(This essay is based on Dr. Medoff ’s remarks at the recent summer institute, in Oxford, of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.)
Summer is drawing to a close, and many American children will be left with warm memories of summer camps where they enjoyed nature hikes, arts and crafts, and singing around the campfire.
Many Palestinian Arab children attend summer camps, too. But their experiences are rather different.
Fatah, the ruling faction of the Palestinian Authority, has just wrapped up its “Fatah Army Summer Camp.” On the Facebook page of the Fatah Nablus Branch, Secretary-General Muhammad Hamdan explained that the 200 boys and girls were trained “to continue the path of the Martyrs and prisoners [i.e. terrorists] towards freedom and independence.”
Photos on the page show the campers dressed in military fatigues, marching alongside members of the PA Security Forces (PASF) who are holding Kalashnikov assault rifles.
Meanwhile, children attending the Lajee Center summer camp in Palestinian Authority-governed Bethlehem were greeted each morning by a huge mural at the camp entrance. At an American summer camp, such a mural would feature farm animals, flowers, and sunshine.
Not at the Lajee camp. Its mural showed a skeleton wielding a bloody knife in one hand and a bomb with a lit fuse in the other, and wearing a bandana in the colors of the PLO flag.
The walls surrounding the Lajee camp’s soccer field were decorated with a gigantic skull in a keffiyeh, and a larger-than-life photo of masked Arabs throwing rocks at Jews, with the slogan “Resistance until liberation and return.”
Another wall featured a painting of a large key, the longtime PLO symbol for the “right” of millions of Palestinian Arabs to “return” to Israel. The key was flanked by the year “1948,” a reminder that their demand is to flood into pre-1967 Israel, not the PA-controlled territories.
In photos on the Lajee Center’s Facebook page, campers are shown running through military-style obstacle courses, filling water balloons with the words “Return 1948” on them, and painting maps with all of Israel labeled “Palestine.”
(Translations courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)
Unfortunately, camps such as the Fatah Army camp and the Lajee Center camp are the rule, not the exception. There are 650 such summer camps run by the Palestinian Authority each year, which more than 65,000 Arab youngsters attend.
There are historical precedents for the way Palestinian Arab children are being trained.
Historians have noted that members and alumni of the Hitler Youth movement were among the most fanatical participants in Holocaust atrocities, from forcing Jews to scrub the streets of Vienna with toothbrushes in 1938, to the mass shooting of Jews swimming from sinking boats in the German harbor of Lubeck in 1945.
Menachem Weinryb, an Auschwitz survivor who was forced to take part in a death march from Poland to Germany, recalled how when the prisoners reached the Belsen area on April 13, 1945, the German guards went to a nearby town “and returned with a lot of young people from the Hitler Youth [and local policemen]…They chased us all into a large barn…we were five to six thousand people…[They] poured out petrol and set the barn on fire. Several thousand people were burned alive.”
The young Germans who carried out such atrocities had spent their entire childhoods in schools where they were inculcated with antisemitism, glorification of violence, and dreams of German expansion.
In off-the-record remarks to reporters in 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt noted that the Hitler regime was preparing young people for war with Germany’s neighbors. He related a story he heard from an American tourist in Germany, about an eight year-old German boy who in his bedtime prayers each night would say, “Dear God, please permit it that I shall die with a French bullet in my heart.”
During World War Two, Disney created a series of short cartoon films to support the American war effort and expose the nature of Nazism. One nine-minute film was called “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.” It showed German schoolchildren being taught that Germans are “an unconquerable super race” who will “destroy all weak and cowardly nations.”
The phrase “Education for Death” accurately summarizes what is taught in PA schools, too. Then-U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton warned in 2007 that “[the PA’s] textbooks do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination.” They are “encouraged to see martyrdom and armed struggle and the murder of innocent people as ideals to strive for,” she said. The PA “profoundly poisons the minds of these children. . . . [It is] a clear example of child abuse.”
Evoking the themes in her book It Takes a Village, concerning the communal influences that shape children’s lives, Sen. Clinton warned that Palestinian Arab hate education would have “dire consequences for prospects of peace for generations to come.” She was right. Children raised on those teachings carried out the October 7 atrocities.
The perpetrators of the Holocaust were not born Nazis. The perpetrators of October 7 were not born killers. They had to be educated for those roles. And the perpetrators of the next October 7 are being trained right now, in the schools and summer camps of the Palestinian Authority.
Dr. Medoff’s new book, The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews is now available wherever books are sold.
