There is a war against Black history.
Educators didn’t enlist in this fight, but their classrooms are now battlegrounds.
Efforts to silence Black history are part of an overall scheme by conservatives to erase inconvenient truths, such as white supremacy, racial capitalism, and systemic racism—as these truths explain many, if not most, of the challenges we face as a society. For that reason, educators must teach these truths and defend the right and obligation to teach them.
Another truth that educators must teach and defend, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable, concerns the seventy-five-year occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government and its people.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” King pointed out that those who manufacture weapons and sanction their use get rich while the victims of those weapons are harmed and pushed further into destitution.
What the world is witnessing is the bombardment of an occupied people suffering from poverty and apartheid. It is a genocide, and whether or not it is comfortable to hear, the United States government is complicit in it.
Financial support for Israel has led to the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom live in poverty. Currently, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, 4,000 of whom were children. As stated by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, what Hamas did on October 7, “didn’t happen in a vacuum.” Leading up to this current conflict was the merciless escalation in the occupation of Palestine by, according to Jewish Voice for Peace, “the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history.”
This isn’t to say that the world doesn’t mourn with the Israeli people over the many lives lost during the Hamas attack. The world does. Nor does it mean that the world has forgotten the hostages held by Hamas. All hostages should be released. But that legitimate grief cannot be made a weapon of warfare and history cannot be ignored or silenced—although some may wish to do both.
World War II was fought against fascism. The Allied victory meant the end of the Holocaust. Upon the resettling of the world, the West determined where European Jews would call home. Palestine was among the former Ottoman Empire territories placed under the United Kingdom’s administration by the League of Nations in 1922. Of all those territories, only Palestine wasn’t placed on a path of independence, but was declared the future home for the Jewish people, per the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
Israel was built on settler colonialism, which is something it has in common with the United States. Sadly, to acknowledge this history, let alone teach it, has come with scrutiny.
Similar plans existed to resettle Jews in Japanese-controlled Manchuria (the Fugu Plan) and British Colonized Kenya. But like those two nations, Palestine was already home to a people. Wars in 1948 and 1967 expanded Israeli settlements, including Gaza and the West Bank, while expelling much of the Palestinian population.
Israel was built on settler colonialism, which is something it has in common with the United States. Sadly, to acknowledge this history, let alone teach it, has come with scrutiny. Numerous individuals have had their voices silenced over the years as a result of speaking the truth of Palestinian occupation, including author and former Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill and Congresswoman Rashida Talib, a Palestinian-American.
She was recently censured in the House of Representatives by mostly conservatives and twenty-two of her fellow democrats (eighteen who’ve received funding from AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). I expect backlash and criticism for my words here.
In a 2021 editorial in Haaretz, Archbishop Desmond Tutu shared a chant he began in the streets of Cape Town:
“We are opposed to the injustice of the illegal occupation of Palestine. We are opposed to the indiscriminate killing in Gaza. We are opposed to the indignity meted out to Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks. We are opposed to violence perpetrated by all parties. But we are not opposed to Jews.”
The archbishop was a truth teller. These voices don’t advocate for the destruction of a people, no matter which group. Standing on the right side of history is not an excuse for or a justification of anti-Semitism of any kind. Nor are those who call for Palestine’s liberation in opposition of Jewish humanity.
Truth tellers call a thing a thing in the hopes of promoting understanding for the sake of justice, so that there is peace. If educators desire to be peacemakers, we must speak the truth and do so loudly.