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It made for dramatic television, Newt Gingrich’s screed against the Palestinians. Defending his earlier assertion that they are “an invented people,” the former House speaker kicked things up at notch at a Dec. 10 debate in Des Moines. “Somebody oughta have the courage to tell the truth: These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?’ We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East.’”

The truth, however, seems to be that no such textbook exists. That’s the word from groups that have been studying Palestinian (and Israeli) textbooks for years, trying to encourage understanding across the divide that some American politicians appear more inclined to see widened. The Associated Press went hunting for the vivid example Gingrich cited with such confidence but could not find it, uncovering only dismay among researchers who have been diligently scouring textbooks for what Israel officials call “incitement.” Indeed, as the West Bank government headed by prime minister Salam Fayyad works to remove incendiary vitriol from Palestinian public discourse, these instances are becoming harder to find.

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