Alwaght- While international condemnations and UN resolutions against the Israeli regime signal a deepening isolation of Tel Aviv globally and even its Western backers can no longer cover up its crimes, the Israelis unbelievably have managed to find allies in the heart of the Muslim world who are ready to roll out red carpet for them. The UAE is the first country to invite the globally-hated politician the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his return to power in December. This warming of relations with Tel Aviv is not limited to diplomatic matters and the Emiratis are expanding their interactions with Tel Aviv to culture as a good service to the Israelis.
In this relation, the UAE embassy in the US announced adding Holocaust to the national curriculum in primary and secondary schools. The UAE embassy held that the country’s leaders consider teaching this topic essential for humanity. The decision by the UAE comes at a time when this country opened the first Holocaust Memorial Museum in Dubai last year in order to strengthen relations with the Israeli regime. After normalization of relations with Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi facilitated Israeli entry to the Persian Gulf region and by signing security and economic agreements, it is strengthening its relations with the apartheid regime day by day— a policy Arab observers warn can bear grave consequences.
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) based in Tel Aviv and London has already started cooperation with the Ministry of Education of the UAE to write new curriculum. According to the institute, the curriculum in the UAE has an upper hand compared to other countries in the region because it shows no evidence of teaching hate or anti-Semitism and recognizes Jewish historical sites in the Arab world.
Propagating Zionist thought among the younger generations
Although the UAE has diplomatic relations with the Israeli regime, the public opinion of this country, like other Islamic nations, is against the normalization, and Abu Dhabi leaders have so far failed to mobilize the public opinion in favor of the thaw. Therefore, the new decision is meant to align the future generation with the policies of the government in the region by promoting Zionist thought in the schools to eliminate the anti-Israeli pessimism from UAE society forever. In other words, they are trying to build new cultural views at home and pave the way for the friendship of the people of this country with Israeli citizens. Since it is easy to proselytize children, Abu Dhabi has started the process from primary schools.
Before the normalization, mentioning the Holocaust or advocating it was considered an act of treason to the Arabs and Palestinians, but now Emirati leaders are breaking this taboo. The Emiratis believe that by promoting Zionist ideas and programs of the Judaism in society, talking about Zionist ideas will gradually become normal, and in the meantime, there will be no obstacles to developing relations with Tel Aviv.
Painting Israelis victims
By adding the Holocaust to the national curriculum, the UAE is seeking to display the Israelis as historical victims and the world needs to take big steps to help them. Ali Al Nuaimi, the Emirati representative and one of the mediators of the normalization of relations with Tel Aviv, claimed last month in justifying this new decision that knowing the horror of the Holocaust in an area where Jews have been living for centuries is vital, and therefore the memory of the Holocaust victims in the Arab world is very important.”
The Holocaust is a claim made by the Israelis who allege that during the WWII, about 6 million Jews were killed in gas chambers by Nazi Germans, a big claim many history researchers call vague and exaggerated. So far, no documents have been presented to show that such a large number of Jews were killed. By making such a claim, the Zionists try to paint the Jews as oppressed and having the right to have a country independently to protect themselves. Probing the Holocaust or rejecting it in some Western countries is a crime, something questioning the validity of the Israeli claims. Still, even in Western countries, the Holocaust is not taught in the schools, and the UAE is turning into the face of an Israeli occupation agenda to play victim.
Turning a blind eye to Israeli crimes in Palestine
The UAE is pushing to paint an oppressed face of the Israeli regime while Tel Aviv has been committing a variety of crimes against the Palestinians. It is ramping up these crimes day by day, to an extent that even the UN and regime's Western backers have voiced deep concerns. Holocaust is added to the primary school curriculum as in national textbooks there is no mention of the Israeli crimes against Palestinians, and from now on, the Israeli atrocities are planned to be further whitewashed and the oppressed and the oppressor change their places.
One of the first crimes of the Israeli occupation is the Deir Yassin massacre, which occurred on April 1948, and a few weeks before the announcement of the foundation of the Israeli regime. On April 9, extremist Zionists attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and massacred 250 Palestinians in the most heinous way possible.
In September 1982, in the midst of the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli attack on the country, the Israeli-aligned Phalangist militias attacked the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southern Lebanon, massacring hundreds of people. The Israeli history remains stained with this horrific crime.
The 51-day Gaza war in 2014 summer is another example of the Israeli crimes. In this war, nearly 2,000 Palestinians living in Gaza, including women and children, were killed and more than 10,000 others were injured. The Israeli crimes are not over and these days continue in the West Bank, and with the assumption of power by the far-right parties, a full-scale war against Palestinian resistance is not unthinkable. The storming of holy Al-Aqsa Mosque by the Israeli National Security Minister Itmar Ben-Gvir last week was the first adventure of the hardliners in the new cabinet and its repeat can spark a new war. Emirati leaders have closed their eyes to all these crimes to avoid disruption of normalization process.
The UAE does not even mention the American war crimes in Iraq and other Islamic countries and censors any topic about them, while they are easily discussed in American schools.
As a Muslim and Arab country, the UAE with its new decision is contradiction-stricken in its policy. On the one hand, it claims to still support the Palestinians in the face of the Israeli crimes and on the other hand, positions the Israelis as victims of the so-called historical crimes. It is unclear how Abu Dhabi explains this contradiction to its public opinion.
