Israel-Palestine Mega Fact Check!

Harvard researcher Sara Roy, who spent 25 years living in and studying Palestine as well as researching Hamas, found little evidence of a direct, organized, systemic link between Hamas’s social institutions and the "promulgation of violence.” She writes: “The notion that ISIs [Islamic Social Institutions, like Hamas schools and clinics] were used as a channeling process to socialize and recruit the perpetrators of violent acts against Israel was not plausible despite a relationship between Hamas and the ISI sector." In other words, she did not find any plausible evidence that Hamas schools and medical clinics were being used to recruit or train militants.

This is not to say that there aren’t some teachers that choose to promote hateful ideas towards Israel or Jews in general. Roy’s research only refutes the claim that Hamas systematically uses schools to indoctrinate children into terrorism.

Source: Hamas and Civil Society: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (2011) by Sara Roy.

Here is one account that helps illustrate how some Palestinian children learn to hate Israel. Handala, a doctor from the West Bank, described how as a child he was often prevented from getting to school due to Israel arbitrarily closing certain military checkpoints. Determined to get to school, he would then attempt to bypass these checkpoints, only to be chased and shot at by IDF soldiers. The hours of walking long detours would blister his feet. Soldiers raided his home in the middle of the night on multiple occasions for no apparent reason. His cousin was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper despite, as he says, never throwing stones or making threats. “It was a clear policy to make Palestinian life miserable, so [that] eventually we would leave our homeland. […] As you can see, Palestinian children learn to hate the occupation from the actions of Israeli forces. They don’t teach us at school to hate Israelis; that’s a bulls**t argument. The whole security … argument used to justify the occupation actually exacerbates the security concern itself”.