David Beden is the Bureau Chief of the Israel Resource News Agency, located in Jerusalem’s Beit Agron International Press Center. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, he has monitored the activities of the Palestinian Authority, to determine whether it truly desires peace.

Several months ago, Avraham M. Goldstein, Editor of The Jewish Homemaker, attended an impressive lecture by Beden at the Young Israel of Far Rockaway, in New York City, and invited him to write an exclusive article for the Homemaker.

The following report is certainly disconcerting, and sends a strong signal that Israel must watch itself very carefully in dealing with Yasir Arafat and the PA.

May 4th will be a notable day in my life, as two events converge — one having very personal significance, the other of vital import to the State of Israel.

On May 4th, my son Elchanon will turn bar mitzvah. Obviously it is a day that will be filled with joy for our family, particularly since it is also Lag BaOmer.

I try hard to prepare with my family for this momentous occasion — invitations to family and friends, arranging a band, reserving a hall, buying tefillin, scheduling the shuttle service to get each relative from the airport, and preparing a Torah thought with Elchanon.

May 4th is also the date when Yasir Arafat has arrogated to himself the right to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state. (By the time this article is in print, we will know whether he has followed through on his promise.) And so as we prepare for the bar mitzvah, I have mixed emotions — joy on the one hand, concern on the other, because I have found that Arafat’s words of peace before the nations of the world are belied by his words to his own people.

I have the grave feeling that we are making preparations for a simchah in the midst of an impending disaster. And while other people can deny what’s going on with Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, I cannot. My profession and my nature will not allow me to do so.

My role as a journalist is to cover the PA. As a resident of Israel in general and Judea and Samaria in specific, the PA’s motives and agenda are profoundly important to me. And what I have uncovered is worrisome, to say the least. Just as disturbing is my inability to obtain coverage of my findings by major news media.

Put simply, Arafat talks peace to Israel and the West, but to his own people, he speaks of war and the destruction of the Jewish State. Addressing audiences around the world, he speaks of coexistence, and of how (at least at the time of the Wye Memorandum) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is his partner in peace. But to the Palestinians, Arafat talks of Jihad and overtaking Jerusalem by force.

How can we evaluate Arafat’s true motives? What better way than by analyzing what the PA is teaching the youths of Palestinian-held territories. The bitter truth is that the PA educational system is rife with anti-Israelisms, calls for Israel’s destruction, and anti-Semitism. Palestinian children are being taught the language of war; they hardly hear Arafat’s call to peace.

I recently spent more than a month in Palestinian schools, working with the official Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation TV network. We filmed classrooms, schoolyards, and school plays.

How did I get in? Even this is indicative of how many PA officials view Israel. I had to use my American passport, because despite a plethora of reconciliation programs promoted by the Oslo process, these schools continue to forbid any Israeli children, teachers, or citizens from entering their grounds.

The school curriculum of the Palestinian Authority remains geared to one thing: the eventual liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine. When elementary school Palestinian children sing of the wonders of their land, they do not restrict themselves to the West Bank and Gaza. They openly claim all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. There is no room for a Jewish State in the Palestinian educational scenario.

Students in the Palestinian refugee camp schools, run by the United Nations, sit in class according to where they “came from” in 1949: cities such as Safed, Jaffa, and Haifa — all parts of Israel inside the pre-1967 borders.

And Palestinian children sing of their “right to return” to Israel proper. This I discover when I visit a Palestinian Authority school that is located in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Shuafat refugee camp, in northern Jerusalem. The school is less than a three-minute ride from the Hebrew University campus at Mount Scopus. The chant of Arab children singing in English greets me. The voices are sweet, but the words are chilling, as in unison these fourteen-year-old girls sing: “We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Some day in Palestine.”

I watch a determined young generation learn about the return to Palestine — not to the new entity comprising the area now under the control of the Palestinian Authority in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, but to Israel proper.

One million Palestinian Arab schoolchildren learn in UNRWA educational institutions. What are they taught? That the peace process will bring them back to the homes and villages vacated by their grandparents in the 1948 War of Independence. They are going back to Jaffa, Haifa, and more than 500 other cities and towns whence Arabs left in 1948.

Some Arabs left of their own accord. Some were driven out. Some left in the confusion of the war. All told, 650,000 Arabs became refugees. Yet while Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab countries, no Arab state would take in their refugees on a permanent basis, lest their claim to land in Israel become stale. The annually reaffirmed U.N. Resolution 194 promises these refugees the right of return and keeps them in the squalor of refugee camps under that very premise.

It is one thing to hear about the theoretical notion that Palestinian Arab refugees may not be satisfied with a West Bank/Gaza state. It is quite another matter to meet with dozens of schoolchildren of all ages and entire communities of refugees who are determined to exercise their right to return.

In this picture, there is no room for Israel. Indeed, school maps of the region identify the entire Israel as “Palestine.” If, as Arafat has asserted, he now recognizes Israel’s existence, why isn’t Israel on Palestinian maps?

One would think that this dangerous dichotomy would make excellent fodder for the news media. What journalist would not want to cover a deception of this dimension? Yet the shocking truth is that the material I, an accredited journalist, have gathered has been rejected by every major newspaper, television news program, and radio program to which I have submitted it. The coverage of this material has been almost non-existent. At best, it is mentioned once and left to hang.

The reason for this refusal to broadcast the facts is that they fly in the face of the perception that Arafat and his people have agreed to a two-state solution, abandoning their earlier professed intention to eradicate the State of Israel. Put starkly, the news media will not publish what I have discovered because these are uncomfortable facts, politically incorrect, and they are not tolerated.

If what I found were limited to one or two schools, we could dismiss it. But this belligerent tone pervades the official Palestinian curriculum. The Center for Monitoring Peace, an academic group, has issued a monograph that evaluates every schoolbook used by the new Palestinian Authority school system. There is one theme that permeates all of these books: war against the state and people of Israel, to liberate all of Palestine and to drive the Jews out of any role in the administration of the land. What’s more, Palestinian teachers do not hide their curriculum. They do not teach in secret.

Why, then, don’t people know what they are teaching? Why do my news stories on the subject of education for Jihad (holy war) go nowhere in the mainstream media?

Once again, this does not jibe with what the media consumers and TV watchers around the world would like to believe: that there is an educational program for peace inside the Palestinian Authority. (See sidebar for samples of PA educational material.)

Unfortunately, the ostriches are not confined to the news media. At least five Jewish organizations have been lobbying the U.S. Congress to provide funds for the Palestinian Authority, based on the peace curriculum that they think has been adopted by its educational system. A lie that is repeated often enough becomes believable.

And who has more credibility: five respected Jewish organizations, all of whom have ties with Israel, or a lone journalist?

Yasir Arafat personally told me that the Palestinian Authority had adopted a “people to people” educational program to bring together Israeli and Palestinian children in dialogue. This program would operate within the context of a grant that the Palestinian Authority had received from the Norwegian and American governments. Arafat told this to me in Norway, at the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords. He omitted one detail: that he had vetoed the program for use in Palestinian schools. Perhaps he did not expect that I would check his story, but I did.

Then there is the matter of the Palestinian military forces, called the Palestinian Liberation Army. I visited a PLA army base, and found motivated soldiers singing songs lauding the liberation of Palestine. Meanwhile, the units have names that bespeak the conquest of Jerusalem through holy war. I have no doubt that these forces are being prepared for future conflict with Israel.

Yet the Israeli and Western media describe the PLA simply as a police force, conjuring up the image of a bunch of traffic cops.

In April 1994, after the Israeli government completed its first economic development agreement with the new Palestinian Authority, I asked Avraham Shochat, then Israel’s Minister of Finance: “What is in this agreement to prevent the PA from constructing gun factories? I see that no such restrictions are written here.” Shochat took off his glasses, looked down at me, and responded rhetorically: “Don’t you know that the Palestinians want peace?” This year, the Ministry of Defense’s Intelligence division issued a series of public reports warning about the military potential of the Palestinian Authority, including its nascent gun industry.

Yet no one in the mainstream media wants news stories about the Palestinian military potential. The fact is that their lightly armed troops, when aligned with any conventional army in the Arab world, pose a threat to every population center in the State of Israel.

Fortunately, not everyone has been fooled. The prestigious Washington Institute for Near East Policy has issued a fifty-page brochure describing the military threat of the PLA in minute detail. But Jews and non-Jews alike are desperate to believe that peace is on the horizon, and they don’t want to entertain thoughts that conflict with this sentiment.

As I speak about this subject around the world, I have learned that the art of honest communication does not necessarily mean that you deliver a message that people would like to hear. But one must hope they will hear, before it is too late.

My kids follow the news, in the family tradition. Elchanon understands that the promise of his Torah portion that “you shall dwell safely in your land” is dependent on how we act as Jews, and he wonders aloud: “Abba, if we do not keep the Torah, will God punish us with Arafat?”

This is a tough question for a father of a bar mitzvah boy, and even a harder one for a journalist who has observed signs of a precarious future.

On The Books

“Complete the following blank spaces with the appropriate word: The Zionist enemy____civilians with its aircraft.” (Our Arabic Language, Part 2, for Third Grade, page 9)

“After the River Jordan flows out of the Lake of Tiberias, it passes on the west the plain of Bait She’an, which leads to the Bani Amer Valley, which has the best soil in the whole of Palestine.”

(Geography of the Arab Lands, for Twelfth Grade, p. 49) [Note: the Bani Amer Valley is the Jezre’el Valley in northern Israel.]

“The Jewish gangs waged racial cleansing wars against innocent Palestinians . . . large-scale appalling massacres, saving no women or children.” (PA television, May 14, 1998)

Another child says, “Each and every part of your soil I have drenched with all my blood. And we shall march as warriors of Jihad. Oh, my exalted martyr, you are my example. . . . Oh, my sister, sing constantly about my life as a suicide warrior . . .”

No one is perfect when it comes to viewing history, but these are outright falsehoods. So is the following declaration of a textbook: “The Palestinian people are descended from the Canaanites.” This attempt to place Palestinians in the Holy Land before the Israelite conquest is almost pathetic. First, it contradicts the Palestinian claim to descent from Abraham, who was a Semite, not a Canaanite. Second, given the Canaanites’ affinity for barbarism and idol-worship, who would want to be related to them?

In a more sinister vein, the Palestine Ministry of Information homepage, to which a link is available from the PA official website, links to a page titled A View From Palestine. This page carries a map of Palestine that encompasses all of Israel (see photo of map to the left). While surrounding countries such as Jordan are labeled, Israel is not. In the Ministry of Information section titled Basic Information About Palestine, we find the following under the subheading Area & Topography: “The whole area of Palestine is approximately 27,000 square kilometers. Israel exists on seventy-five percent of its area.” Here is a blatant reference by the PA to Israel as “Palestine.”

Still, the Palestinian Authority site contains material that appears to accept Israel’s legitimacy. Unlike the map displayed to the left, the map on the PA’s primary site locates Jerusalem partly within Israel and partly within the autonomous Palestinian entity. Yet when discussing East Jerusalem’s demographics, it lists the city’s religions as “Christianity and Islam”; no mention is made of Judaism.

—Avraham M. Goldstein