Tel Aviv - As the new school year gets underway in Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the sides found themselves Monday embroiled over a new controversy concerning history education in schools. The Islamic Hamas movement has accused the United Nations, which educates refugee children in the Gaza Strip, of planning to include in its curriculum the Holocaust - the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II.
In an open letter to the local head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Hamas called the Holocaust "a lie invented by the Zionists."
Meanwhile, in Israel, Minister of Education Gideon Saar announced pans to drop from textbooks the word "Nakba." The word is Arabic for "catastrophe," and also used by Arabs to describe the creation of Israel.
He told the cabinet Sunday that, while what Arab-Israelis had experienced in 1948 was a "tragedy," in the context of the textbooks, the word "nakba" was similar to the world "holocaust," and so could not be used.
A spokesman for the Follow-up Committee on Arab Education in Israel told the Jerusalem Post daily that Saar's decision was a "political gimmick" aimed at denying Arab-Israelis their identity.
