Mick Hartley

A surprising Washington Post op-ed (via):

For decades, billions have been poured into Gaza. It has been well documented how these funds have been used to construct tunnels, build rockets and fund other military infrastructure. But the biggest scandal isn’t what’s been built, it’s what’s been taught in Gaza’s schools — in large part funded through Western largesse.

Every generation in Gaza grows up memorizing the language of martyrdom. Schools, summer camps, mosques and media channels work in concert to instill an uncompromising worldview: violence is virtuous, compromise is weakness and the annihilation of Israel is a sacred duty. Hamas’s rockets are the visible expression of decades of indoctrination of the next generation.

Gaza’s children are the victims of this violent ideology. Few parents in London, Paris or Washington would tolerate their child being taught that violence is noble or that neighbors are subhuman. Yet the international community has subsidized precisely that curriculum for Palestinian children — and then has acted shocked when violence perpetuates itself. It’s time for that to end.

An unusual and welcome dose of reality from the mainstream press.

UNRWA has operated for decades with minimal oversight. But each revelation produces the same response from the organization: acknowledgment of concern, promises of reform — and then business as usual once the cameras leave. The massacres of Oct. 7, 2023 were the gruesome cost of inaction. Several UNRWA employees may have participated in the violence. The agency responded by treating it as an isolated personnel issue rather than the logical endpoint of decades of hateful indoctrination.

The author, Todd Pittinsky, suggests that such a destructive mind-set can be overcome, just as Nazi propaganda was overcome while preserving German culture, and postwar Japan replaced militarism with civic education. The problem with such optimism is that, unlike with Germany and Japan, the Gaza/Hamas mindset is part of a religion – perhaps an inextricable part of that religion. Also, the countries surrounding Israel have, by and large, the same mindset and the same religion. And that’s without taking into account the unfortunate reality that large swathes of the West have been actively cheering on Hamas, all the while happily resurrecting the old antisemitism that we thought was confined to the past.