Forgetting the lessons of history
Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. A lot of worthy things were said about the need to remember the Holocaust to ensure that such a thing never happens again — in a country which demonstrates every day that, by blaming the intended victims of a planned second Holocaust of the Jews and minimising or denying the threat posed by the Iranian deniers of the first, it is repeating the lesson of its own history in refusing to recognise what is happening and thus making it more likely that it will happen again.
Some years ago, the Holocaust Educational Trust was established to ensure that schools were adequately equipped to teach the lessons of the Holocaust. I think there is now an urgent need for a similar organisation to teach British children the true history of Israel and the Jewish people. I hear alarming reports from horrified parents of schools teaching their pupils the falsehood that, as a result of European guilt over the Holocaust, the modern State of Israel was created by the importation of European Jews with no connection to the land, thus displacing the rightful Arab Muslim inhabitants whose land it had been since time immemorial. Every part of that account is untrue. The result of such teaching — and worse —which I suspect is now routine in British schools is that British schoolchildren are being fed a diet of propaganda lies which is inciting them to hatred of Israel and the Jews who support its existence. On those occasions when some brave and well-informed pupil tells them the truth — the Jews were the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arab conquest —their perspective immediately changes.
In the absence of a proper education in Jewish and Israeli history, and in today's dreadful climate of prejudice, I’m afraid that teaching the Holocaust often merely confirms British schoolchildren in the poisonous belief that the victims of the Nazis turned into Nazis. The need for an initiative to ensure that schools teach children the truth about the Jews has never been more urgent.