For a long time, Saudi Arabia was one of the intellectual homes of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment. The Wahabi clerics whom the Saudi royal house supported held a special animus for Jews and that animus infused education in Saudi Arabia. Now, though, Saudi Arabia is backing away from this hostility to Israel and its textbooks are reflecting the increasingly friendly relationship between the two nations.
Two things are responsible for the change to that dynamic. The first was that Barack Obama worked hard to set Iran on the road to being a nuclear power, something that terrified Saudi Arabia and pushed it closer to Israel. The second was Trump’s Abraham Accords, which sidelined the troublesome Palestinians and encouraged Muslim nations in the Middle East to make separate peace agreements with Israel for both profit and national security.
While Saudi Arabia never officially entered into an Abraham Accords agreement with Israel, Trump (and, I’ve heard, Jared Kushner, who had a good relationship with Prince Mohammed bin Salman) nevertheless managed to create a behind-the-scenes conduit between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The external pressures bringing these two nations together have become even stronger as Biden picks up where Obama left off in terms of sheltering Iran on its way to becoming fully nuclear.
As to Israel and Saudi Arabia, the payoff from these trends can be seen most obviously in a startling change in Saudi Arabian education. According to the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (“IMPACT-se”), antisemitism has significantly disappeared from Saudi Arabia’s textbooks:
The report, released on Monday, found that content portraying Jews as disobedient and teachings of antisemitic tropes such as Jewish wealth were removed from the Saudi curriculum.
Saudi Arabia has seen a trend of improvement in removing antisemitism from its curriculum in recent years, IMPACT-se said.
According to the institute, Qur’an verses describing Jews being turned into monkeys were removed, as was the antisemitic myth that one of the goals of Zionism is a “global Jewish government.”
In addition, Qur’an verses prohibiting friendships with Jews and Christians and condemning homosexuality have all been removed in the past three years.
Those aren’t the only changes. Last year, the textbooks got rid of lessons that demonized not only Jews but also Christians and other “non-believers” and a unit on jihad vanished from textbooks. Two years ago, the textbooks lost a chapter called “the Zionist danger” that had all sorts of antisemitic myths and that delegitimized Israel.
Things aren’t perfect, of course:
According to the report, Israeli is still omitted from maps shown in textbooks and Zionism is still described as “racist.”
Saudi students are falsely taught that “Zionists” deliberately tried to burn down Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969, a lie that was removed from Qatar’s curriculum. A Qur’an verse comparing Jews to “book-carrying donkeys” also remains, while students are taught that women are to blame for male sexual harassment.
But Rome wasn’t built in a day and what matters here is that the trend in Saudi education is to move away from demonizing Jews and Israel. As new editions of textbooks appear, it’s reasonable to believe that the Saudis will continue to improve their approach to teaching about both Jews and Israel.
The last three American presidents deserve credit for having helped accomplish this change. Presidents Obama and Biden deserve it because their championing of Iran terrified Saudi Arabia and effectively forced it into Israel’s ambit. That wasn’t their goal but that’s still what they did. And President Trump deserves credit for having created a framework that allows Sunni Muslim nations to have cooperative and profitable relations with a country that fears Shia Iran just as much as they do.
i was aiming for Chit Chat where Peloni posted a link to an article about the shooting of former PM and Trump ally, Shizo Abe last Friday. I can’t edit in Israpundit on my ipad.
@Peloni
https://www.businessinsider.com/gun-control-how-japan-has-almost-completely-eliminated-gun-deaths-2017-10
@Ted
The link you shared for the transcript has been deleted. Here is an archived link to the same transcript:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220101021718/https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/21/politics/trump-saudi-speech-transcript/index.html
Also here is the full video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_gphbkZC6w
Perhaps his single most important speech. It was not terribly long, particularly by Trump’s standards, but it came to completely changed everything in the Middle East.
@Ted
The link you shared for the transcript has been deleted. Here is an archived link to the same transcript:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220101021718/https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/21/politics/trump-saudi-speech-transcript/index.html
Also here is the full video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_gphbkZC6w
Perhaps his single most important speech. It was not terribly long, particularly by Trump’s standards, but it came to completely changed everything in the Middle East.
When Trump visited SArabia in the spring of 2017 he addressed a gathering of the heads of the Islamic states.
Whenever he talked about defeating terrorism, he always said “and its ideology”. These Islamic states pledged themselves to do so.
That’s where it all began.
Ezekiel 38:13 — no mystery here. When Turkey & Iran attack Israel, Saudi Arabia will not join them. Neither will NATO (the “merchants of Tarshish”)
Meanwhile, 51% of American small businessmen expect to be forced out of business over the next six months, and 33% have not yet paid their June rent — and we are still going through the infancy of the current economic catastrophe. I believe the Colorado River is at its lowest level ever, meanwhile, so say “goodbye” to relief from the food crisis (Colorado River water feeds our most productive agricultural lands). Add to that ongoing draughts in Africa to South Asia, gas and food crises created by Biden’s War in the Ukraine, DAVOS’ war on the Dutch Farmers (the most productive in the world), and one insane Biden policy after another, and we will look back at the plagues of Egypt as the Golden Age of civilization.
I don’t expecgt any of this to phase the Israeli government, whoever they may be.
This is an enormously powerful development. The true grasp of a long term peace between the Arabs and the Israelis can only be cemented in the reform of education. Too long has the established education presented that not only the Jews held no right to the lands of their ancestors, but that they were in fact subhuman or evil people having committed routine atrocities against the Arabs and their culture. These moves by the Saudis to begin to rectify at least some of these false narratives well established in the educational materials is a welcome move towards also establishing a mindset within the next generation where peace might find a potentially long term support from just the changes at the educational level. Most peace treaties will be sought out based along the needs of economic, trade, and military benefits of an alliance with Israel, but these factors alone lack the ability to necessarily overcome the cultural challenges created by teaching history which has no historical basis, and which is simply war propaganda fed from generation to generation to continue the conflict between the two people descended from Abraham.
The significant position of the Saudi nation among the nations of the middle east also presents the added potential of other nations following the Saudi example in educational reforms. This is a very important revelation, and hopefully the educational reforms will continue to move towards teaching an even more honest history of the Jews in the region. Any peace will require this subject to be resolved, and resolving it prior to a peace will make the peace that much more substantial and that much more sustainable.