The UAE will soon become the first Arab country to teach the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust in its schools, a historic move that has been lauded in some quarters but criticised in others.
The UAE intends to include Holocaust education in primary and secondary school curricula, according to a tweet from the country’s embassy in the United States last week.
According to the Times of Israel, the UAE will collaborate with the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education in Tel Aviv and London, as well as Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, to develop a new curriculum.
“Now we have the opportunity to reach new audiences and Yad Vashem is working on paving the way to bring Holocaust awareness to the Arab-speaking world,” the organization’s spokesperson Simmy Allen told CNN.
“Across most of the Arab-speaking world, until recently, there was little to no dialogue with Yad Vashem about the events and atrocities of the Holocaust,” he added.
The Holocaust has been largely absent from Arab governments’ school curricula, but the UAE has been doubling down on Holocaust awareness since normalising relations with Israel in 2020 under the Abraham Accords.
In late 2020, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah Bin Zayed will travel to Berlin’s main Holocaust memorial with his Israeli counterpart.
The first Holocaust memorial exhibition in the Arab region will open in Dubai in 2021, and the foreign minister visited Yad Vashem last year, where he laid a wreath.
In an article published in Israel’s Jerusalem Post in 2021, Ali Al Nuaimi, chairman of the Defense Affairs, Interior and Foreign Relations Committee of the UAE’s Federal National Council for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, wrote that school curricula in the Arab world “have omitted critical parts of history in the West,” including the Holocaust, for too long. Muslims, he argued, “must liberate themselves from the burdens of history to move ahead toward the future.”
The move is a “natural outgrowth of the Abraham Accords,” according to Kristin Smith Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
“The UAE leadership has been engineering cultural change to support its strategic objectives,” she said.
“Embracing ethnic diversity has accompanied the expansion of a global workforce, and interfaith dialogue has aided in countering pan-Islamism and religious extremism.”
It is unclear whether the UAE’s move will apply only to government-run schools or to the country’s hundreds of private schools.
The UAE Ministry of Education did not respond to CNN’s request for comment by the time this article was published.
According to World Bank data, approximately 90% of the UAE’s population of about 10 million is made up of expatriates, many of whom send their children to privately run schools that teach international curricula that frequently include Holocaust education.
Emiratis on social media were mostly silent about the decision to teach about the Holocaust, but Abdul Khaleq Abdulla, a prominent UAE commentator and political science professor, responded in a tweet that there was no need for it.
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