Scottish textbooks push anti-Israel propaganda – report

The country’s largest teacher union publishes textbooks that depict Israel as violent towards innocent Palestinians and deny the Jewish people’s rights to the land.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Scottish schools are spreading hatred of Israel through the textbooks published by its largest teachers’ union, The JC reported Tuesday.

An investigation carried out by the Jewish newspaper revealed that the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) has texts that say, for example, that innocent Palestinian children are regular victims of IDF violence.

Its website resources include a “case study” under the title “Palestine and Israel: Understanding the Conflict,” in which a Palestinian girl talks of needing to go through a security checkpoint to get to school and how the soldiers scare her “more than anything else” because “you don’t have to be a bad person to get shot by them…. here everybody gets shot.”

She also says that Palestinians “have nothing,” the Israelis “have everything,” and “believe I am not as good as they are.”

An EIS “fact card” on “Palestine” says that “Palestine is an ancient land and Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years,” while the Israel section does not mention the ancient Jewish kingdoms of Judea and Israel, only stating that “There has been a Jewish presence in Palestine for thousands of years.”

Non-EIS materials were also examined, and found that one local authority’s recommended textbook charged that Israel’s “apartheid and settler colonial regime” has committed “genocide” of Palestinians.

The Board of Deputies (BoD), the largest representative body of British Jews, has requested meetings with the EIS several times and asked the union to pull antisemitic and anti-Israel references, to no avail, said the report.

The report added that the EIS had called its primary and high school materials on the conflict an “education for peace.”

A group of Jewish members of the teacher’s union resigned less than a month after the Israel-Hamas war was sparked on October 7, 2023 by the terrorist group’s invasion and massacre, following a union representative’s post on X the next day that had expressed solidarity with the Palestinians.

The Scottish Jewish Teacher Network (JTN) said the tweet was “incredibly offensive and insensitive towards the Jewish community” but that the top EIS officials did not take any action over their concerns.

“We are seeing educators across social media using the words genocide and apartheid whilst discussing Israel… but are using measured and apologetic language around Hamas, a terrorist organisation whose charter clearly states their intent to kill Jews,” JTN said in a statement that included its “huge concern” over “the bias shown by our largest teaching union.”

Whether the way Israel is depicted influences the students learning the material can be debated, but the fact is that many Jewish parents told The JC that they have moved their children out of public schools because they have been bullied or even beaten up, and some are considering emigration as a result of the antisemitism they have suffered.

The problem is not relegated to the schools, said one parent.

“The situation in Scotland is very hostile,” one mother told the paper. “I am thinking about [moving to] Israel because I don’t see where else we could be safe… Half of the Jewish families in Scotland that I know are thinking about it too.”

anti-Israel biasEducationEuropean antisemitismScotland