UAE To Begin Offering Holocaust Studies in Primary, Secondary Schools
The United Arab Emirates will begin teaching about the Holocaust in elementary and high schools throughout the country, the UAE Embassy in Washington said in a tweet on Monday.
“In the wake of the historic #AbrahamAccords, will now include the Holocaust in the curriculum for primary and secondary schools,” the tweet said. It also quoted Ali Al Nuaimi, chairman of the Defense Affairs, Interior and Foreign Relations Committee of the UAE Federal National Council, who said, “Memorializing the victims of the Holocaust is crucial.”
The UAE’s announcement was raised by the US special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt. “Holocaust education is an imperative for humanity and too many countries, for too long, continue to downplay the Shoah for political reasons,” she wrote on Twitter, using a Hebrew word for the Holocaust. “I commend the UAE for this step and expect others to follow suit soon.”
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Holocaust studies in the Arab world are a relatively recent phenomenon, as the topic was largely taboo for many years due to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Traditionally, teaching about the Holocaust was perceived to promote sympathy for Jews and provide a justification for Israel’s existence in a region where hostility to the Jewish state was ubiquitous. However, the Arab world has recently shown growing openness to learning about the Holocaust, and some Arab countries, such as Morocco and Tunisia, have begun teaching about it in schools as a way to promote tolerance and prevent future genocides. There have also been efforts to translate Holocaust literature into Arabic and to establish Holocaust museums and educational centers. However, the subject remains a sensitive and controversial topic.
Israel normalized its relations with the UAE and Bahrain in September 2020 with the signing of the Abraham Accords. Sudan and Morocco joined the Abraham Accords, signing normalization agreements of their own with Israel, later the same year.
The Negev Forum Working Groups, which grew out of the normalization agreements and include officials from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the UAE, and the US, are now holding two days of talks in Abu Dhabi. These talks are intended to lay the groundwork for the next Negev Summit, which is expected to take place in Morocco this spring.
The UAE’s announcement comes after it and other Arab states condemned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government over the recent visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site, by ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
