“Impact” is an Israeli-American organization assigned to monitor the educational curricula of Arab and Islamic countries, particularly those related to Arabic and Islamic studies. It provides regular reports on its mission to official American entities to exert pressure on Arab countries to implement its agenda. It is officially known as the “Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education,” abbreviated as “Impact.”
In a report issued in February 2024, the institute, based in “Israel” and London, confirmed that it primarily observes how Israel and Jews are portrayed in Arab educational texts.
In another report issued in May 2023, the institute emphasized succeeding in quietly changing Arab and Islamic countries curricula, aiming to foster acceptance of “Israel” and peace with it. They claimed the alteration in textbooks across Arab and Gulf countries, which researchers noted gradually, covered topics from gender roles to promoting peace and tolerance with Jews, as reported by “CNN” on June 19, 2023.
Additionally, in April 2023, the organization released a comprehensive report documenting how Egypt and Arab countries accelerated the process of changing their educational curricula in favor of “Israel” and Jews. An article by the “Yedioth Ahronoth” newspaper on April 23, 2023, detailed the organization's successful pressures and cited examples of its achievements in Egypt.
The Egyptian Ministry of Education issued revised versions of educational curricula in Egypt after removing all previous materials related to Jews, or so-called “anti-Semitism,” following Jewish pressure.
Quoted from the institute monitoring Arab and Gulf educational curricula to provide normalization reports, it reviewed and examined 271 Egyptian textbooks issued for the academic year 2022-2023, covering Arabic language, Islamic studies, social studies, history, geography, and philosophy, noting drastic changes favoring Jews and “Israel.”
“Jewish News” reported on May 24, 2023, that due to these pressures, a Gulf state also removed all materials distorting the “Israel” image from schoolbooks, deleting Quranic ayahs and prophetic hadiths accusing Jews of conspiring against Islam.
The same website also mentioned a 165-page PDF memo detailing the demands presented to a Gulf state, urging the implementation of these demands in their curricula.
Another study conducted by a Jewish organization in collaboration with the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change,” managed by the former British Prime Minister, in September 2021, titled “Teaching Peace and Tolerance in the Arab World Two Decades After September 11,” revealed their success in altering educational curricula in several Arab countries by removing criticisms of Jews and “Israel” from textbooks.
Erasing Gaza's identity
Since the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” “Impact” has taken on the responsibility of a campaign to “eliminate and remove hatred in Palestinian school textbooks” after the occupation claimed that Gaza's educational curricula was behind “Hamas” attacks, calling for the rewriting of the Palestinian curriculum to remove incitement to violence and hatred!
A major campaign has been launched accusing “UNRWA” and its schools in Gaza, as well as some teachers and employees in the United Nations agency, of teaching students to hate Jews and initiate the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” which led to blocking the funding by the United States and several European countries to “UNRWA” on the grounds of correcting its course because it supports terrorism, while calling for the necessity of changing Palestinian curricula, as according to “Fox News” on November 7, 2023.
“Israeli” Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to repeat in American media that the killing of children in Gaza is due to Palestinian mothers teaching their children a desire for death instead of teaching them to cherish life, and that Gaza schools teach students jihad and martyrdom.
He claims that the root of the problem lies in the religious and political extremism propagated by “Hamas” among Palestinians and the educational textbooks in Gaza.
In an attempt to prove this, the occupation’s President Isaac Herzog presented a book at the Munich Security Conference titled “The End of the Jews” to assure that the book “calls for not recognizing the existence of Jews, praises the Holocaust, and calls on countries to follow in the footsteps of the Nazis.”
Social media users mocked him, confirming that the book was not written by Mahmoud al-Zahar, a leader in the “Hamas” movement, as claimed, but rather by an Egyptian researcher in prophetic medicine named Abu al-Fida Muhammad Ezzat.
The War on Education
Under the title “The Open War on Education,” the Palestinian Institute for Studies discussed the systematic and deliberate destruction of all educational institutions, including schools and universities, in Gaza. It pointed out that the occupation's destruction of educational institutions in the Strip was aimed at eradicating all forms of education in Palestine. This was not a new plan but rather a war of over a decade, especially since 2011.
The occupation forces destroyed more than 12 high-level educational institutions, claiming they were strongholds of “Hamas,” including Al-Azhar University, the Islamic University, and Al-Quds Open University.
“Impact” stated that education became a major obsession for the occupation when it began its campaign to distort the Palestinian curricula, especially in East Jerusalem.
The occupation has been launching a propaganda campaign against the Palestinian Authority's educational curricula themselves, claiming they promote terrorism, hatred, and antisemitism and do not adhere to values of tolerance and acceptance of others.
According to the Institute, the occupation waged numerous wars in international forums against the Palestinian Authority's curricula, leading to the freezing of American aid, followed by aid from the European Union, which was allocated for these curricula, which marked the beginning of its open war on the educational sector.
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