CA Educators Are Resisting Anti-Palestine Bills Pushing “Academic Police State”

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Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

A raft of bills proposed in the California legislature would stifle Palestine-related speech in public schools and on college campuses, including protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and the teaching of ethnic studies and histories of Palestine and the Middle East.

“These bills are really about censorship of teaching Palestine. They’re about perpetuating right-wing myths about people of color and silencing the most oppressed in our schools,” Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, co-chair of the San Diego Unified School District Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee, told Truthout.

As lawmakers convene in Sacramento this month to conclude the current legislative session, a coalition of educators and advocates is organizing to stop four proposed bills: Senate Bills 1277 and 1287, and Assembly Bills 2918 and 2925. Many opponents have grouped themselves under the umbrella of the California Palestine Solidarity Coalition, including the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) California, the California Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, and Jewish Voice for Peace California. The coalition argues this legislation would make public education even more hostile and dangerous to educators and students who are already being targeted amid an unrelenting wave of anti-Palestinian racism and police violence on college campuses.

SB 1287 poses a particular threat to those on California’s college campuses, including the almost half a million students, faculty and staff members in the University of California (UC) system. The bill would require schools to implement new rules against harassment, discrimination, or conduct that “creates a hostile environment for students on campus.”

“It’s coming out of the pro-Palestine protests that have been roiling campuses in both the University of California and the Cal State systems, and it’s written in such a way as to essentially recreate the public university as something other than a public space,” Stacy Fahrenthold, a professor of history at UC Davis, told Truthout. While SB 1287 has since been amended, its original text included a proposed ban on a “call for or support of genocide” — an accusation that was leveled at campus protestors.

The Gaza solidarity encampments established on California campuses earlier this year faced various fates. Student protesters at UC Irvine were suspended without due process, and dozens at that campus and UC Santa Cruz were injured or arrested in violent police crackdowns. However, at UC Davis, administrators negotiated in good faith with student leaders rather than inviting cops onto campus. (While student leaders struck a deal with UC Davis administrators and decamped voluntarily, the UC Office of the President and Board of Regents blocked UC Davis from following through.)

The legislation would “put genocide education in the hands of anti-Palestinian organizations that deny Israel is committing a genocide.”

Fahrenthold told Truthout she fears that SB 1287 could preclude this kind of engagement in the future, and would instead de facto outlaw protest in what should be public spaces, such as the university quad, and “force university leaders to repress pro-Palestine speech on campus.”

Like SB 1287, AB 2925 is also framed in terms of preventing discrimination on college campuses. It would require higher education institutions to each develop and offer anti-discrimination or diversity, equity and inclusion training tailored to prevent discrimination against groups with the highest number of hate crimes committed against them the previous year, according to data compiled by the California attorney general. While the current draft of AB 2925 also names Islamophobia among the forms of discrimination it seeks to prevent, its drafters did not consult Muslim organizations or leaders of Arab American or Palestinian American communities in its drafting.

Researchers have highlighted several reasons why the hate crime data AB 2925 would use to determine California’s most targeted groups may not be representative of harms against marginalized communities, including the fact that some marginalized groups are less likely to report hate incidents than others. Hate crime data also excludes some forms of discrimination, including employment and education discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. Some of the highest-profile cases of such violence in the U.S. in recent months have been committed against Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims.

Further, in what opponents argue is a clear nod to Zionist nationalists and could lead to crackdowns on speech critical of Israel, AB 2925 defines nationality and national identity to include a “person’s actual or perceived shared ancestry… in a country with a dominant religion or distinct religious identity.” At a Senate Committee on Education meeting in June, Omar Altamimi, senior policy and advocacy coordinator at CAIR California, expressed his organization’s concern about the definition. “We’re concerned that the bill could be used to conflate First Amendment protected speech, such as criticism of a foreign country, with discrimination or harassment on the basis of nationality or religion,” he said.

“Since October 7, campus has been a difficult place to be someone who teaches Palestinian history.”

The other pair of bills that the California Palestine Solidarity Coalition is organizing against would intervene in curricula, shifting critical decisions about educational content away from those with subject matter expertise to biased groups, and opening the door to attacks on educators who teach about Palestine.

Under SB 1277, the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education would be tasked with creating genocide education curricula for use in California schools, distributing grants to Holocaust education organizations, and evaluating teachers. That collaborative was established in 2021 by the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center, which is known for its efforts to silence discussion of anti-Zionism in schools and for conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism in attempts to slander educators. The organization’s Contemporary Antisemitism lesson plan for high school students lists critiquing Israel among forms of antisemitism.

Lara Kiswani, executive director of AROC and a lecturer at San Francisco State University, told Truthout that the legislation would “put genocide education in the hands of anti-Palestinian organizations that deny Israel is committing a genocide.”

Meanwhile, AB 2918 erects new barriers to the long-awaited rollout of ethnic studies courses in California’s public high schools. It would mandate new oversight measures, moving decisions about ethnic studies curricula away from educators to an ill-defined group of “stakeholders.”

All four of the bills are authored by members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, a pro-Israel group of lawmakers comprising 15 percent and 17.5 percent of the State Assembly and State Senate, respectively — enough to exercise leverage as a bloc of votes on the floor. The caucus has refused to support calls for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and has engaged in the dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, painting even anti-Zionist Jewish protesters, such as those affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace, as anti-Semites.

“We have to fight for our right to even care about our people.”

The Jewish Public Affairs Committee (JPAC) of California lists the four bills among its legislative priorities. JPAC is a pro-Israel lobbying group whose California branch sponsors trips to Israel for state lawmakers.

Opponents of the legislation are critical of the bill’s backers and point out that California has existing legislation to prevent discrimination and ensure curricula adhere to state law and undergo relevant review processes.

The people most threatened by this raft of legislation are educators and students of color, Muslims, Palestinians, and their allies. CAIR recorded a staggering rise in harassment against Muslims last year, with more than half of the cases of harassment it measured coming in the latter months of the year after Israel launched its attack on Gaza. In an April 2024 report, the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism found that “anti-Palestinian racism is a pervasive phenomenon” with negative impacts on the health of those who experience it. These effects include feelings of fear and isolation and trouble sleeping.

While the institute recorded anti-Palestinian racism across several sectors, Jess Ghannam, a professor of psychiatry and global health sciences at UC San Francisco, told Truthout the findings were “even more pronounced within the academic sector and the education sector.”

Ghannam likened the raft of legislation to creating an “academic police state,” where the intent is to foster a chilling culture of fear across California’s educational institutions.

“Since October 7, campus has been a difficult place to be someone who teaches Palestinian history,” Fahrenthold told Truthout.

While the tense atmosphere at colleges nationwide has garnered more headlines, Gallagher-Geurtsen of the San Diego Unified School District said she thinks “there’s even more censorship” at primary and secondary schools. “Teachers are terrified,” she said. Students, too — Gallagher-Geurtsen said they are afraid to raise questions about Palestine in class, although many of them see news from Gaza on social media.

“Our students should be able to talk about Palestine,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to experience censorship by a school district, a teacher [or] a curriculum — we shouldn’t be censoring current events.”

Educators who spoke to Truthout said they or their colleagues had been doxxed, had their teaching loads reduced, and had invited talks canceled after teaching about Palestine. Some have counseled students facing harassment and stalking due to their pro-Palestine views.

These reports track with data from the National Writers Union, which found that academic workers who support the Palestinian cause or are critical of the Israeli government have faced firing, suspension, event cancellation, doxxing, social media suppression, censorship, and violence from police and counterprotesters.

Kiswani told Truthout that Palestinian Americans shoulder a unique burden. “We feel the gravity of having to watch our people’s genocide live-streamed every single day, knowing that our tax dollars are what makes it possible,” she said. “As if that’s not devastating enough, people are afraid to express themselves and share their viewpoints about a struggle that’s so deeply connected to themselves, their history and their family.… We have to fight for our right to even care about our people.”

The staunch commitment to this struggle in the face of rampant anti-Palestinian racism and attacks on Palestinians and their allies has had an effect. On August 15, AB 2918’s drafters shelved the legislation following an advocacy day, where California Palestine Solidarity Coalition members met with lawmakers. However, the bill’s sponsors have promised to pursue similar legislation in the next legislative session.

The remaining three bills — SB 1287, AB 2925 and SB 1277 — are still making their way through the legislature, with the two Senate bills slated for a vote on the Senate floor before the end of the month.