandWithUs event on the issue said.
“Go to the source,” former Jerusalem deputy mayor and special envoy for trade and innovation Fleur Hassan-Nahoum told The Jerusalem Post at the event, where she served as the moderator of the evening’s discussion.
“Why are people terrorists? Because they're indoctrinated. These kids are taught in the Palestinian Authority school system, which is good enough for Hamas, that the best thing they can do with their lives is martyr themselves. Their heroes are shahids (martyrs).”
The former Jerusalem deputy mayor said that while she was working in the city hall, the educational system in east Jerusalem was something she took meaningful steps to address.
A 2024 Knesset report found that the majority of Arab schools in east Jerusalem still use the Palestinian curriculum, but Hassan-Nahoum says that figure has plummeted over the last decade.
“At the time when I went into city council in 2016, 93% of kids in Jerusalem in the Arab educational system were learning the same school books as the kids in Gaza,” she said, a reference to the large percentage of Gazan students that, prior to the October 7 massacres and the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War in 2023, attended UNRWA schools.
UNRWA schools in Gaza, east Jerusalem, and the West Bank use the Palestinian Authority curriculum and textbooks.
“The city of Jerusalem, along with some really incredible advisors, went about trying to incentivize Arab schools in east Jerusalem to leave the Palestinian Authority curriculum and adopt the Arab-Israeli curriculum,” Hassan-Nahoum said. “Arabic first language, Hebrew second language. So nobody was taking anybody's cultural character away from them in their educational system. And I'm very pleased to say that in ten, twelve years, we managed to bring down from 93% of the kids studying the Palestinian Authority curriculum to 53% of the kids. Forty percent, we moved the needle.”
Sitting on the panel alongside moderator Hassan-Nahoum was Anne Herzberg, the legal advisor for NGO Monitor, a prominent research institute that analyzes and reports on the funding, activities, and reporting of international and local NGOs, with an emphasis on anti-Israel bias and actors.
Education: The root cause of the conflict
“First of all, we have to tackle the root cause of the conflict,” she said during the event. “That's the number one thing that has to be tackled, the education system.”
Without first reforming the educational system, she added, Israel will not be able to make headway in defanging radicalism in Palestinian society.
In an interview with the Post at the event, she highlighted a narrative that is sympathetic to, or excuses, “Palestinian terrorism” being accepted abroad, beyond the Palestinian educational system, that is also serving as a pillar supporting the Pay-for-Slay program.
Because of this sympathy, she said, governments, the UN, and NGOs “don’t have the will to stop” outside money from ending up in the hands of terrorists.
“A lot of the propaganda and narratives have worked, unfortunately, on a lot of government officials,” she said. “They are afraid if they strengthen oversight, they think less aid will get to the people.”
This strategy, though, she said, is “hampering the solution-finding” that would actually resolve the conflict and improve the lives of people, not just in the West Bank and Gaza, but in other countries like Lebanon and Yemen.
“What they're doing is they are overlooking the damage being done by allowing these areas to be controlled by these terrorist organizations, the long-term damage of that, we've seen,” she said. “It's a lot of hard work to come up with a solution, and they just don't have either the time or the resources to come up with it.”
This lack of willingness to take steps to cut money off from terrorists, in turn, fuels further terror attacks, Sarri Singer told the Post.
Singer was the final panelist in the discussion. She is the founder of the organization Strength to Strength and a survivor of a 2003 attack that took the lives of 17 other people.
“There's incentivization of carrying out attacks. And families knowing that they will receive a monthly stipend for it, depending on how many people were killed and how many people were injured, is horrific to me,” she said. “The harder part is not the fact that the family of my terrorist receives this money and has received it for decades, but the fact that it incentivizes future attacks. That's the hard part, is not only what I went through, but that somebody else is going to go through that same thing, because somebody is getting paid monthly stipends.”