According to the Palestinian Authority's official school textbooks for grades 6 through 9: • The Canaanites were Arabs…

According to the Palestinian Authority's official school textbooks for grades 6 through 9: • The Canaanites were Arabs • Palestine grew tomatoes and potatoes in the 600s • Muslims invented zero and reached America in the 800s • The Third Crusade was in 1291, sent by "Britain" • George Washington declared independence at the "Third Philadelphia Congress" • World War I was fought by the Axis • Israel burned al-Aqsa • A terrorist who killed 13 children on a bus killed "soldiers" • Ancient Israel did not exist This is what UNRWA and PA schools are teaching to children. Let's take a journey through the Palestinian Authority's fantasy world. 🧵

It starts in the Bronze Age. According to the Palestinian Authority: The Arameans, Canaanites, Akkadians, Assyrians and Amorites were all "Arab tribes" who migrated out of Arabia. In reality: None of these groups were Arabs. The Akkadians and Assyrians were native to Iraq and wrote in Akkadian. The Amorites came from Syria. Sargon of Akkad ruled around 2300 BC, and the first person in history ever called an "Arab" turns up on an Assyrian monument in 853 BC. Referring to all of these people as "Arabs" is like referring to Celts as "English." Source: Grade 6, p.34

According to the Palestinian Authority: "The Canaanites: they are of the Arab tribes that migrated from the Arabian Peninsula." In reality: The Canaanites were absolutely NOT tribes from Arabia. Canaan is in the records by the 1700s BC, a thousand years before anyone is called an Arab. The Canaanites spoke Canaanite languages, and Hebrew is one of them; Arabic isn't. Ancient DNA from Canaanite burials shows local Levantine ancestry and no migration from Arabia. In an attempt to fabricate a 4,000-year Arab claim to the land, the Palestinian Authority pretends that the Canaanites were Arabs. Source: Grade 6, p.44

The Palestinian Authority's historical errors extend far beyond the Levant. Let's see what they say about Mesopotamia. According to the Palestinian Authority: Hammurabi's laws are "the first law in Mesopotamia, and the oldest written laws in human history." In reality: Hammurabi wrote his code around 1754 BC. Mesopotamia already had the Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BC), the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar (c. 1930 BC) and the Laws of Eshnunna. It isn't the first in the world, and it isn't even the first in Mesopotamia. Source: Grade 6, p.62

What came after the Canaanites? According to the Palestinian Authority: The land "fell under the rule of the Pharaohs, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans and the Persians." In reality: Between the Pharaohs and the Assyrians, for roughly 400 years, the land was ruled by the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Then the Assyrians destroyed Israel (722 BC) and the Chaldeans destroyed Judah (586 BC). The book names the conquerors and deletes who they conquered. Israel is on an Egyptian stele from 1208 BC, "the House of David" on a 9th-century stele, and Israelite kings by name in Assyrian records. All of it is gone. In an attempt to deny the connection between the Jews and the Land of Israel, the Palestinian Authority's textbooks erase centuries of well-documented history. Source: Grade 6, p.54

The Palestinian Authority attempts to erase Jewish history, but it presents the Hebrew names. How do they explain it? By calling the Hebrew names "Canaanite." According to the Palestinian Authority: "Shechem (Nablus)" is a Canaanite city, and the Zionist occupation "named its settlements with these Canaanite names, and stole Palestinian national heritage." In reality: Shechem is in Egyptian texts from around 1850 BC, and it never stopped being the city's Hebrew name. "Nablus" is the new name: Roman Flavia Neapolis, founded in 72 AD. Israel didn't steal the ancient name. It kept it. Source: Grade 6, p.52

Onto the Palestinian Authority's history of Arabia. According to the Palestinian Authority: The cities of the Hijaz "maintained their complete independence since antiquity." In reality: They didn't. The Babylonian king Nabonidus moved his court to Tayma, in the Hijaz, for ten years (c. 552–543 BC), and his own inscription lists Yathrib, later Medina, among the oases he took. Rome later stationed a legion detachment at Hegra and left a Latin inscription there (175–177 AD). Source: Grade 6, Part 2, p.14

According to the Palestinian Authority: Before Islam, Iraq, Syria and North Africa were "Arab lands" suffering from Persian, Greek and Roman "occupation." In reality: They weren't Arab lands. Their people spoke Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Berber, and only became Arabic-speaking after the Arab conquest of the 7th century. In the book's terms: Rome ruling Berbers = "occupation" Arabs conquering Berbers = "liberation" Source: Grade 6, Part 2, p.13

How does the Palestinian Authority report on the Arab conquests of North Africa? According to the Palestinian Authority: North Africa, all the way to the Atlantic, was conquered "in the era of Uthman," who died in 656. In reality: Under Uthman, the Arab armies went no farther west than Tunisia, in a single raid in 647 that collected tribute and went home. Morocco was conquered around 700, under the Umayyads. The map is off by half a century and about 2,000 km. Source: Grade 6, Part 2, p.58

The Palestinian Authority wants you to know that the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem was actually quite tolerant. According to the Palestinian Authority: The Pact of Umar, which says "no one of the Jews shall live with them in Jerusalem," is "religious tolerance that has no parallel in the history of civilizations," and "the oldest" document regulating relations between religions. Read that again: The Palestinian Authority says that a total ban on Jews living in Jerusalem is a high point of religious tolerance and, moreover, the first such document in history. Banning a religious group is not religious tolerance. And Rome's Edict of Milan, which granted freedom of religion, came 300 years earlier. Source: Grade 6, Part 2, p.79

Fun fact: The early Islamic conquerors of the Levant were apparently also time travelers. According to the Palestinian Authority: Under the first caliphs (632–661), Palestine grew "tomatoes, potatoes, corn, sugar cane and oranges." In reality: • Tomatoes and potatoes came from the Americas. Nobody outside the Americas saw one until after Columbus, 800 years later. • Bitter oranges first arrived in the 900s, and sweet oranges arrived in the 1500s. Even the Arabic word the book uses for orange—burtuqal—means "Portugal," after the Portuguese traders who brought sweet oranges from Asia to the Mediterranean. Source: Grade 6, Part 2, p.80

On to Grade 7, where Muslims get credit for Indian numerals, and Persians are turned into Arabs. According to the Palestinian Authority: Muslims "took the numeral system from the Indians, and created the zero digit." Read that again: they took the numeral system from India, then invented the zero that was already in it. In reality: Brahmagupta set out the rules of zero in India in 628 AD, before Muhammad had even taken Mecca. The Arabic word for zero, sifr, is a translation of the Sanskrit shunya. Muslim scholars carried zero to Europe. They didn't invent it. Same page: "Among the most famous Arab physicians is Abu Ali Ibn Sina," and the Arabs' "most famous scientist was al-Khwarizmi." Both were Persian. Al-Khwarizmi's name literally means "the man from Khwarezm," in Central Asia. Like they did to the Canaanites, the Palestinian Authority retcons non-Arabs as Arabs. Source: Grade 7, p.67

Grade 7 geography is no better. According to the Palestinian Authority: "The Mongolic language group, among them the Altai language… is spread in Indonesia." The table files Turkish under Mongolic too. In reality: Mongolic languages are spoken in Mongolia and its neighbors, about 5,000 km from Indonesia. Indonesian is Austronesian, a cousin of Tagalog and Hawaiian. Turkish is Turkic. The book even says the languages are sorted by "race." It's 19th-century race science, taught as linguistics. Source: Grade 7, Part 2, p.46

Muslims discovered America! According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: An Andalusian Arab sailed west and "reached South America in the ninth century," and "inscriptions found in Brazil" prove Muslims got there before the Europeans. In reality: The book's own source, al-Idrisi, says those sailors landed on some Atlantic islands, got captured, and were shipped back to Morocco. He never mentions a land across the ocean. And no genuine Muslim inscription has ever been found in Brazil. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, p.17

How does the Palestinian Authority handle the Crusades? Watch the vocabulary. According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: The Crusaders “succeeded in occupying Jerusalem” in 1099 and pursued “a hostile policy toward the original inhabitants of the land,” committing “massacres against its Muslim inhabitants.” Then came “Saladin’s liberation of the city of Jerusalem.” In reality: Islam reached Jerusalem with the Arab conquest of 638, about 460 years before the Crusaders. Jews had lived there for more than 2,000 years, and the Crusaders massacred them too. The book leaves them out. So when Christians conquer Jerusalem, it’s an “occupation.” When Muslims conquer it, it’s a “liberation.” Muslims are the “original inhabitants,” and Jews are not mentioned. And the same page dates the Third Crusade to 1291, sent by “Britain.” It was 1189–92, led by Richard the Lionheart of England. 1291 is the year the last Crusader city fell, and the page itself says the Third Crusade came after the Battle of Hattin, in 1187. Source: Grade 7, Part 2, p.13

So how did Saladin’s “liberation” of Jerusalem go? According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Saladin let the Crusaders leave for a ransom, “as for the poor, he decided to exempt them from payment,” and the Muslims set out “to restore the Arab Islamic character of the city.” In reality: Saladin’s own secretary, Imad al-Din, and the historian Ibn al-Athir report that around 15,000 people who couldn’t pay were taken as slaves. And “restore”? Jerusalem was the city of the Jewish Temple for a thousand years and a Christian city for three centuries before Islam arrived. The man doing the “restoring,” Saladin, was a Kurd. Even the book’s name for Jerusalem, “Bayt al-Maqdis,” comes from the Hebrew “Beit HaMikdash”: the Jewish Temple. The Arabic name of the city remembers what these textbooks erase. Same page: one of Nur al-Din’s pulpits “was installed in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.” That’s the Cave of the Patriarchs, the tomb of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enclosed by King Herod. In 1267 its Muslim rulers barred Jews from entering. The ban lasted 700 years, until 1967. Source: Grade 7, Part 2, p.24

According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Until the 15th century, Europeans “thought that the earth was flat, and not spherical.” In reality: Medieval Europeans knew the earth was round. Bede wrote so in the 700s, and the standard astronomy textbook in medieval universities was literally titled “On the Sphere” (Sacrobosco, c. 1230). The flat-earth story is a 19th-century myth. The lesson’s stated goal? Showing “the role of the Arabs and Muslims” in the discoveries. In other words, ignorant Europeans thought that the earth was flat, unlike enlightened Arabs, who knew better. This is, of course, not true. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, p.12

According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Spain discovered “the Canary Islands (San Salvador), the Cape Verde Islands,” Cuba and Honduras. In reality: San Salvador is in the Bahamas, where Columbus first landed in 1492, about 6,000 km from the Canaries. That’s like writing “Hawaii (Manhattan).” And Cape Verde was discovered by Portugal, not Spain. Sloppy. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, p.16

American history, PA-style. According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: “George Washington declared the independence of the American colonies from Britain in 1776, in what was known as the Third Philadelphia Congress.” In reality: Washington didn’t declare anything. The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration on July 4, in a text Thomas Jefferson drafted. Washington wasn’t even in Philadelphia; he was in New York commanding the army. And there was no “Third” congress. The page before also teaches the Boston Tea Party. Why? Because this page asks students to discuss “Boycotting Zionist goods as a tool of Palestinian resistance.” In this lesson, Israel is the British Empire. One problem: the book’s own word for the boycotting colonists is “mustawtinin,” the same word it uses for Israeli settlers. The heroes of the analogy are settlers, dressed up as the natives they displaced. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, pp.35–36

The PA's attempts at retelling US history get better/worse as you keep reading. According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: “I compare the tragedy of the Red Indians [al-hunud al-humr], the original inhabitants of America, with the tragedy of the Palestinian people.” So on page 33, the Palestinians are the Native Americans. By page 35, they’re the American settlers, dressed up as Native Americans. The pictures it chose to illustrate the comparison: British redcoats, and Palestinian refugees in 1948. No Native Americans. The lesson can’t decide which side of its own analogy it’s on. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, p.33

Back to Palestine, 1799, where the PA mistakes Cairo for Jaffa and Ottoman soldiers for “Palestinians.” According to a Palestinian Authority textbook quiz: “The French committed a number of massacres against the Palestinians, the most prominent being the massacre of ___.” (Answer: Jaffa.) In reality: The best-known victims at Jaffa were thousands of surrendered Ottoman soldiers, many of them Albanian, shot and bayoneted on the beach. Once again, the book retcons them as “Palestinians.” Bonus: the painting the book uses for the “Jaffa massacre”? Look behind Napoleon. Those are pyramids. It’s Antoine-Jean Gros’s “Battle of the Pyramids” (1810), a battle fought outside Cairo in 1798. Sloppy. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, p.66

So who stopped Napoleon? According to the Palestinian Authority, “the Palestinians”! According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: An entire section is titled “The Palestinians’ resistance to the French campaign.” It credits the rebels of Nablus, the “unity” of the countryside, and Acre’s walls and “the bravery of its defenders.” In reality, Acre was saved by: • Ahmad al-Jazzar, its Ottoman 🇹🇷 governor, born in Bosnia 🇧🇦 • The British 🇬🇧 Royal Navy under Sir Sidney Smith, which captured Napoleon’s siege guns at sea and turned them on him • Antoine de Phélippeaux, a French 🇫🇷 royalist engineer and Napoleon’s old classmate, who designed the defenses • Plague 🦠, which tore through the French army A Bosnian, an Englishman, a Frenchman and the plague. Not one of the people who decided the siege was Arab. Local Arab villagers around Nablus did ambush French columns, but that was a footnote. The book turns the footnote into the main event and calls it “the Palestinians.” The PA’s explanation of Acre includes zero mentions of the British Royal Navy, Phélippeaux, or the plague. Bonus: the painting captioned “Resistance of the locals” is Lejeune’s “Battle of Aboukir,” a French victory over an Ottoman army in Egypt. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, pp.64–65

Meet the PA’s first “Zionist settlement”: Jerusalem’s own Jews, living in charity housing outside the Old City walls in 1856. According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: “The Zionist movement established its first settlements… known as Montefiore, in 1856.” The same sentence goes straight on to “settlements that include training camps and weapons depots.” In reality: “Montefiore” refers to Mishkenot Sha’ananim, rent-free charity housing for poor Jews from Jerusalem’s overcrowded Old City, paid for by the British philanthropist Moses Montefiore and finished in 1860. It came decades before any Zionist movement: the word “Zionism” was coined in 1890, and the first Zionist Congress met in 1897. They were not immigrants in any sense. They were Jerusalem’s own Jews, moving a few hundred meters outside the city walls. In the 1860s, Jews were the largest community in Jerusalem. To the Palestinian Authority, Jews living in Jerusalem at all counts as a “Zionist settlement.” Source: Grade 9, p.10

When did “Palestinian armed resistance” begin, and what were they “resisting”? According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: “Palestinian armed resistance began with the start of Zionist immigration to Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century.” Its goal, says the same page: “freedom, independence, and building the state.” In reality: At the end of the 19th century, there was no Israel, no British Mandate, and no “Zionist occupation.” What the book calls “resistance” is violence against Jewish immigrants, like the 1886 raid on the new farming village of Petah Tikva. The land was occupied by the Ottoman Empire, which the page never mentions. In fact, across grades 7–9, the PA never once calls four centuries of Ottoman occupation an “occupation.” And “independence”? Thirteen pages later, the same book says: “The concept of independence did not enter our Arab society until after the fall of the Ottoman state.” Notice the vocabulary. When locals rose against the Ottomans who actually occupied them, the PA calls it “separatist movements.” When they attacked Jewish immigrants, it becomes “resistance” for “independence.” What were they resisting? Jews moving in. Source: Grade 9, pp.59, 72

How does the PA explain Ottoman Palestine? As a country the Ottomans carved up. According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Students learn “the administrative divisions of Palestine under Ottoman rule.” “The Ottomans divided Palestine into five sanjaks [districts].” In reality: “Palestine” was a region, like “the Midwest.” It was never an Ottoman province or district, so there was nothing to divide. The districts didn’t even match today’s borders: the sanjak of Safed reached into what is now southern Lebanon. The book’s own map says so: Province of Acre, Province of Damascus. “Palestine” appears only in the caption, an anachronistic label pasted onto an Ottoman map. And the PA knows it. The Grade 7 book admits Palestine’s borders “were drawn by the British occupation (the Mandate).” Source: Grade 8, pp.91–92; Grade 7, Part 2, p.49

Meet the PA’s heroes of 1929: three men hanged for cold-blooded murders in the Hebron and Safed massacres. According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Britain used execution to “terrorize peoples” when “it executed three of the Palestinian revolutionaries”: Muhammad Jamjoum, Ata al-Zir and Fuad Hijazi, “in the wake of the Buraq Revolt of 1929.” In reality: The “Buraq Revolt” was the 1929 riots, in which Arab mobs killed 133 Jews, 67 of them in the Hebron massacre. The three were convicted of murders in Hebron and Safed. The name comes from al-Buraq, the Arabic name for the Western Wall. The riots were whipped up by rumors that Jews planned to seize al-Aqsa, after a dispute over Jewish prayer at the wall. Most of Hebron’s Jews belonged to an old, religious community that had lived there for centuries. In other words, this wasn’t a “revolt.” It was a pogrom. The book lists the hangings under “repressive colonial methods,” right after the massacres it remembers. Hebron isn’t one of them. So the massacre of Jews disappears, and the punishment of its murderers becomes colonial terror. Source: Grade 9, p.38

The Palestinian Authority’s social studies textbooks achieve an incredible feat: teaching World War II without a single mention of Hitler, Nazis, Jews, or the Holocaust. Mussolini gets a line, because he invaded Libya. Hitler doesn’t. What the World Wars lesson does have: a map of each World War, with the captions swapped. Source: Grade 9, Part 2, pp.52–53

1948, according to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Britain handed Palestine to the Zionists. In reality, British officers led an Arab army AGAINST Israel, and Egypt and Jordan walked off with the “West Bank” (Judea & Samaria) and Gaza. Exact quote: “Britain helped the Zionist movement occupy Palestine in 1948.” What does that even mean? It’s not explained. In reality: • 1939: Britain capped Jewish immigration, as Jews fled Hitler. • 1947: Britain abstained on the UN partition plan. • 1948: British officers commanded Jordan’s Arab Legion, which fought Israel and took the Old City of Jerusalem. The PA textbooks mention none of this. Mandate Palestine was a building with a British landlord and two sets of tenants, Jews and Arabs. When the landlord left, the UN proposed splitting it. The Jews said yes. The Arabs said no, and five Arab armies invaded, hoping to grab pieces for themselves. The Jews won. The Arab armies did grab some pieces. From 1948 to 1967, Egypt held Gaza and Jordan annexed the “West Bank” and East Jerusalem. Nineteen years, and no Palestinian state. Their treasured homeland was occupied by foreign Arab states for nearly two decades, and the PA’s history books don’t mention it once. Source: Grade 8, Part 2, p.56

The Palestinian Authority teaches that Eisenhower was Israel’s bodyguard. He’s the president who forced Israel to hand Gaza back to Egypt. According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Eisenhower’s 1957 plan rested on “four pillars,” one of them “guaranteeing the security of the Zionist occupation.” Students are asked to discuss its goals. In reality: The Eisenhower Doctrine was about stopping Soviet influence. It doesn’t mention Israel at all. And in 1957, Eisenhower did the opposite of guaranteeing Israel: he pressured it, under threat of sanctions, to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza after the Suez war. This was a decade when the US wouldn’t even sell Israel weapons. And who got Gaza back? Egypt, which went on ruling it for another ten years. The PA never finds Egypt’s occupation of Gaza important enough to mention. Source: Grade 9, p.8

According to Palestinian Authority textbooks: Zionists took Jerusalem in 1967 and “turned the Buraq Wall into the (Wailing) Wall,” one of their “measures aimed at obliterating Arab Islamic landmarks.” To add insult to injury, they also opened “Zionist synagogues in the Old City.” The textbook drives home this point by giving students a quiz question about it. In reality: Jews were recorded praying at the wall in the 1500s, and English travelers were calling it the Wailing Wall in the 1800s. In 1930, the League of Nations set up a commission on “the Western or Wailing Wall.” The idea that the Kotel (Western Wall) is important to Jews is not a recent invention. The PA’s own books undercut it. They call the 1929 riots the “Buraq Revolt,” named for the wall, because the violence grew out of a dispute over Jews—I mean, Zionists—praying there. That’s 38 years before 1967. And from 1948 to 1967, Jordan barred Jews from the wall entirely and destroyed the synagogues of the Jewish Quarter. Destroying synagogues: not mentioned. Rebuilding those same synagogues: “obliterating Arab Islamic landmarks.” Source: Grade 7, pp.61–62

The Palestinian Authority’s 9th-grade “economics lesson” is a greatest hits album of completely insane conspiracy theories. “The occupation” (Israel): • “worked to pollute the Palestinian environment with radioactive and chemical materials, which led to a rise in the rates of serious diseases, foremost among them cancer” • flooded its markets with “spoiled goods… such as cars” • released “herds of pigs that harmed the inhabitants and their crops.” This is all nonsense, obviously, but the bigger takeaway is that this is supposed to be an ECONOMICS LESSON. The lesson also accuses “the occupation” of strangling the Palestinian economy. Back in reality, before October 7, Israel was issuing thousands of work permits to Gazans, in the hope that prosperity would mean less terror. Didn’t work. Source: Grade 9, p.21