The UAE’s decision to start teaching the Holocaust in public school curricula is another testament to their ongoing rapprochement with Israel. At the World War II Holocaust Memorial Pavilion at the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum, the only one of its kind in the Arab world, Andreas Dunn, who visits the location by decision.
“It’s good that the UAE is leading the Arab world on this very important piece of history that everyone should know,” says the 38-year-old British financial expert based in Dubai. “It shows that things are changing,” he added.
Don came to visit the exhibition after hearing the UAE’s announcement that they would study the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis in their official curriculum, becoming the first Arab country to do so. The move was not widely praised. The State of Israel was established in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust during World War II at the expense of the Palestinians.
As a result of the region’s broad solidarity with the Palestinians, the issue of the Holocaust is not often discussed in the region. In most Arab countries, the geographical maps taught do not have the name of Israel, but rather it is either “occupied Palestine” or “Zionist entity”. “The Holocaust is a historical fact that Israel uses for political purposes,” Emirati political science professor Abdul Halek Abdullah told AFP. According to Abdullah, “Israel is politicizing it and abusing it for its own political purposes.”
Between Denial and Sympathy
In 2020, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco signed agreements to normalize relations with the Jewish state. The Palestinians have condemned these agreements, which they say run counter to the Arab consensus that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a sine qua non for peace with Israel. Earlier this month, the UAE Embassy in Washington announced via Twitter that the Holocaust would be “included in the curricula of primary and secondary schools,” without giving any further details. The tweet quoted Emirati spokesman Ali Al Nuaimi, who co-sponsored the Abraham Accords (normalization agreements negotiated under US auspices), as saying: “Respecting the memory of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust is very important.” “It’s very important to talk about the Holocaust in the region because denial is so widespread,” said Ahmed Obeid al-Mansouri, founder of the Museum of the Crossroads of Civilizations, which houses a pavilion dedicated to the Holocaust. “If we want people to empathize with us, we must empathize with others,” he says. The exhibition has a book through which visitors can share their opinions. It has positive and anti-Israeli comments, including in Arabic: “He who is offended must defend the oppressed and not be offended”, while another visitor wrote: “Down with Zionist imperialism” and “Destroy Israel”.
“The Palestinian cause is sacred”
Private schools in the UAE, where foreigners make up about 90 percent of the 10 million population, include the Holocaust in their curricula. The UAE Ministry of Education has consulted with the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT) and the Holocaust Memorial Foundation (Yad Vashem) to develop its program.
“The Holocaust is a very small part of the whole curriculum, and it’s being worked on right now,” says Markus Schiff of Impact, the Israel-British Institute. According to Yad Vashem, this “initiative is still under development,” noting that it is “too early” to provide more details. Alex Petrofreind, a UAE Jewish community leader who has lived there since 2014, says he is “proud” of the changes.
“By educating the Holocaust, the UAE wants to show the possibility of what will happen if people of different religions and cultures cannot live together,” added Petrofond, a Belgian (56), whose grandparents were killed during the Holocaust.
