Holocaust education is badly needed but it is not a panacea
Holocaust education is vital, but the belief that it will help fight resurgent global anti-Semitism is misplaced. Other tools will be needed for that. It will be a never-ending job.
Holocaust education is sorely missing in many places and the idea that addressing this is key to stemming resurgent anti-Semitism is appealing. It is also probably wrong. Such education is necessary, but changing attitudes towards Israel needs a different approach.
It is true that Holocaust education is lacking. One in five Americans between 18 and 29 years old believe the Holocaust is a myth. More than a quarter of British and Australians do not know that it happened. The data is not significantly different elsewhere.
Understanding history’s greatest horror is essential if humanity is to learn from its dark past, but many of those at anti-Israel rallies, in academia, in newsrooms, and in parliamentary corridors, do know about the Holocaust. It is evident in many of their claims. They have even weaponized it. Consider:
Palestinians should not be paying for Europe’s sins.
Jews’ experience of the Holocaust makes Israel’s actions even worse.
Jews deserved it because of the social role they played in Europe.
What does it have to do with what is going on now?
We need another one (charming, isn’t it?)
Israel is worse than Hitler.
Jews play the Holocaust card to gain victim status.
Anti-Semites deface Holocaust memorials in Europe and the US, showing they fully understand their significance.
It is the top one that speaks to part of the problem. Israel’s legitimacy does not come from the Holocaust, but the focus on Holocaust education as a tool to combat anti-Israel sentiment links the two in people’s minds.
To change attitudes towards Israel, we must identify and address the problematic narrative. Younger generations’ anger at Israel is based not on Holocaust denialism or ignorance (though both are real), but on false beliefs about how, why, and under what circumstances the Jewish commonwealth was recreated. These people are not just chanting slogans; they believe their portrayal of Israel as an aggressor, occupier, and colonizer, is historically accurate and continuing today.
It is this fiction that is the narrative hurdle. This is a great challenge. Whereas Holocaust education is clearly important to everyone, it is hard to argue that Israel’s nationalist story should be included in the world’s school syllabuses. Many countries fail to teach their own country’s history properly, let alone Israel’s or another state’s.
This is not something that can be solved with overseas education campaigns. Israel, despite its military prowess, is outgunned in the propaganda wars. There is no short-term fix, especially as Israel’s foes are pathological liars who play a multigenerational game.
What is needed is what we media strategists call a Trojan horse strategy, which just means sneaking a narrative in on the back of other narratives and programs.
The key for Israel is to show, not tell. It takes about 10 minutes in Israel to realize there is no apartheid, the country is multi-racial and multi-religious, and that it is just people living their lives like people everywhere, struggling to pay bills and to find time to exercise.
That is Israel’s most powerful communications tool. Once people realize this, that is when their minds may open to hearing Israel’s real liberation story. We need to normalize Israel as a state, not make it special.
So, the question is how to get people to come to Israel and how to impart some factual history into them when they do so. There are no better advocates for Israel than those who know the truth first hand.
The first step should be ensuring that those who visit Israel get some modern political history while they are there. Pilgrims are by far the biggest group. Before COVID-19, about 2.5 million of the 4.5 million foreign visitors to Israel annually were Christian pilgrims, according to the Israel Ministry of Tourism.
Many devout Christians see Israel’s recreation as important for religious reasons, but some of them could not care less about politics. They come to Israel for the Christian holy sites, and they would do so regardless of what the country was called or who held sovereignty. After all, pilgrims have been going there since before the Crusades.
However, this group is a captive audience. Work could be done with tour operators and Christian organizations to ensure that political history - the modern nationalist forces that drove Israeli independence - is taught along with religious history. There is no need to sanitize this. It can be a warts and all history. Contrary to what many think, Israel’s history is better than many places. No country has a clean history.
Given that getting foreign visitors is a key to changing attitudes towards Israel, getting more should be a priority. Tourism is a good place to start. Israeli tourism has been lazily dependent on the pilgrimage trade for too long. Admittedly, this is because many in the tourism industry believe the pilgrimage business can more than double, and this should be pursued.
Yet, the country’s history and archeological does not need religion to make it worth visiting. No one goes to Athens to pray to Zeus; they go for the ancient history. Proper modern history can be imbedded into itineraries of Israel’s historical sites. A major tourism campaign would bring economic benefits as well as help with attitudes.
Israel should resist the urge to market to the noisy Western street. They might dominate the news headlines, but Israel is beside Arab countries. It is Arabs and Jews who must live side-by-side, so this is where a tourism campaign should initially be targeted.
Since the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020, about half a million Israelis have visited Dubai. By contrast, the number of Emiratis who have visited is just a few thousand. In 2022 about, 20,000 Israelis visited Egypt, while the return number is about 5,000 a year. These are paltry figures. Reasons include security concerns, the belief that visiting Israel would undermine support for Palestinians, and the fact generations of Arabs have been raised to hate Jews and fed lies about Israel.
The UAE has begun teaching Holocaust education in its government schools, while Saudi Arabia has recently quietly removed much of the anti-Semitism and Zionism-is-racist material from its education curriculum. This shows how these Arab states are viewing the future. To be sure, these governments are ahead of their populations’ attitudes, but change is afoot in a great realignment, meaning now is the time to capitalize on it, and to contribute to it.
Besides tourism, Israel should sponsor far more Arab journalists to visit. Israel has sponsored journalist trips over the years, mainly Western ones. Targeting Western journalists is pointless. Most are morally lost and supine to the narrative, which is why the Palestinians have had enormous success giving them free trips and tours around disputed territories. The anti-Israel lobby will invariably weaponize genuine education efforts and criticize these Western reporters as being on Israel’s payroll, thus defeating the point. In any case, legacy Western media is discrediting itself daily. It is better to target influencers and the some of the better voices in emerging in the alternative media space.
There is a great opportunity for Israeli-Arabs to spearhead these initiatives. Israel’s Arabs play a vital role in the country’s health system, and they could play a valuable role in tourism, too. Israel’s long-term success requires the participation of all Israelis - of all faiths - and could be a win for Israel and a boon for the Arab sector in terms of jobs and incomes.
As Arabic-speaking Muslims who know the truth and reality of Israel - the good and the bad - they have a credibility that purely Jewish hosts do not have. They can also make visiting Arab tourists feel comfortable in what for them might feel like an alien land.
The ideal would be to have Israeli Arab and Jewish tour guides, otherwise tours could proceed with almost no interaction between visiting Arabs and Jews. If you have ever seen a Chinese or Japanese tour group travel anywhere, you will have noted that interaction with locals outside of souvenir shops is not a feature.
Again, these itineraries must include ancient and modern history. The ancient history is amazing in itself, but it also proves Jews indigeneity without the need the highlight it, while modern history can help counter the fictional narrative. This is a way for Israel show, rather than tell, its story, truthfully, and with a human face.
Government-funded student exchange programs could be implemented, too, with students required to blog or vlog about their experiences, and these should be promoted to get eyeballs. Influencers could be offered exchange trips.
Joint tourism initiatives are another area worth exploring. It is a long way from the US or Europe to Dubai or Tel Aviv. There is scope to create tours that take in both places - the glitz of Dubai and the ancient history of Israel. This would help bind the countries’ business interests. There are already tours to Egypt for foreigners visiting Israel. European tours with multiple destinations are normal, as are trips that take in Japan and Korea.
It might seem implausible now, with war on many fronts, but Israel is not going anywhere, and neither are its neighbors. Long-term thinking beyond the war and current crisis are needed for the region to thrive. All these ideas, once refined, could serve as a model for Western countries down the line.
Lest I be misunderstood, Holocaust education is vital and something that must have a place in the world’s school syllabuses as part of human history, but it is not going to combat anti-Semitism as many imagine it will.
In the long term, improved attitudes towards Israel will need to be built on people-to-people communications and relationships, as much as between governments and states.