Borrell Opposes Banning EU Aid to Palestinian Authority

On Saturday, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell protested against a possible ban on financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, due to content deemed hateful and anti-Semitic in Palestinian textbooks.

"The Palestinian Authority is in a critical situation and is at risk of bankruptcy if EU funding is banned. As the supreme representative (of the bloc), I will not allow that," Borrell told AFP in Stockholm, where he is participating since Friday in a meeting of EU foreign ministers.

The EU aid amounts to 300 million euros a year.

Thus, Borrell directly opposes his Hungarian colleague, Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement in the EU, Oliver Varhelyi, who announced Friday that the Commission will fund a second study of Palestinian textbooks to verify its content at the request of members of the European Parliament.

The European Parliament approved the European budget for 2021 on Wednesday but again requested that the union's financial support to the Palestinian Authority in the field of education be subject to the condition that the contents of textbooks comply with UNESCO standards and that all anti-Semitic references and examples that incite hatred and violence be removed.