opinion
Teaching the Holocaust in the
Arab World Has its Pitfalls
Lyn Julius
G 14
JANUARY 26, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
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.

the Farhud, making no secret of his wish to extermi-
nate the Jews in his sphere of infl uence. As Hitler’s
guest in Berlin, the Mufti raised SS units of Muslim
troops and broadcast poisonous anti-Jewish propa-
ganda. For reasons of realpolitik, he was never tried
at Nuremberg for war crimes, though he certainly
could have been.

It is necessary to understand the connection, often
erased for reasons of political correctness, between
the Nazis, their Arab sympathizers and the Israeli-
Palestinian confl ict. The Mufti was, according to the
scholar Matthias Kuentzel, the linchpin of the Nazis’
great war against the Jews and the Arabs’ small war
against Israel.

Nazis fought alongside Arabs in the 1948 war
and Nazis became military advisers to Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s Egypt. In the 1950s, Islamized antisemitism,
infl uenced by European ideas of Jewish conspir-
acy and control, became entrenched in the Muslim
Brotherhood’s ideology.

Arab governments are no longer united in their
desire to eliminate Israel, but there are still some
who wish to complete the job Hitler started. Would
“teaching the Holocaust” in this top-down fashion
help weaken grassroots rejectionism? Isn’t it easier
to sidestep the issue altogether? ■
Lyn Julius is the author of “Uprooted: How 3,000
Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World
Vanished Overnight.”
danheighton / AdobeStock
ood 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 compar-
ison to the Palestinian nakba. The fl ight 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 Arab nakba and the Jewish nakba —
the displacement of almost a million Jews from Arab
countries, most of whom ended up in Israel in a de
facto exchange 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.

As Matti Friedman put it, most Jews are in Israel
because of the Arabs, not the Nazis. They arrived as
refugees from riots, the Arab League’s Nuremberg-
style discriminatory laws, arbitrary arrests, human
rights abuses and forced dispossession.

The third danger is that Arabs could be mislead-
ingly portrayed as “innocent bystanders” to the
Holocaust who “paid the price” for a European
problem through the creation of Israel.

The truth is that substantial numbers of Arabs were
sympathetic to the Nazis, if only for the pragmatic
reason that the Nazis were hostile to British and French
colonialism. The Arab world was rife with paramilitary
youth groups on the Nazi model, and Arab nationalist
parties inspired by Nazism still exist today.

The fourth danger is that teaching the Holocaust
will ignore active Arab collaboration with the Nazis,
and the specifi c role played by the Palestinian Mufti
of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the so-called
“leader” of the Arab world.

The Mufti helped stage a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in
1941 and incited the anti-Jewish massacre known as