Lyn Julius, JNS, Jan. 16, 2023
Good news from the Gulf: The UAE will teach about the Holocaust in its schools. It is only right that in the ongoing process of normalization with Israel, the Gulf countries should make sure that schoolchildren are acquainted with the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jewish people.
But if teaching the Holocaust is meant to gain sympathy for Israel in the Arab world or even enhance the legitimacy of the Jewish state in Arab eyes, there are pitfalls to this approach.
One is that some supporters of the Palestinians misappropriate the Holocaust to draw a false comparison to the Palestinian nakba. The flight of some 700,000 Arabs from soon-to-be Israel, however, was not due to systemized mass murder, but rather the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Indeed, a more appropriate comparison would be between the Arabnakba and the Jewish nakba—the displacement of almost a million Jews from Arab countries, most of whom ended up in Israel in a de factoexchange of refugee populations.
The second danger is that teaching the Holocaust tends to portray antisemitism as a purely European phenomenon. It shifts the focus away from Arab and Muslim antisemitism, perpetuating the myth that Jews and Arabs had always lived in peace and harmony before Israel’s establishment. …SOURCE