In the West Bank, children are learning a lot more than just how to read. During its first year as the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas has injected its ideology into public school curricula and gradually expelled education officials who do not preach the party line, according to an Associated Press report.

Despite scrutiny from more moderate Palestinians, Hamas has used its first of four years in control of the Education Ministry to lay the groundwork for an Islamic incubator. Religion classes have increased from three to four per week, and a ban on private teaching materials has been lifted. One newly reinstated reader’s preface declares the booklet is intended to “emphasize the Arab and Islamic identity” of Palestinians, stress the “brutality of the occupier” and “create the energy to get rid of all types of occupation.”

The reader also teaches that American cease-fire initiatives “ignored the political rights of the Palestinian people and did not recognize the Palestinian people’s right to resistance to regain its rights.”

Perhaps even more ominous, and a portent of more extreme measures to come, Hamas has stacked party loyalists into crucial jobs throughout the educational system. Over half of the school districts in the West Bank are controlled by Hamas, up from zero a year ago. According to the report, many qualified candidates are watching lower ranking educators leapfrog into positions of authority, while others have kept their jobs but lost their decision-making power. Fatah loyalists of retirement age have been released.

In addition, a new religion requisite has required 300 Hamas college graduates to be hired into the system as teachers. Hamas has even created its own teachers union to rival that of the Fatah party, and claims to have enlisted tens of thousands of educators.

These changes, however, are not enough for many Hamas legislators. “We want to implement the Palestinian dimension, and the Islamic and Arabic dimension,” legislator Sheik Hamed Bitawi said. “Anything that comes in conflict with our Islamic ideology should be taken out.” Hamas Education Committee members have demanded that U.S. history be stripped from textbooks, saying that the United States is an enemy to the Palestinians.

Besides being introduced to abrasive new texts, Palestinian children are under other pressures in the classroom. Computer teacher Riham Diek says her 14-year-old daughter’s teachers have harassed her to get her to stop wearing jeans and start wearing a robe and headscarf. “As a mother, I am very afraid for my children,” Diek said. Hala Barghouti, an 11-year-old under similar goading, said she is transferring to a private Christian school to escape the pressure at her public school. Other schools have reported frequent fights between students who identify with Hamas’s rhetoric and more moderate students.

Although Palestinian education has been historically somewhat secular and is under great international pressure to remain that way (since it depends on foreign aid for funding), we can expect the teaching of extreme ideology to increase in the West Bank now that it has gained a strong foothold.

“It’s a battle for the Palestinian soul,” AP quoted former minister of higher education Hanan Ashrawi as saying. “You are seeing the gradual transformation of a largely secular national … educational system into a more ideological, closed system.”

Any hope for the Arab-Jew peace process must consider the hard fact that the next generation of Palestinians is likely to be even more hostile to the Jewish state than the present one is.