Teaching the Holocaust in the West Bank
I’m Palestinian, from a small village near Ramallah in the West Bank. I went through the Palestinian public school system from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade, and across those twelve years, I was never once taught about the Holocaust.
I have plenty of criticisms of the Palestinian curriculum. And by curriculum, I don’t just mean the textbooks—which are only one part of the picture, even if they get almost all the attention from outsiders. I mean the entire educational environment: the lesson plans, teacher training, school culture, administrative pressures, etc.
I think one of its failures is how little we learn about Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. Our textbooks weren’t praising Hitler and we weren’t doing Sieg Heils every morning, but the Holocaust wasn’t mentioned. That said, I do remember teachers making their own contributions over the years, including offhand remarks about how Hitler should have finished the job.
Today, I teach at a private school in Ramallah, where I have more freedom to shape my own lessons. And I do teach the Holocaust.
I firmly believe it’s a subject we need to cover. Generally speaking, Palestinians have very little understanding of Jewish historical trauma or how deeply the Holocaust shaped Israeli society. We don’t understand Israeli fears, the deep-seated emphasis on Jewish self-determination, or what often looks to us like an obsession with security. Missing that context is one of the reasons this conflict feels never-ending.
I know this ignorance works both ways. Plenty of Israelis know nothing about the Nakba. But I can’t change the other side. I can’t change my own side either, but at least I can do my part in my own classroom.
I’ve taught the Holocaust several times now, and I’ve never received a complaint from a parent or an administrator. Even so, it’s still a sensitive topic, and the practical challenges of teaching it here are real.
Education in general is hard in Palestine. All aspects of life are hard here, mostly thanks to the nutcases in power on the other side. On some days, I spend hours stuck at checkpoints just trying to get to work. My morning often hinges on a 19-year-old Israeli soldier deciding whether I’m allowed to keep driving. I get migraines from the long wait, and by the time I step into the building, I’m already exhausted.
And I’m one of the lucky ones. I know public school teachers who have gone months without seeing a full paycheck, effectively working for free. Israel’s withholding of Palestinian tax revenues, combined with the Palestinian Authority’s own endless financial issues, has left our education system in a disastrous state. Poverty is rising, parents are stressed, teachers are burnt out, and kids are missing massive amounts of school. Some public schools are down to operating two or three half-days a week.
When teachers barely have enough time to cover basic reading and math, I can’t exactly suggest to them that what their students really need is a unit on European Jewish history.
Even at my private school—where I actually get paid on time and have the academic freedom to cover these subjects—finding solid, age-appropriate Holocaust materials in Arabic is nearly impossible. I end up translating most of it myself.
The irony is that Yad Vashem, one of the premier Holocaust museums in the world, is theoretically about 25 minutes away from my classroom. But in Palestine, we don’t measure distance in kilometers. We measure it in checkpoints, permits, closed gates, and the unpredictable mood of whichever soldier is on shift. To get there, I’d need an Israeli permit (assuming I could even get one), have to hope my village gate is open, navigate multiple checkpoints, and cross through Qalandiya—and there is nothing I hate more than the Qalandiya crossing. I’d love to take Palestinian students on field trips there someday, but right now, it might as well be a continent away.
Teaching the Holocaust in Palestine can be a lonely job. I don't really have colleagues locally to bounce ideas off of, but here is how I approach it in my classroom:
I teach grades 6–8, which I actually find to be an advantage. My students are young enough that most haven't hardened into stances you see in older teenagers and adults. They're curious, they ask good questions, and they're usually willing to engage with a human story without turning it into a debate about Israel and Palestine.
First, I have to clarify that Jews and Israelis aren't interchangeable terms. In Palestinian Arabic, people frequently use Yahud (Jews) when they actually mean Israelis. It’s a habit many of us grew up with, and it creates massive confusion when you're trying to explain that the people murdered in Auschwitz were European Jews who had never set foot in Palestine.
From there, I start with Jewish life before the Holocaust. I don't want my students' first introduction to European Jews to be photos of starving people behind barbed wire. I want them to see that these were ordinary human beings with families, jobs, schools, hobbies, internal debates, and vibrant communities.
Then I introduce a specific person they can follow—usually Anne Frank. Before we bring the Nazis into the picture, I want my students to know who Anne was: what she liked, what she dreamed of becoming, her personality. Once they know her as a person, we look at how her world started shrinking.
I follow a clear, straightforward historical timeline:
Jewish life before the war → history of antisemitism → the Nazi rise to power → legal discrimination and social exclusion → Kristallnacht → war and occupation → ghettos and deportations → mass shootings → extermination camps.
I want them to see that the Holocaust didn't happen overnight just because Hitler woke up one morning and decided to murder six million people. It was a step-by-step process. A modern, bureaucratic state systematically stripped an entire group of its rights, pushed them out of public life, confiscated their property, restricted their movement, isolated them, and ultimately organized their industrial murder.
I rely heavily on primary sources—diary entries, family photos, letters, children's drawings, and eyewitness testimonies. Once the kids build a personal connection with the people in those stories, we zoom out to look at the massive system that destroyed them.
I also don't try to make the topic palatable by focusing on Muslims who rescued Jews. Those stories are real and worth telling, but my students shouldn't need a character who looks like them in order to feel empathy for Jewish victims.
Finally, I try to avoid discussions of Israel, Zionism, or the Nakba. I want to keep us grounded in the history itself rather than letting the lesson devolve into a political argument—which is always an uphill battle here. When difficult or politically charged questions come up, I acknowledge them directly, answer them as best as I can, and pull us back to the material.
If there are other educators reading this who have taught this topic in sensitive contexts, I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.