 While the PA deputy minister for education denied that books with these statements were used in the schools, Yasser Arafat did confirm their usage.Arafat excused their use claiming that these were old Jordanian textbooks and that the PA lacked sufficient funding to replace them with more modern ones.To this claim, Laschet responded that as the EU was donating 300 million Euros to the PA, that the PA "...certainly can bear the cost of publishing new textbooks".