The Walls of Arab Holocaust Denial Are Finally Crumbling https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2021/04/the-walls-of-arab-holocaust-denial-are-finally-crumbling/

April 15, 2021 | Robert Satloff
About the author: Robert Satloff is the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of several books on the Middle East, including Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands.

For many years, Holocaust denial in its various forms—not to mention downright sympathy for the Nazis—has been endemic to the Arab world. But slowly that has begun to change. Robert Satloff, who has been instrumental in this transformation, notes several reasons for it, among them:

[H]storians finally began to tell the Arab story of the Holocaust, that is, the persecution of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in those Arab lands that fell under the domination of Nazi Germany, Vichy France, or Fascist Italy—principally Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya—and the role Arabs played as perpetrators, bystanders, and even rescuers.

[Moreover] Israel now has full diplomatic relations with six Arab countries, whose collective population constitutes a majority of the Arab world, and working relationships with several others, making possible unprecedented human interaction between Arab and Israeli societies. One byproduct is that with contact comes understanding, and even empathy, for the Holocaust and the role it plays in Israel’s national narrative.

[In addition], key Arab states have stopped trying to protect themselves against the spread of Islamist extremism by accommodating the radicals and have shifted gears to confronting radicalism and embracing a strategy of religious tolerance and outreach to minorities. . . . Across the region, this phenomenon has triggered a virtuous cycle of philo-Semitic steps by states not historically friendly to Jews or Judaism.

Read more on Washington Institute for Near East Policy: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/crumbling-walls-arab-holocaust-denial