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Teach Gaza children about Holocaust, UN tells Hamas

The Independent reports:

"Palestinian schoolchildren should learn about the Nazis' slaughter of Europe's Jewish population during the Second World War as part of a curriculum component based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UNRWA says

The United Nations' refugee agency is planning to include the Holocaust in a new human-rights curriculum for Gaza's secondary-school pupils, despite strident opposition to the idea from within Hamas.

John Ging, the UN Relief and Works Agency's (UNRWA) director of operations in Gaza, told The Independent that he was "confident and determined" that the Holocaust would feature for the first time in a wide-ranging curriculum that is being drafted.

Mr Ging, a passionate advocate for Palestinian civilians in Gaza who has recently faced increasingly personal criticism and even threats by elements in the Islamic faction, added: "No human-rights curriculum is complete without the inclusion of the facts of the Holocaust, and its lessons."

One must wonder whether the same call will go out to the Israelis to teach their children about the Nakba.

That aside, as The Independent also reports in the same piece [above]:

"He argued that tackling the issue "would be so simple if we didn't have the illegality of the [Israeli-imposed] siege ... and the war and all the other illegalities that are the daily life of Palestinians here in Gaza", such as, "the fishermen not being allowed out to fish, sanitation not working, water being undrinkable, the private sector having lost all of the jobs and the dignity of work, students not being able to travel out of Gaza, sick people being trapped in Gaza.

"[It] is a seemingly endless list of travesty and injustice but we can't wait for those to be righted before we also do more to counter the effect of all that." Mr Ging said that the human-rights component in the existing curriculum had not been adequate to tackle topics of concern in Gaza, including the illegality of firing rockets, the issue of what constituted lawful resistance, and the effect of propaganda and "anti-Semitic rhetoric"."

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