Educational authorities in Spain have promised to review a high-school teacher’s manual that claims Israel’s West Bank security fence bears “many similarities to the Nazi genocide.”

But Marina Subirats, director of the Barcelona Municipal Institute of Education, or IMEB, avoided any explicit apology for the comparison, nor did she commit herself to any specific changes in the text.

“The only intention of this book was to render homage to the victims of the Holocaust and Nazism, and to preserve the historical memory of these events,” she said in a statement...

... Subirats said the book was meant to give educators instruments to teach “a reality which until know has been rather unknown” — the incarceration of Republican prisoners from the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War in Nazi concentration camps.

As for the security-fence analogy, she said, “This obviously relates to the authors’ own opinion. It is not the criteria of the IMEB in such cases to exercise censorship.”...

However, Subirats said she would “reopen the text to incorporate enriching contributions.”

In its current form, the manual reads, “Of all the problems in the world at this moment, there are two … which bear many resemblances to the Nazi genocide, with the ghettos created by the Nazis to isolate Jews from other people and with the humiliations and indignities received by the Spanish Republicans and Catalonians and the rest of the prisoners in the concentration camps.

“These are the construction of the ‘wall of shame’ in Palestine, and the detention of the Taliban prisoners at the military base that the United States has on the island of Cuba, at Guantanamo,” the text says...