How the Palestinian Authority Incubates the jihād Executed by Hamas

11 December 2025

The Palestinian Curriculum: Incubator of Rejectionism

It is a peculiar and persistent delusion among the diplomatic salons of Brussels and the editorial boards of the West that the Palestinian Authority represents a secular, moderate bulwark against the theocratic mania of Hamas. This is not merely a misreading of the tea leaves; it is a grotesque masquerade that collapses the moment one opens a Palestinian textbook. As I shall make it uncomfortably clear, we are not witnessing two opposing political species, but rather a single, lethal continuum of rejectionism. The Authority functions as the incubator, a government-sponsored laboratory where the mind is systematically poisoned from the first grade; Hamas is merely the executioner, the kinetic expression of a curriculum that has elevated the death drive to a collective sport.

Consider, if you have the stomach for it, the “pedagogical machine” currently humming away in Ramallah. It is a system that does not teach children how to live, but how to die. In a perversion of education that would make a totalitarian blush, the concept of jihād is stripped of any nuance and presented as the “pinnacle of faith,” while the act of martyrdom is sold to impressionable adolescents as a “wedding” to be consummated with seventy-two virgins. Even the immutable laws of physics are drafted into this squalid service: Newton’s laws are demonstrated not by apples falling, but by slingshots firing, and mathematics is taught by calculating the body counts of “martyrs.” This is not a curriculum; it is a child abuse scandal masquerading as a syllabus.

The result of this anti-rational meme is Khaled Mashal and his cohorts in Gaza. When the Hamas leadership stares at a 50-to-1 kill ratio and the ruin of their territory, yet declares victory because “the angels have not laid down their weapons,” they are not hallucinating. They are simply reciting the lesson plan. They are the perfect graduates of a school system that has surgically excised the error-correction mechanism from the Palestinian psyche, replacing empirical reality with a closed and self-referential narrative of divine intervention and eternal victimhood.

And who plays the role of the indulger in this suicide pact? Who underwrites this static society where time stands still and maps are drawn without Israel? It is the European Union. Despite high-minded roadmaps and reports detailing this “deeply problematic content,” the EU has acted as the credulous paymaster, signing checks to the tune of €1.6 billion without a single mechanism to verify that the hate-producing machinery has been removed. By funding a system that denies reality, Europe has become a silent partner in the incubation of a mind that cannot distinguish between a classroom and a recruitment office. It is a subsidy for oblivion, paid for with the taxpayer’s coin and the Palestinian child’s future.

The Continuum of Rejectionism

The current strategic landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally misunderstood. The Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas and other Palestinian jihādist groups do not represent opposing political forces. Instead, they are two distinct stages on a single ideological continuum of rejectionism. The PA functions as the systematic incubator of this worldview, engineering a pedagogical machine that seeds the minds of children with victimhood, antisemitism, and a fundamental denial of reality. Hamas and their brethren-in-arms, in turn, acts as the inevitable executioner, translating this indoctrination into a kinetic strategy of suicidal delusion. I this essay, I shall shed light on this continuum, tracing the direct line from the foundational indoctrination within the PA’s government-sponsored curriculum to its ultimate manifestation in the strategic and tactical actions of Hamas and other groups (from now Hamas represent all other Palestinian jihādist groups). At the end, I aim to conclude with a philosophical diagnosis of this shared worldview, revealing it to be a self-imposed sentence to strategic failure.

The Incubator

A government-sponsored curriculum is a strategic document that reveals a regime’s long-term theory of victory. The Palestinian Authority’s 2025-2026 curriculum is not designed to build a state but to perpetuate a conflict. Its foundational pillars are engineered to create a population psychologically incapable of peace, ensuring that any political engagement is merely a tactical pause in a permanent war. To understand the strategic choices of Palestinian actors today, one must first grasp these foundational pillars of indoctrination.

The Systemic Erasure of Reality

The PA curriculum’s primary function is to deny the historical and physical existence of the State of Israel. This is not a subtle omission but a systematic and comprehensive erasure of reality itself.

• Cartographic Denial: Maps used in textbooks invariably depict a single state of “Palestine” with borders identical to those of the British Mandate, completely eliminating Israel from the map.
• Linguistic Negation: Israel is almost never referred to by name. Instead, it is consistently labeled with pejorative epithets like the “Zionist occupation” or the “Zionist entity,” framing its existence as illegitimate and temporary.
• Historical Purging: The curriculum has been scrubbed of any reference to an ancient Jewish historical presence in the land. Mentions of the Kingdom of Judea or the Bar Kokhba revolt have been excised. Even sacred sites are re-contextualised; the Western Wall is taught exclusively as an Islamic site, the “al-buraq” Wall, with any Jewish connection dismissed as a fabrication.

The Glorification of Violence and Martyrdom

The curriculum systematically indoctrinates children to value death over life, transforming violence from a tragic necessity into a celebrated virtue.

• The Doctrine of jihād: The concept of jihād is stripped of its alternative interpretations and is taught almost exclusively as a “violent external struggle.” It is presented as a religious duty and the “pinnacle of faith,” framing political violence as a sacred calling.
• To fully grasp the mechanics of this indoctrination, one need only quantify the vocabulary deployed in a single Grade 8 Islamic Education lesson. On pages 100–102 of the curriculum review, the text performs a semantic weaving that entraps the child’s imagination in a web of sanctified violence. In this brief section alone, the command “to kill” (qātala) appears nine times, intertwined with nine invocations of jihād and three references to the shahīd (martyr), all anchored by fourteen invocations of allāh. This repetition is not accidental; it is a linguistic bombardment designed to fuse the sacred with the lethal, leaving the impressionable mind with no theological escape route: to worship is to fight, and to kill is to obey.
• The Cult of Martyrdom: Martyrdom (shahādah) is celebrated as a “wedding,” a glorious transition to a paradise where rewards include “seventy-two beautiful women.” This worldview is inculcated from the earliest ages; first-grade children learn the letter “هاء hāʾ” through the word shahīd (martyr).
• Politicisation of Neutral Subjects: This normalisation of violence permeates the entire curriculum. Newton’s laws of motion are taught using images of slingshots, an icon of the conflict. Mathematics exercises ask students to calculate the number of “martyrs” in an uprising, embedding the calculus of death into the logic of numbers. Extreme violence is rendered mundane through language; a grammar exercise uses the Arabic word for “strewn remains” (ashlāa’), normalising a term associated with the dismemberment of bodies.

Antisemitism as Institutional Pedagogy

The PA’s educational framework promotes a deeply antisemitic worldview, attributing immutable and evil characteristics to Jews as a people.

• Stereotypical Depictions: Jews are consistently depicted as “deceitful, manipulative, or inherently corrupt enemies of Islam.” Textbooks revive centuries-old libels, such as the canard that Jews control global “financial and media institutions,” and attribute inherent traits like “cowardice and slyness” to them.
• Explicit Teacher Directives: This is not left to interpretation. Official teacher guides explicitly instruct educators on how to transmit this hate. One guide directs teachers to inform students that “the Zionists are the terrorists of the modern age and they are fated to disappear.” This transforms textbook content into a mandatory pedagogical practice.

The Deliberate Rejection of Peace

Perhaps the most damning evidence of the curriculum’s purpose is its deliberate and systematic removal of all references to past peace agreements or reconciliation efforts. Peace is not presented as a value or a strategic goal. The curriculum has excised Yasser Arafat’s historic call for a “new era of peace” and the PLO’s official renunciation of violence. In place of diplomacy and coexistence, students are offered only a bleak vision of protracted “Resistance” (muqāwamah) until the inevitable, violent demise of the Zionist entity.

This carefully constructed worldview, however, does not remain theoretical. It finds its ultimate and most catastrophic expression in the actions and ideology of Hamas.

The Executioner

This section examines the strategic posture and worldview of Hamas, as articulated by its leadership. Hamas’s strategy is not an independent or radical departure from the Palestinian mainstream; rather, it is the logical and catastrophic endpoint of the educational foundation laid by the PA. If the classroom teaches that reality can be denied, the battlefield becomes the arena for acting upon that denial.

The Delusion of Divine Victory

Hamas’s worldview is fundamentally impervious to empirical reality. In a December 2025 address, leader Khaled Mashal declared victory despite the “comprehensive strategic annihilation” of the organization’s military capabilities between 2023 and 2025. Facing a devastating 50-to-1 kill ratio, Mashal did not reassess his strategy but instead retreated into “theological reassurance,” claiming that “the angels have not laid down their weapons yet.” This retreat from causality is not just a theological coping mechanism; it is a strategic pathology that makes iterative learning and adaptation impossible.

Perpetual War as Identity

Aligning perfectly with the PA curriculum’s glorification of jihād, Hamas views violence not as a political tactic to achieve specific aims but as the core of its identity. Mashal asserts that rights are not secured at the UN Security Council but “at the recruitment office.” He frames the conflict as an “unending battle,” where “the resistance and its weapons... are the honor and glory of the Islamic nation.” Strategically, this transforms violence from a negotiable instrument of policy into a non-negotiable component of identity, guaranteeing conflict without end or achievable objective.

Strategic Blindness and Self-Inflicted Oblivion

The “closed and self-referential narrative” that Hamas inhabits has led it into a strategic cul-de-sac. Mashal claimed the October 7 massacre was a “geopolitical triumph” that turned Israel into a “pariah.” The reality was the opposite. The conflict catalysed a new regional architecture in which Israel consolidated its position as the dominant military power and became a critical “geographic hinge” for global trade. By believing its own propaganda—a direct product of the anti-reality education system—Hamas led its people not to victory, but into oblivion.

The link between the PA’s classroom and Hamas’s battlefield is therefore not circumstantial but causal, direct, and undeniable.

The Convergence

The purpose of this section is to draw a crystal-clear, evidence-based line between the theoretical indoctrination taught by the Palestinian Authority and the kinetic actions executed by Hamas. The former provides the mental landscape that the latter tragically inhabits.

PA Curriculum (The Incubator)

Hamas Worldview (The Executioner)

The PA removes Israel from the map.

Hamas acts to “expel this [Israeli] entity” from reality.

The PA teaches that Jews are “fated to disappear.”

Hamas attempts to execute that disappearance.

The PA teaches that jihād is a “personal obligation.”

Hamas declares that “the battle is not over.”

This direct parallel illustrates a unified ideological project. As one analysis notes, the education provided in UNRWA schools using the PA curriculum is the “womb that gave birth to Palestinian nationalism” and its core dream: “to wake up one morning to an Arab state from the river to the sea—without Jews.” In this context, the October 7 massacre was not an aberration from the Palestinian cause but “the deepest realization” of the education provided by the Palestinian Authority.

To understand why this unified worldview is so inherently self-defeating, we must turn to a deeper, philosophical diagnosis of its core pathology.

It is a revealing exercise to trace the trajectory of a single line of scripture—surah al-anfāl (8:60)—through the arteries of this ideology. The Muslim Brothers, the progenitor of modern Islamist movements, historically adopted a single, ominous word from this verse as its slogan: “Prepare.” Khaled Mashal, in his December address, expanded this to a fragment of six words, summoning the faithful to gather strength to secure their rights not through diplomacy but at the “recruitment office.” Yet, it is the Palestinian Authority—the ostensible moderate in this equation—that displays the most unbridled militancy. As documented on page 102 by Agassi, the PA curriculum does not content itself with fragments; it commands Grade 8 students to digest the verse in its entirety: “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy.” Thus, the “secular” PA serves as the most comprehensive theological conduit, injecting the full, unredacted imperative of terror into the minds of children, effectively providing the maximalist software that Hamas merely runs.

A Framework for Failure

To move beyond a mere description of this pathology to a functional diagnosis, we must apply a more powerful analytical framework. The work of physicist David Deutsch on the nature of societal progress provides a clinical lens through which to understand the PA-Hamas continuum as a textbook case of a “Static Society” built upon “anti-rational memes”—ideas that actively prevent learning, suppress criticism, and guarantee societal stagnation and failure.

Anti-Rational Memes and the Suppression of Error Correction

Deutsch defines anti-rational memes as ideas that are structured to prevent their own improvement. They suppress criticism, enforce conformity through powerful taboos, and destroy creativity. The PA curriculum is a highly effective delivery system for such memes. By forbidding the teaching of Jewish history, punishing dissent, and framing peace as treason, the PA systematically disables its society’s “error-correction mechanism.” Hamas is the ultimate result of this process: a movement pathologically incapable of adaptation. When faced with the “catastrophic prediction error” of its failed war, its hermetically sealed worldview prevents learning. Instead of correcting its strategy, it retreats deeper into the bad explanation of angels intervening on its behalf.

Bad Explanations vs. Reality

Deutsch distinguishes between good explanations, which are hard-to-vary and constrained by reality, and bad explanations, which are easy-to-vary myths. The Palestinian national narrative is built upon a foundation of bad explanations. When the PA teaches that Israel releases “wild boars” to destroy crops or that Jews are inherently “corrupt,” these are parochial conspiracy theories designed to maintain stasis, not to explain the world.

In stark contrast, Israel, facing its own “cognitive collapse” after October 7, acted as a “Dynamic Society.” It engaged in radical adaptation, conjecture, and criticism to solve the existential problems it faced. It updated its strategic models and leveraged technology (the F-35I Adir) to survive and thrive. One society used error correction to solve problems; the other remained trapped in a suicidal loop, sustained by bad explanations.

The Rejection of Optimism

At the core of Deutsch’s philosophy is the “Principle of Optimism”: the idea that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge and are therefore soluble. All problems can be solved through the creation of new knowledge. The PA and Hamas fundamentally reject this principle. They teach that the problem of Israel’s existence is insoluble except through apocalyptic violence. By rejecting peace education and demonising humanitarian values, they deny their children the intellectual tools required to solve problems creatively. They lock their society into a state of permanent misery where problems are never solved, only perpetuated.

This self-defeating framework is not sustained in a vacuum; it is enabled by a paradoxical dynamic of international funding.

The Paradox of International Complicity

The role of international aid in this dynamic has not been a solution but a key component of the problem. Despite the PA curriculum’s clear and documented violation of international UNESCO standards, a cycle of “commitments without delivery,” funded largely by the European Union, has allowed this system of indoctrination to continue unabated for years. This dynamic reveals a deeply entrenched system of strategic inertia, where the international community’s stated goals of reform are consistently subordinated to the perceived political necessity of maintaining the PA as a nominally stable entity, regardless of its ideological function.

A clear timeline of unfulfilled promises emerged between 2021 and 2025. In 2021, an EU-funded report from the Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) documented the curriculum’s “deeply problematic content,” prompting the EU to establish roadmaps for reform. This was followed by high-profile pledges, including a public commitment by PA President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN General Assembly in September 2025 to reform the curriculum “in accordance with UNESCO standards.”

These international commitments were systematically contradicted by domestic messaging. The PA Foreign Minister deferred any responsibility for reform, claiming it could not be achieved “under occupation.” More bluntly, the PA Ministry of Education asserted in Palestinian media that “not a single word has been omitted or changed in textbooks.” The 2025-2026 curriculum confirmed this was true.

Despite this, European conditionality failed. The European Commission repeatedly approved new funding packages, including a €1.6 billion program in April 2025, without establishing any “independent content-change verification mechanism.” This failure to enforce its own standards effectively meant that foreign funds continued to enable the PA to maintain its static, radical, and conflict-oriented curriculum.

The Lethal Strategy of Anti-Reality

A worldview divorced from reality is a lethal strategy. The one incubated by the Palestinian Authority and executed by Hamas is no exception. The PA curriculum nurtures a mind that cannot distinguish between the finite game of terror and the infinite game of building a thriving civilisation. Hamas is the kinetic and tragic expression of that profound incapacity.

Applying the Deutschian framework provides a final, powerful diagnosis: the tragedy of the Palestinian cause under its current leadership is its reliance on dogma over truth, on bad explanations over verifiable reality. It is the choice to seek rights “at the recruitment office” rather than through the creation of knowledge, value, and a society capable of solving its own problems. Until a fundamental transition is made from a Static Society reliant on anti-rational memes to a Dynamic Society capable of error correction and optimism, the Palestinian people will remain trapped in a chasm of delusion, waiting for angels that will never arrive.

We arrive, then, at a conclusion that is as inescapable as it is nauseating. The machinery of this static society—one that suppresses error correction in favour of a suicidal loop—is not self-sustaining. It runs on the high-octane fuel of European generosity. When the Palestinian Ministry of Education boasts to its domestic audience that “not a single word has been omitted” from its hate-filled texts, while simultaneously pocketing a €1.6 billion tranche from Brussels, we are witnessing a fraud of continental proportions.

Let us be under no illusions about what this money buys. It does not purchase peace; it purchases the next generation of “martyrs” who are taught that the laws of physics are best understood through the trajectory of a slingshot. By refusing to enforce a verification mechanism, the international community has become the silent partner in a strategic pathology. We are, quite literally, subsidising the anti-rational memes that lock the Palestinian people in a permanent state of misery, waiting for angels to intervene while they are led into the abattoir of history. Until the paymasters demand that the schoolhouse stops serving as the anteroom to the grave, we are not witnessing a tragedy, but a crime.

References:

Arik Agassi, 202511, Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum: Grades 1-12 Selected Examples. IMPACT-se.

Khaled Salih, 20251210, “A Chasm of Delusion: Hamas’s Rhetoric in the Face of Strategic Reality.” https://khaledsalih.substack.com/p/a-chasm-of-delusion-hamass-rhetoric