In a significant development in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, the most powerful country in the regions has begun the process of removing anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist contents from the country’s textbooks for the coming school years.
This information was reported by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education.
This news comes when there are talks of a possible normalisztion of relations between Saudi Arabia, home to the two of Islam holiest mosques and the Jewish nation of Israel.
For weeks there has been the news of possible normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. However, it has reached fever pitch last week, when senior White House adviser to President Donald Trump Jared Kushner said, “normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia is inevitable”.
Credit must also be given to President Donald Trump who pushed the Arab nations to mend ties with Israel and recognize this nation which was formed three years after the end of the Second World War to give the Jews their own country.
In some of the school books that children read in Saudi Arabia, there are stories of religious prediction wherein the Muslims would kill all the Jews as per a prophecy. This has served as a foundation anti-Semitic views in the Muslim world, including India.
The monitoring group said that while it “did not find that new tolerant material had been injected into the curriculum, a substantial amount of offensive material had been removed.”
The classic anti-Semitic trope that Jews, identified as “Zionist forces,” use villainous methods, including money, women, and drugs to control the world has been dropped.
“Examining the trendline of our 2002, 2008 and even 2019 reports of the Saudi curriculum, it is clear that these new 2020 textbooks represent an institutional effort to modernize the Kingdom’s curriculum,” said IMPACT-se CEO, Marcus Sheff.
“The Saudi authorities have begun a process of rooting out anti-Jewish hate,” he further said.
Fahad Nazer, the spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said, “a very concerted effort to remove all [offensive material] from the entire curriculum.”
Hatred of Jews is still present, including “a decontextualized and ambiguous” story about Jewish “wrongdoers,” who are described as monkeys.
According to the report, “There is clearly still work to be done. However, the changes made thus far show promise for a moderate and tolerant curriculum. Further improvements need to be made. But the overriding impression is of a willingness to engage, to participate in dialogue regarding curriculum content and finally move towards textbook reformation.”
This is a major shift in the regional politics of the Middle East after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco began the process of normalizing its relations with Israel.
However, there is still a lot of work to be done in improving the relations between both these nations. Some experts in this region see the normalization of ties between some of the Arab countries with Israel as a political experiment for Saudi Arabia to test the waters.
Saudi Arabia is still is an Islamic theocratic state and any overt outreach between both nations could trigger internal strife. It is an open secret, Saudia Arabia wants to eventually establish diplomatic relationship with Israel, but the question is how much time it will take.