PA textbooks do not show Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine

Aside from containing many historical errors, new Palestinian Authority (PA) school textbooks do not show the holy city of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, Safa and other news agencies reported on Sunday.

In the mathematics book for third graders, for example, an activity question ignored Jerusalem and focused on the West Bank city of Ramallah as the centre of Palestine. The same question also included the name of the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, which was created on the historic Palestinian suburb of Jaffa. The article in Safa pointed out that Tel Aviv is an Israeli name given to the city created by the occupation authorities; the original name for the Palestinian land there was Tel Al-Rabeei.

Other books include some immoral and unethical conceptions that contradict the faith of the majority of Palestinians.

Palestinian activists called on the PA to revise the new syllabus and accompanying textbooks in order to correct the errors. They claim that these have been made intentionally as part of the recognition agreement between the PA (and PLO) and Israel which insists on Jerusalem being acknowledged as the capital of the Zionist state.

“It is not a major problem to identify Ramallah as a central city,” explained activist Jalal Barq, who first raised these issues on Facebook. “The problem is to identify Jerusalem as a minor city to the south of Ramallah.”