Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He is a Holocaust scholar who has written extensively on the subject.
For years, Western leaders have insisted that Islam itself is not the enemy. After September 11, President George W. Bush declared that “Islam is peace" and that terrorists “represent evil and war." President Barack Obama later told the Muslim world in Cairo that America and Islam “overlap" in principles of justice, progress, tolerance, and human dignity.
Both men were drawing an important distinction. A religion is not the same thing as the political culture that may develop around it, exploit it, or weaponize it.
That distinction matters. The issue before Israel is not whether Islam, in the abstract, is a religion of peace. The harder question is whether the political and religious culture cultivated by Palestinian Arab factions, official media, public ceremonies, street rituals, and school performances prepares children for peace - or teaches them that violence is the natural language of national struggle.
Culture is not biology. It is not destiny. It is learned, taught, rewarded, repeated, televised, dramatized, and celebrated. A society tells its children what is honorable by what it praises. It tells them what is shameful by what it condemns. It tells them what the future requires by the heroes it places before them.
That is why the “precious diamond" poem reported by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) is so revealing. According to PMW, on Jan. 5, 2025, at celebrations in Nablus marking the 60th anniversary of Fatah’s “Launch," a young girl appeared on Official PA TV and chanted a poem praising Gaza’s children. In the poem, a stone becomes a “precious diamond," a child’s bicycle becomes a mine, a silk ribbon becomes an ambush, and the spout of a baby bottle becomes a knife.
This is the core of the problem. When a political culture turns a child’s bicycle, ribbon, stone, and baby bottle into symbols of violence, it is not educating children for statehood. It is preparing them for sacrifice. It is telling them that childhood itself is raw material for the national struggle.
Stone-throwing has long been romanticized as a form of resistance. Thomas Friedman, a scathing critic of Israel, observed that when the First Intifada erupted in 1987, Palestinian Arabs threw stones not because they had suddenly become disciples of Mahatma Gandhi, but because stones, clubs, and kitchen knives were the weapons available to them. Friedman nevertheless understood the symbolism. Stones, in that moment, were presented as the language of mass civil disobedience rather than conventional terrorism.
But that distinction has collapsed. Stone-throwing did not remain a symbol of protest. In some communities, it became a rite of passage. Haaretz journalist Amira Hass wrote in 2013 that “throwing stones is the birthright and duty" of those under foreign rule. To be precise, Hass was largely defending stone-throwing at soldiers and also called for schools to teach nonviolent forms of resistance. But the cultural message remains disturbing: violence becomes normalized, moralized, and passed down as political grammar.
One activist, quoted by Al Jazeera producer Linah Alsaafin, justified rock-throwing by saying that as long as soldiers remain, land is “encroached upon," jeeps enter villages, and tear gas is fired, the Shabab will not stop throwing rocks. In 2013, Muhammad Abu Hashem, then 17 years old, put the matter more bluntly. Weeks before his fourth arrest in three years, he said: “Children have hobbies, and my hobby is throwing stones." He added, “A day with a confrontation is better than a free day."
That sentence should haunt every adult who claims to care about Arab children.
In Beit Ommar, a village between Bethlehem and Hebron, former New York Times correspondent Jodi Rudoren described rock-throwing as “a rite of passage and an honored act of defiance." The futility of stones bouncing off armored vehicles mattered little, she observed. “Confrontation is what counts." According to the IDF commander in the area, there were between five and fifteen stone-throwing clashes each week.
A stone is not only a symbol. A stone hurled at a moving car can kill. A stone thrown at a soldier can maim. A child taught that confrontation is heroic is being trained to confuse courage with violence and dignity with brutality.
The culture of celebration reinforces the lesson. When 17-year-old Bilal Ayad Awad returned home after serving 16 months in an Israeli prison, he was reportedly greeted like a conquering hero, with flags, fireworks, a motorcade, and women lining the streets in wedding attire. Children see these scenes. They understand the message. Prison becomes honor. Confrontation becomes manhood. Violence becomes communal status.
The tragedy is that oppressed peoples at the hands of their own leaders have not lacked alternatives. Gandhi used nonviolent resistance, fasting, moral discipline, and mass civil disobedience against the British Empire. Martin Luther King Jr. turned marches, boycotts, prayer, sermons, and disciplined nonviolence into a national moral reckoning.
The point is not to turn Gandhi, King, or any national movement into a simplistic fable. Their struggles were complex, and not all their followers were saints. But their first principle was clear: the method of resistance shapes the moral architecture of the future society. A movement that teaches children discipline, self-restraint, prayer, organization, economic creativity, and bridge-building produces one kind of future. A movement that teaches children martyrdom, knives, ambushes, and “precious" stones produces another.
Research on civil resistance supports that distinction. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth found that among 565 completed campaigns over the past 120 years, about 51 percent of nonviolent campaigns succeeded outright, compared with about 26 percent of violent campaigns. She also notes that these figures focus on maximalist campaigns, including efforts to remove national leadership or achieve territorial independence. The research does not answer every question in every conflict, but it does challenge the fatalistic assumption that violence is the only serious language of political struggle.
That is why current Palestinian Arab polling is so sobering. In the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research’s ( PCPSR) October 2025 poll, Hamas remained more popular than Fatah: 35 percent supported Hamas, compared with 24 percent for Fatah. Among likely legislative voters, 44 percent said they would vote for Hamas, compared with 30 percent for Fatah.
The same poll found that 53 percent of Palestinian Arabs said Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 attack was correct, including 59 percent in Judea and Samaria and 44 percent in Gaza. That does not necessarily mean every respondent endorsed every atrocity committed that day; denial and misinformation are part of the polling environment. But the political signal is severe: militant legitimacy remains deeply embedded.
Nor does the peace-process data offer much comfort. PCPSR found that 45 percent supported the general concept of a two-state solution, while 53 percent opposed it. When presented with a more detailed package - a demilitarized Palestinian Arab state, East Jerusalem as capital, limited land swaps, peace with Israel, and international guarantees - 44 percent supported it and 53 percent opposed it. The regional split matters: support was significantly higher in Gaza than in Judea and Samaria. That nuance should be acknowledged. But the strategic constraint remains obvious.
When Palestinian Arabs were asked to choose the most effective way to end the occupation and establish a state, 41 percent chose “armed struggle," 36 percent chose negotiations, and only 19 percent chose peaceful popular resistance. In another question, a larger share supported unarmed popular resistance as one possible political measure. But when forced to identify the most effective path, armed struggle still led.
This is where the famous line often attributed to Golda Meir remains morally relevant, even though its exact provenance is disputed. The line says: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." The moral point is powerful: peace becomes impossible when a public culture rewards the sacrifice of children more than the protection of their future.
The point is not that Palestinian Arab parents do not love their children. Of course they do. The point is that private love cannot overcome a public culture that glorifies martyrdom, violence, prison, and death. A mother may love her child with all her heart, while the society around that child tells him that the highest form of honor is to become a fighter, a prisoner, or a martyr.
Even the Palestinian Authority appears to understand the danger when that culture threatens its own control. PMW has argued that the PA’s indoctrination of children has “come back to haunt it," noting that PA security officials complained that armed gangs were using children for surveillance, moving ammunition, and throwing pipe bombs at PA security personnel. But the PA’s complaint was not a rejection of terrorism as such. It was an objection to losing control of the violence it had helped romanticize.
That is the danger of building a society around the cult of confrontation. Eventually, the child taught to turn a stone into a “precious diamond" may not ask who the approved target is. He has learned the deeper lesson: violence brings honor.
You understand a political culture by what it celebrates. If a young man returns from prison and is greeted as a conquering hero, children notice.
If school ceremonies turn martyrdom into theater, children notice.
If official broadcasts convert stones, bicycles, ribbons, and baby bottles into instruments of violence, children notice.
If terrorists are elevated above teachers, builders, doctors, entrepreneurs, and peacemakers, the next generation receives the message clearly.
Elie Wiesel captured this divide during the 2014 Gaza war in a full-page advertisement in major American newspapers condemning Hamas’s use of children as human shields. “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’s turn," the headline declared. “What we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab or Israeli versus Palestinian," Wiesel avowed. “Rather, it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death. It is a battle of civilization versus barbarism."
The Palestinian Arab people have suffered deeply, suffering which has been self-inflicted. But suffering does not absolve leadership of responsibility. Responsible leaders turn pain into institution-building, education, commerce, diplomacy, civil society, and moral seriousness. Failed leaders turn pain into grievance, grievance into hatred, hatred into violence, and violence into a curriculum for children.
This is why peace cannot be reduced to borders, Jewish communities, checkpoints, or diplomatic formulas. The fundamental issue is political and religious culture:
What is taught in homes? What is broadcast on television? What is performed in school plays? What is sung at public ceremonies? What do children hear in poems, rallies, funerals, summer camps, mosques, the media and classrooms? Are they taught that their highest calling is to build a future - or to die in a conflict their leaders refuse to end?
Israel cannot manufacture a peace partner out of a political and religious culture that glorifies the stone, the knife, the ambush, and the martyr. Peace will not begin when a child is taught that a baby bottle can become a knife. Peace will begin when adults teach that a baby bottle is for feeding a child - and that the child’s life, safety, education, and future are the highest national project.