Why One Arab Country Has Chose To Teach The Holocaust In Its Schools

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The United Arab Emirates will soon be the first Arab country to teach terror attacks holocaust Among its schools, the historic move has been praised in some quarters and criticized in others.

UAE plans to include Holocaust education in school curriculum, says embassy in U.S. tweeted last week.

The UAE said it would work with the Tel Aviv- and London-based Monitoring Institute for Peace and Cultural Tolerance in Schools and Yad Vashem, the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, to help create the new curriculum. times of israel.

“Now we have the opportunity reach new audiences Yad Vashem is working hard to pave the way for bringing Holocaust awareness to the Arabic-speaking world,” Simi Allen, the group’s spokesman, told CNN. events and atrocities,” he added.

The Holocaust is largely absent from the school curricula of Arab governments, but the UAE has been doubling down on Holocaust awareness since the normalization of relations with Israel in 2020, known as the abraham agreement.

In late 2020, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed joined his Israeli counterpart on a tour of Berlin’s main Holocaust memorial. 2021, first Holocaust Memorial Exhibition The Arabian Quarter opened in Dubai, where the foreign minister paid a highly publicized visit last year Yad Vashemwhere he laid a wreath.

In an article in Israel jerusalem post In 2021, Ali Al Nuaimi, chairman of the Defense Affairs, Interior and Foreign Relations Committee of the Federal National Council of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, UAE, wrote that school curricula in the Arab world “omit key parts of Western history,” including the Holocaust, for too long. Muslims, he argued, “must free themselves from the baggage of history in order to move into the future.”

The move is “a natural outgrowth of the Abraham Accords,” Kristin Smith-Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told CNN.

“The UAE leadership has been orchestrating cultural change to support its strategic objectives,” she said. “Embracing racial diversity comes with an expanding global workforce, and interfaith dialogue can help combat pan-Islamism and religious extremism.”

It was unclear whether the UAE’s move would only apply to public schools or the hundreds of private schools in the country. The UAE Ministry of Education did not respond to CNN’s request for comment by press time.

About 90 percent of the UAE’s roughly 10 million people are expats, many of whom send their children to private schools that teach an international curriculum, often including Holocaust education, according to the World Bank.

Emiratis were largely silent on social media about the decision to teach about the Holocaust, but Abdul Khaleq Abdulla, a prominent Emirati commentator and political science professor, commented on the announcement in the tweetsaying it is not necessary.

He tweeted: “Repeatedly talking about adding Holocaust themes to our school curriculum despite the absence of any national values, educational (interests) and intellectual needs.”

Much of the reaction from Arabs outside the UAE has been critical, with some accusing the country of handing over Control its syllabus to Israel, while others question whether this will come at the expense of teaching the history of the Palestinians, especially Catastrophe. Nakba, meaning disaster in arabicreferring to the fact that some 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes when Israel was established in 1948.

“We do not deny the Holocaust, we empathize with its victims,” ​​the tweet said Feel, a commenter on Twitter who identified himself as Palestinian. “But incorporating it into the curriculum of young students would make it easier for the occupation (Israel) to infiltrate the Arab people.”

The UAE, which has a large Palestinian community, said in local media reports that its normalization with Israel would not affect its commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yasser Abu Hilala, former general manager of Al Jazeera, tweets Teaching the Holocaust in the UAE “helps to understand the history and atrocities of the West,” adding that “it is from this West that Zionism was born,” referring to the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East.

The involvement of Israeli organizations in writing the country’s syllabus brings additional complications. Opinion polls show that publics in Arab countries that have normalized relations disapprove of their governments’ support for Israel.According to a July 2022 survey by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, more than 70 percent of people in the UAE and Bahrain hold negative view standardization.

The Abraham Accords are also not popular in other Arab countries.One poll A report released last week by the Qatar-based Center for Arab Studies and Policy Studies found that only 7.5 percent of Arabs support normalization, with 84 percent seeing Israel as the biggest threat in the Arab region, followed by the United States and Iran.

The poll polled more than 33,000 people in 14 Arab countries, excluding the UAE.

Analysts say the UAE is likely to strengthen ties with Israel despite differences in official and popular perceptions of Israel.

Dina Esfandiary, senior adviser for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, said: “The UAE public may not fully agree, but the leadership has decided that this is the path they are going to take, so they will continue to do so. Do it,” told CNN. “They feel that by maintaining these good relationships, they have more leverage over Israel and Israel’s actions.”

Some Emiratis would be uncomfortable coordinating with Israeli institutions “in sensitive areas such as education” because of widespread sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, said Diwan of the Arab Gulf States Institute.

“But this should not negate the value and importance of knowing the historical facts and context of the Holocaust,” she added. “Disinformation is a problem that does no one any good.”

Additional reporting by Michael Schwartz in Jerusalem

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Popular US music festival Coachella will feature Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna in this year’s line-up, making her the first artist in the festival’s history to perform in Arabic.

The Coachella Music Festival, held in April in California, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year and features some of the biggest names in music.

“I’m proud and excited to bring my culture and music to Coachella,” the singer wrote on Instagram.

Fans were ecstatic to hear the news, a user on twitter Write “ELYANNA at Coachella this is not a drill.”

“Made me want to go to @coachella for the first time!” tweeted another user.

Elyanna rose to fame after releasing her debut EP “Elyanna” in 2020.

She describes her music as having her own genre “Yes, I have Arabic lyrics but at the same time it’s not Arabic, [and] Not so American,” she tell gq magazine. “It’s in between, and I want that to continue to happen…it makes everyone listen.”

With millions of streams on the music platform Spotify, Elyanna’s music incorporates instruments and Palestinian melodies, as well as melodies from the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere in the United States.

While Elyanna will be the first singer to perform in Arabic at Coachella, she isn’t the first Arabic performer.

Palestinian DJ Sama AbdulHadi performed a set at last year’s festival and was credited with introducing the techno scene in her home country. In addition to Coachella, AbdulHadi has performed in the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Mohammad Abdelbari