Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

They Tried to Teach About Palestine. They Paid a Huge Price.

In California, talking to your students about Gaza can have severe consequences.

Pro-Palestinian high school students demonstrate in front of the White House on May 24, 2024.

In early 2024—after the death toll in Gaza reached more than 25,000 and school was suspended, after Israel bombed Palestinian children sheltering in classrooms, and after high schoolers in the United States began walking out of them in protest, a ninth grader in California asked her teachers if she could share a poem with the class.

Isa (a pseudonym) had written the verse for an Ethnic Studies project on apartheid. It was inspired, she explained, by the videos from Gaza she scrolled through constantly on TikTok. Videos of mothers carrying their children, with “a lot of, like, fire, a lot of dead bodies,” buildings reduced to rubble, and bagged corpses in mass graves. Videos that haunted her but that had never come up in the classroom, that seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere at once. She wrote:

It’s always right before I fall asleepThat I’ll keep thinking about humanityWhile I lay in the warmth of my bedI wonder how it feels to know that at any second, you could just be deadI wonder how I would handle it if I were in their place[…]What if the blood in my veins would be the Palestinian one?I would know what it feels like to face the end of a gunI would sit in the ruin of a place once called homeand pray to God for them to leave us alone.I would scream and cry for one peaceful dayin which I won’t watch another child be put in a grave[…]It’s right before I fall asleepI wonder what would happen to my family.

Isa recited her work proudly, she told me, eager to “finally express [herself],” and make her peers “aware of what was happening.” But when she did, her teachers warned her. If she were to share her writing more widely, they wouldn’t be able to protect her. They themselves, she remembered, were “not allowed to talk about [Palestine]” and “couldn’t help her talk about it.”

When adults “hear the name [Palestine], it’s like they need to shut it down,” she said. “They always think [since] we’re kids we don’t know what we’re talking [about], and they’re always telling us we need to get educated. Well, how are we going to get educated? Nobody’s teaching this to us, nobody’s talking about it. We’re trying to figure this out on our own.”

Isa’s instinct—that Palestine was uniquely off-limits—was a good one. And her teachers were right to be worried.

Across the United States, organized attacks on teaching about Palestine—attacks that began long before October 7—have grown more frequent, calculated, and institutionalized. From the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther—a plan targeting support for Palestine in elementary and high school curricula—to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s refusal to designate funds for Ethnic Studies courses after pro-Israel backlash, political leaders have worked vigorously across levels, states, and parties to erase Palestine from American education.

K-12 teachers, in turn, have faced increased censorship, surveillance, doxxing, accusations of antisemitism, suspensions, reassignments, terminations, harassment, and even lawsuits for daring to mention Gaza in the classroom. Their curricula, their students, the books and subjects that they teach have all come under fire.

The pattern, according to Eleanor Morton, a labor lawyer who has consulted with dozens of educators teaching about Palestine, is one of unequal enforcement. “You can conduct a lesson about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; nobody has a problem with that,” she said. “But if you talk about Gaza, suddenly the administration is pulling out [an obscure] policy” to oppose the lesson.

Even in schools where Israel and Palestine had long been an established unit, lessons have come under scrutiny. Teachers have been doxxed; curricula have been revised and even removed. And students, who have what Morton called “a First Amendment right to information about what is happening in the world,” have been repeatedly abandoned.

In 2024 alone, the legal aid group Palestine Legal received more than 100 reports concerning K-12 schools, most of them from teachers who either faced or feared disciplinary procedures, censorship, or targeted attacks for engaging with Gaza. In Philadelphia, three teachers were dismissed after displaying illustrations drawn by their Palestinian students of doves, flags, and slogans like “From the River to the Sea” in the school’s common area. In New Jersey, a year of Zionist lobbying resulted in the removal of a novel about a Palestinian boy in the West Bank from the sixth-grade curriculum. In Maryland, three teachers were placed on leave after posting about Gaza online. In Minnesota, two high schoolers were suspended after a schoolwide walkout for a ceasefire.

In California, where Newsom signed a bill last October establishing a statewide K-12 Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator (The New York Times called this “a law restricting what teachers can say in the classroom”), examples of censorship abound. A state investigation found that a San Jose Ethnic Studies teacher “violated Jewish students’ rights by failing to intervene with another perspective during a student project on genocide with a slide titled ‘Genocide of Palestinians.’” A teacher in Oakland was fired for wearing a “Free Palestine” pin. Samia Shoman, a Palestinian American principal who was doxxed, received death threats, and became the target of a failed removal campaign in early 2023, was attacked again last year for attempting to lead a teacher training on “Humanizing Our Arab/Muslim Students.” In San Francisco, Ethnic Studies teachers were required to use a textbook that does not discuss Israel and Palestine. And in Santa Ana, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) boasted that its lawsuit disbanded the district’s Ethnic Studies Steering Committee and canceled three courses: Ethnic Studies World Geography, Ethnic Studies World Histories, and Ethnic Studies: Perspectives, Identities, and Social Justice.

Further north, in the Bay Area district where Isa recited her poem—and where I myself went to high school—Israel/Palestine was a standard World Studies unit before becoming so taboo that student poetry about it set off alarm bells. It was a standard unit before teachers began discouraging students from organizing a walkout for a ceasefire. And it was a standard unit long before a lesson on Gaza sparked backlash so disproportionate it grew national, and so influential it turned into California state policy.

Because of that lesson, California state Senator Josh Becker—whose son went to Menlo-Atherton, the high school where it was taught—co-authored AB 1468, a bill that sought to give government officials the power to censor teaching materials. When AB 1468 failed to become law, Becker (who did not respond to repeated requests for an interview) supported its replacement, AB 715, which did pass. Despite legal challenges to its constitutionality, the law went into effect this year. AB 715, Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said, “erase[s] Palestinian voices” and “repackage[s] censorship under the guise of combating antisemitism.”

The California legislature also approved a budget measure that stopped the statewide rollout of Ethnic Studies courses in schools. In other words, high schools across California will no longer be required to implement anti-racist education. They will, however, have an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator—one bound by a definition of antisemitism that condemns targeting the state of Israel—developing their training, resources, and enforcement strategies.

But let’s back up, for a moment, to before. Before the lesson on Gaza that so infuriated Becker. Before the backlash and the bills. The lesson, after all, was not the beginning. And Becker was not alone.

It was the summer of 2019. Earlier that year, experts had convened to develop an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) for California schools. But as soon as the curriculum was made public, backlash began to roll in. Most criticism, Jewish Currents reported, stemmed from “Zionist groups who opposed the inclusion of Palestinian topics—including a mention of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—within the Arab American studies portion” of the proposed curriculum. Those groups included the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, StandWithUs, and the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES)—the same organization that would denounce both Samia Shoman and Menlo-Atherton a few years later.

Each of these........

© The Nation