Opinion – Jaime Spitzcovsky: Abraham Accords lead Arab countries to combat Holocaust denial

With an impetuous ability to destroy barriers, the Abraham Accords, signed between Israel and four Arab countries in 2020, reveal yet another frontier in the challenging quest for peace in the Middle East and its surroundings.

United Arab Emirates and Morocco, signatories of the treaties, line up initiatives to combat Holocaust denial, by including the theme in school curricula, and promoting tributes to victims of Nazi-fascism.

Over the decades, Holocaust denial became a widespread practice in the Arab and Muslim worlds. A vile propaganda maintained that the massacre of Jews by Nazi Germany would consist of “a myth to justify the creation of a country, Israel, inhabited by Europeans, in the Middle East”.

Such nonsense has contaminated political speeches, books, radio and TV programs, content on the internet – many of them still used today in public debate in Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad. In 2006, the Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brought together denialists like David Duke, Robert Faurisson and Michèle Renouf in Tehran, in a depressing effort to torture history.

With the Abraham Accords, signed between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, initiatives to combat disinformation gained new momentum, fundamental ingredients for peaceful coexistence among the diverse peoples of the kaleidoscopic Middle East. The Moroccan and Emirati governments, for example, announced the decision to bring topics such as Jewish history and culture to schools.

Rabat revealed his plans in the educational area amid the winds brought by the treaty and justified the initiative as a way of emphasizing “diversity in national identity”. In the late 1940s, the local Jewish community numbered around 250,000, today reduced to around 3,000.

After the proclamation of Israel’s independence, in 1948, with resolution 181 of the United Nations, Arab governments, such as that of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, expelled Jewish communities – actions that generated the migration of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Israel and other countries , such as USA, France and Brazil.

Israel then went through a process of demographic change, since at the beginning of the Jewish return from the diaspora, especially at the dawn of the 20th century, initiatives designed in Eastern Europe prevailed, with the arrival of “Ashkenazi” immigrants speaking Polish, Russian or Yiddish, a dialect of the Jews. However, from the 1950s, the Israeli population balance began to indicate a progressive increase in inhabitants from Arab or African and Asian countries, such as Ethiopia and India.

These sections of society, described as “Sephardim” or “Orientals”, now account for around 50% of the population, in a demographic landscape that is increasingly different from the beginnings of the country, at the time mostly “Ashkenazi”. In gastronomic terms, one can imagine a country consuming more hummus, a chickpea paste, than “guefilte fish”, a typical fish cake on Eastern European tables.

In the midst of Middle East changes, in September the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, carried out a pioneering and historic visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. These are important steps for Arabs and Israelis to be able to build and cement foundations for a desired peaceful coexistence.