This week, I want to pull JNR’s camera back from the trending headlines and point it at two places the mainstream media rarely lingers long enough to understand: Gaza’s operational reality, and the Palestinian classroom.
Because if you only consume the drive-by version of this war, you’d think Israel wakes up each morning, stretches, pours a coffee, and says, “You know what would really hit today? Dropping bombs on children.” That narrative may be emotionally satisfying and algorithmically profitable, but it is journalistically lazy. It erases Hamas’s deliberate embedding inside civilian infrastructure, it ignores what “protected” spaces are actually used for, and it turns targeted counter-terror strikes into indistinguishable “Israeli attacks” with no actors, no context, and no causality.
Most JNR readers know I am a two state solution guy, despite all evidence that Hamas and most Palestinians really just want Israel to go away more than they want a homeland to grow an economy, a culture, and a peaceful place to raise children. I want peace. Real peace. For Palestinian children and Israeli children, Muslim and Jewish. Not theoretical peace. Not performative peace. Not hashtag peace. Actual peace. The kind that means classrooms without indoctrination, lives without fear, and futures that do not end in funerals.
But peace does not come from wishing. It comes from telling the truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable.
Recent reporting from the field tells a far more complicated story than the headlines allow. The IDF has released operational footage showing Hamas moving armed personnel and weapons via ambulances from a hospital to a school in northern Gaza. Senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders tied directly to October 7, hostage captivity, and active force rebuilding have been targeted and eliminated. Smuggling networks exploiting crossings and ceasefire conditions have been exposed, functioning as Hamas’s logistical and financial back office. None of this absolves Israel of scrutiny. All of it explains why civilian suffering in Gaza is not accidental, and not one-sided. When armed groups embed themselves inside hospitals, schools, and humanitarian systems by design, those systems become part of the battlefield whether the cameras acknowledge it or not.
And yet even this is not the deepest failure of coverage. Because even if the shooting stopped tomorrow, even if every tunnel were sealed and every border reopened, the conflict would still be quietly reproducing itself somewhere far less visible than the battlefield. In the classroom.
If you want to understand why every ceasefire collapses and every peace initiative feels like theater, start there. According to documentation compiled by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, Palestinian children are not being educated toward coexistence. They are still being conditioned, step by step, for Israel/Jewish eradication and conflict.
As early as age six, one of their first vocabulary words is shahīd, martyr. Not apple. Not friend. Martyr. By seven or eight, children memorize poems urging them to give their lives to the revolution and carry its flame to Haifa and Jaffa, cities inside Israel. Elementary school pupils color maps of “Palestine” that erase Israel entirely, often paired with blood imagery. A fourth-grade math problem asks students to calculate the number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings, illustrated with coffins at a mass funeral. Even physics is weaponized, with Newton’s laws taught using images of masked boys firing slingshots at Israeli soldiers.
By early adolescence, the indoctrination is no longer implicit. It is explicit. Students are taught to venerate Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led the massacre of 38 Israelis including 13 children, as a heroic role model. Jews are described as “the terrorists of the modern age,” not as individuals or a people, but as a singular evil force. Teachers’ guides instruct educators to deduct points if students fail to link so-called Zionist crimes to Jewish religious belief.
By the teenage years, the message is unmistakable. Violent jihad is presented as the highest religious ideal and a personal obligation rewarded with paradise. Reading comprehension exercises feature suicide bombers and knife attacks, images students are instructed not to forget. By seventeen, pupils are urged to return to Israeli cities with weapons in hand. After more than a decade of sequential conditioning, their highest aspiration is not to live well, but to die killing Jews.
This is not an educational failure. It is a system. A conveyor belt. And no two-state solution can survive while one side is systematically teaching its children that the other has no right to exist.
Which brings us to the most revealing silence of all. Where are the politicians, activists, celebrities, and self-appointed moral guardians who flood our streets and screens with declarations of justice and liberation? Where is their outrage when Palestinian children are being psychologically vandalized in classrooms funded by Western money? Where is the courage to call this what it is: abuse.
If this were happening to their own children, the outrage would be immediate and deafening. Press conferences. Emergency hearings. Endless coverage. But because the victims are Palestinian children being harmed by Palestinian leadership, the silence is total. And that silence is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Any serious path forward will require something the West has been unwilling to name, let alone demand: a full de-radicalization and de-nazification process. Not as a slogan, but as a policy. After World War II, Germany was not rebuilt by pretending its ideology was a misunderstanding or by rewarding it with aid absent reform. It was rebuilt by dismantling the worldview that glorified violence, eliminated Jews, and trained children to see death as noble. Textbooks were rewritten. Teachers were retrained. Institutions were rebuilt around life, not annihilation. That work was long, uncomfortable, and non-negotiable — and it was the price of reentry into the civilized world.
There will be no peace until a similar reckoning occurs in Palestinian society. No amount of reconstruction money, humanitarian aid, or diplomatic theater can substitute for removing incitement from classrooms, purging antisemitism from curricula, and ending the moral abuse of children in the name of resistance. Until that conveyor belt of indoctrination is dismantled, no ceasefire will hold, no conference will matter, and no slogan will save the next generation.
Peace does not begin with headlines. It begins in classrooms.
Brad Goverman is the editor/creator of the weekly Substack The Jew News Review, which provides a summary of news relevant to the broader Jewish community along with his sometimes smarmy commentary. He is also a Zayde for 4 beautiful grandchildren and one grand dog and belongs to Temple Sinai in Sharon.