UAE to teach Holocaust

Announcement about its inclusion in history lessons comes after nation’s normalization of ties with Israel.

DUBAI — The United Arab Emirates will begin teaching about the Holocaust in history classes in primary and secondary schools across the country, its embassy in the U.S. says.

The embassy provided no details on the curriculum, and education authorities in the Emirates, a federation of seven sheikhdoms, did not immediately acknowledge the announcement Monday.

However, the announcement comes after the UAE normalized relations with Israel in 2020 as part of a deal brokered by the Trump administration.

“In the wake of the historic #AbrahamAccords, [the UAE] will now include the Holocaust in the curriculum for primary and secondary schools,” the embassy said in a tweet, referring to the normalization deal, which also saw Bahrain and, later, Morocco recognize Israel.

U.S. Ambassador Deborah E. Lipstadt, the special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, praised the announcement in her own tweet.

“Holocaust education is an imperative for humanity and too many countries, for too long, continue to downplay the Shoah for political reasons,” Lipstadt wrote, using a Hebrew word for the Holocaust. “I commend the UAE for this step and expect others to follow suit soon.”

The announcement comes ahead of a planned meeting in Abu Dhabi this week of the Negev Forum Working Groups, which grew out of the normalization. The meeting will include officials from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the UAE and the U.S. Egypt has diplomatically recognized Israel for decades.

In the Holocaust, Nazi Germany systematically killed more than 6 million European Jews during World War II. Israel, founded in 1948 as a haven for Jews after the Holocaust, grants automatic citizenship to anyone of Jewish descent.

Other Arab nations have refused to diplomatically recognize Israel over its decades-long occupation of land that Palestinians want for a future state.

The announcement by the UAE also comes after it and other Arab nations condemned the visit by an ultranationalist Israeli Cabinet minister to a contentious holy site in Jerusalem after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government took office.

The site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, is the holiest site in Judaism, home to the ancient biblical Temples. Today, it houses Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.