Date.parse('01/01/2018') is breaking for Locale Arabic (United Arab Emirates). I checked the locale accepted date format,it is mm/dd/yyyy. Any pointers why is it breaking??
with context user locale set to arabic (UAE), the date format will be dd/mm/yyyy. But your example - Date.parse('01/01/2018') should still work. So maybe there is another problem? Could you share more information?
https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/133534/get-dateformat-based-on-locale