Palestinian teacher posts lesson hailing terrorist in 1978 attack that killed 38 Israeli civilians
An Arabic-language teacher at a Palestinian school in Hebron posted a grammar lesson for students to review at home during the coronavirus pandemic that glorifies the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38 Israeli civilians, along with a female terrorist who took part in the attack.
Nasser al-Rajabi uploaded the reading comprehension and grammar lesson to YouTube on February 28, and it was twice shared on his Wasyah Al-Rasoul elementary school for boys’ Facebook page early last month. The video has since racked up over 11,000 views.
The lesson is based on a 2019 Palestinian Authority Arabic-language textbook for fifth graders, according to an Israeli watchdog that analyzes Palestinian textbooks, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se).
In the 1978 attack, several Fatah terrorists landed on a beach near Tel Aviv, hijacked a bus on Israel’s Coastal Road and killed 38 civilians, 13 of them children, and wounded over 70.
In the lesson, al-Rajabi includes a graphic of one of the architects of the terror attack, Dalal Mughrabi, standing in the hijacked bus, pointing a rifle at the Israeli passengers inside and what appears to be a murdered woman on the bus floor next to a Palestinian flag. Below the image is a sentence taken from the textbook that reads, “She took the flag of Palestine out of her bag, kissed it and then hung it inside the bus.”
In a separate corresponding Q&A video on the lesson, al-Rajabi tells students that the attack was carried out “to avenge the martyrs of the Deir Yassin Massacre, and also to remind the world of this massacre.”
This was a reference to an attack that took place in 1948 when Jewish Irgun and Lehi groups entered Deir Yassin just outside Jerusalem and, in house-to-house fighting, killed many of the village’s residents, including women and children. The death toll is disputed: while the Israeli fighters said they had killed some 254, other counts put that figure as low as 107.
“The suicide operation… caused the deaths of many of the occupation’s [Israel’s] soldiers,” al-Rajabi adds during the Q&A session, even though only one Israeli soldier was killed in Coastal Road Massacre.
A spokesman for the PA’s education ministry said he was not familiar with the lesson but declined to comment further.
IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff said the Hebron teacher’s video demonstrates that “even when studying at home, Palestinian children cannot escape the hate. The violence and incitement of the official Palestinian curriculum is being neatly migrated online by official and unofficial educational initiatives and fed into their living rooms.”
Source: TOI
