Pamela Drews (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Educators at City University of New York held a rally in support of Palestine in October 2023.
In December, four Montgomery County, Maryland, educators were placed on administrative leave for posting statements in support of Palestine on their personal social media accounts or on school email systems.
That same month, a superintendent in Palm Beach, Florida, released a message about the Israel-Gaza war that condemned anti-Semitism without mentioning Islamophobia. An elementary school teacher, in an email, asked the district to “publicly recognize the Palestinian community.” She was placed on leave.
When Oakland, California, educators sought to provide balance to an Oakland Unified School District curriculum that largely omits the Palestinian experience, superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell, in a YouTube video posted on November 26, condemned their proposal as “harmful and divisive.”
Earlier in November, when student chapters of Amnesty International and UNICEF at Desert Mountain High School in Arizona gave a lunchtime presentation expressing sympathy with Palestinians in Gaza, the state’s Superintendent Tom Horne urged Arizona educators to kick both groups off their campuses.
These are just four examples of a larger trend of administrators and officials clamping down on discussing Palestine in public schools. As a result of this backlash, “teachers have been walking on eggshells,” as American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten put it.
Many Jewish educators, myself included, have criticized efforts to prevent teachers from providing balance in discussions on the Israel-Palestine conflict—a topic that, in most U.S. media sources, leans heavily in favor of Israel. Unfortunately, some Jewish leaders are encouraging censorship.
Marc Levine of the Anti-Defamation League, for example, dismissed the Oakland educators’ concerns as “antisemitic.” Jeremy Russell of the Jewish Community Relations Council called them inflammatory and prejudicial and warned that a more inclusive curriculum might lead to the “incitement of antisemitism.”
Antisemitism must be called out and countered. But punishing American educators who criticize Israeli government policies—which are also being condemned by journalists and human rights groups around the world—as bigots is not the way forward.
The Oakland educators were denounced for using educational materials that imply Zionists are colonizing oppressors, yet for decades the Zionists themselves used the word “colonization” to refer to their attempts to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
Colonization is an apt term. In 1922, Muslims represented 78 percent of the Palestinian population, and Jews only 11 percent. In the ensuing twenty-five years—as the United States and others largely refused to take in those fleeing the Holocaust—the Jewish population in Palestine grew 750 percent. In 1948, after the Nakba—an Arabic term that refers to the brutal displacement of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948—Jewish settlers established the nation-state of Israel.
In fairness to Israel, it is also true that, unlike settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, and others, many Israelis were refugees who had little choice but to become settlers. Of course, if teachers aren’t allowed to bring up Israel-Palestine in any substantial way, they also aren’t able to talk about the historical nuances behind the war.
The Oakland educators are also being reprimanded for referring to “the historic and unfolding oppression and genocide of Palestinians.” Yet Israel’s widely-condemned response to Hamas’ October 7 attacks has so far killed more than 26,000 Palestinians in Gaza, about two thirds of them women and children. If this is not “unfolding oppression and genocide,” what is?
Educators are also being labeled as antisemites for repeating or posting allegations of Israeli “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid-like” policies.
Israel has been accused of ethnic cleansing by Amnesty International, the United Nations, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, Israeli lawmaker Ofir Kassif, Israeli author Gideon Levy, and numerous others. Israel was labeled an apartheid state by the Israeli human rights groups B’tselem and Yesh Din, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.
The academic freedom of American educators is under assault now more than at any time in recent decades. Public school teachers have the right to question Israeli policy—and the lavish support the U.S. provides to uphold it—and not be censored, tarred as bigots, or deprived of the academic freedom that’s crucial to the art of teaching.