Welcome News From Saudi Arabia

It seems that the Saudis have rewritten their textbooks to squeeze out every last drop of antisemitism. I don’t know why the Saudis are doing this, though I will speculate below on possible reasons. I’m sure the religious establishment is furious with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the onlie begetter of this change, but in Saudi Arabia, MbS calls the shots, and this good news deserves to be disseminated. More on this change can be found here: “Saudi Arabia Removes Virtually All Antisemitism From School Curricula, New Report Finds,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, August 17, 2026:

Saudi Arabia is continuing to implement major reforms of its sprawling system of 35,000 public Islamic education schools, according to a new report by the Institute for which says government officials have scoured virtually all antisemitic content from curricula and textbooks assigned to Saudi youth.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se), which analyzes school curricula around the world, examined 136 textbooks as part of its study. The nonprofit organization found that the trend of moderation offers a glimpse of how Saudi Arabia imagines its future, one in which less popular suspicion of Israel, Jews, and the US facilitates increased cooperation with the West and draws continued support for its ongoing “Vision 2030” initiative to modernize the country’s economy and culture.

“Saudi textbooks published for the 2025/26 school year continue the kingdom’s sustained program of educational reform, further advancing moderation, coexistence, and critical thinking,” Impact-se CEO Marcus Sheff said in a statement on Monday, following the announcement of the main findings of his organization’s exhaustive review and translation of thousands of pages of content. “The curriculum is now entirely free of antisemitic content, with the final few remaining examples removed. In fact, Saudi curriculum has never been more positive in its portrayal of religious minorities or more encouraging of peace and tolerance.”…

It is not only antisemitic passages that have been “squeezed out” of Saudi textbooks. There is also active encouragement of positive views of other non-Muslims — Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians. MbS wants to prepare his subjects for being part of the modern world, ready and able to interact with, collaborate with, find common ground with, not be locked in perennial war with, the 6.2 billion people in the world (out of a total world population of 8 billion) who are not Muslims.

“The reports also found further progress in the curriculum’s portrayal of Israel, including the removal of content describing Zionism as a ‘racist European movement,’ and falsely accusing Zionists of the 1969 al-Aqsa Mosque arson,” the report said. “In addition to the removal of problematic content, new textbooks promoting values of peace and tolerance were also introduced.”

For years, the Arabs have been accusing “the Jews” of being behind the attempted arson at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969. Jews had nothing to do with it. A crazed Australian tourist was responsible, and now Saudi textbooks have removed that source of Muslim anger with “the Jews” by properly assigning blame to the mentally disturbed Australian.

Israel and Saudi Arabia are quietly cooperating on security matters because they face a common enemy — the Islamic Republic of Iran. Furthermore, the Saudis are opposed to Hamas, which they rightly regard as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that is opposed to the Gulf Arab monarchies and wants them replaced with theocratic states.

Part of the motivation for this “cleansing of the textbooks” in Saudi Arabia is the desire to win favor in Washington, which the Saudis still rely on for their security, including supplies of advanced weaponry. The Saudis also want to ensure that the Americans will assist them in their civilian nuclear energy program.

The UAE is still far ahead of other Muslim states, actively encouraging better relations between Arabs and Jews, and stressing examples in Islamic history when Muhammad treated Jews well (his visit to that sick Jewish child). It also insists that fanatical Muslims are a threat to the Emirates’ prosperity. Finally, the UAE has put the “question of Palestine” on the backburner, and no longer insists that “settling the Palestinian question” should be the sine qua non before other issues, including a possible peace treaty with Israel, are resolved.

Now the Saudis are intent on following the UAE example. They have squeezed the antisemitism out of their schoolbooks. Could Riyadh now go so far as to join the Abraham Accords, to which the UAE belongs, without any longer insisting on the establishment first of a Palestinian state? Let us hope.

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