Saudi Arabia Is Purging Anti-Semitism from Its Textbooks

When Islamic State established its own schools in Iraq and Syria, it used textbooks produced in Saudi Arabia, and over the past decades educational materials coming from the kingdom have encouraged hatred of Jews and Israel, among other ills, throughout the Muslim world. Finally, that situation may be changing, writes Kimberly Dozier:

The kingdom’s latest batch of textbooks has for the first time removed sections calling for non-believers to be punished by death, and predicting an apocalyptic final battle in which Muslims will kill all Jews. . . . That said, the books, which are used in the public K-12 curriculum and made freely available throughout the Arab world, still characterize Jews and Christians as “enemies of Islam.” They say that infidels “do not have any good deeds” and will spend eternity in hell.

This is the second major revision of the nation’s textbooks during the Trump administration. Last year’s version dropped many of the worst racist and anti-Semitic references but was still “suffused with extremism,” Marcus Sheff, [an expert on the subject], says. . . . The reforms of the 2020 textbooks include removing most references to jihad. . . . Just a decade ago, [by contrast], the curriculum centered around preparing students for jihad and martyrdom.

The texts, [moreover], no longer include the anti-Semitic trope that “Zionist Forces” run the world and are plotting to expand Israel’s territory from the Nile to the Euphrates. . . . And for the first time, a key Saudi religious teaching has been deleted that describes an end-of-days battle between Muslims and Jews in which all the Jews would be killed.

Read more at Time

More about: Anti-Semitism, Jewish-Muslim Relations, Jihad, Saudi Arabia

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF