Teachers and Students Are Rising Up to Defend Anti-Racist Education in the US

“Our students demand to learn the truth even if a small group of powerful, mostly wealthy, white adults is threatened by that,” insisted Michael Rebne, a teacher at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City. “At this moment we are seeing a rise in both Islamophobia and antisemitism stoked by the same right-wing forces that seek to further marginalize LGBTQIA+ students and the voices of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and all people of color. We need to set the record straight and see that we are stronger united.”

Educators in the United States unwilling to turn their lessons into press releases for Israel’s far-right prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have faced harsh censure, especially since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people. Since then, Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, enforced collective starvation, bombed schools and hospitals, and committed a host of other war crimes—atrocities that honest educators believe students have a right to learn about.

Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which defends the free speech rights of Palestine advocates, revealed the alarming escalation in these attacks: “We’ve had an exponential surge in requests for legal help. It has been like nothing we’ve seen before.” In just the month of October 2023, the organization responded to nearly two hundred reports of “suppression of Palestinian rights advocacy”—almost as many incidents as they addressed in all of the previous year.

The repression of education about Palestine has contributed to the proliferation of violence against Palestinian youth. Six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was stabbed by his family’s landlord twenty-six times and killed in October 2023. In November 2023, Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Ali, and Kenan Abdulhamid, three Palestinian college students, were walking together in Burlington, Vermont—two of them wearing kaffiyehs—when a hateful assailant shot and wounded all three and left Awartani paralyzed from the waist down.

The crackdown on advocates for Palestinian rights has taken various forms. According to Sainath, individuals have faced consequences ranging from job terminations due to supportive tweets or social media messages about Palestinian human rights to student critics of Israel being doxed and listed on a website called “College Terror List,” aiming to render them unemployable. Death threats have even been made to students and teachers.

An elementary charter school in Los Angeles fired two teachers for sharing “a lesson on the genocide in Palestine.” A school in Illinois banned students from wearing a kaffiyeh scarf—a Palestinian cultural symbol. In Palm Beach County, Florida, a first-grade teacher was investigated by the school district and put on administrative leave for asking the superintendent to “publicly recognize the Palestinian community” while communicating about the violence in the Middle East. Four teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland, were placed on administrative leave for public expressions of support for Palestinians. The Decatur, Georgia, school district suspended their equity coordinator for sharing “Resources for Learning & Actions to Support Gaza.” In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, fifteen-year-old Palestinian American Jad Abuhamda was expelled from Pine Crest School because of social media posts—not from him, but from his mother who wrote about the “collective brutality” that Israel was waging against Palestinians.

Several universities have suspended campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, including Columbia, Brandeis, George Washington, and Rutgers. Many politicians—both Republicans and Democrats—were more outraged by the students who camped out in tents on college campuses in the spring of 2024 to protest genocide than they were by Israel bombing Palestinian refugees in their tents. Many of these peaceful college student protesters were arrested, suspended, or denied graduation because they spoke out against genocide.

These neo-McCarthyist tactics to prohibit honest education about Palestine aren’t new, even if they are intensified. Steven Salaita was fired from the University of Illinois after he publicly criticized Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza with tweets such as, “Only Israel can murder around 300 children in the span of a few weeks and insist that it is the victim.” Bahia Amawai was an educator who worked for a school in a suburban district outside of Austin, Texas, as a speech-language pathologist working with elementary school children with autism, disabilities, and speech impediments. She was fired in 2018 when she refused to sign what amounted to a pro-Israel loyalty oath that demanded she “not boycott Israel during the term of the contract.”

And it isn’t only red states that have attacked educators critical of Israeli policies or education that seeks to allow students to see the full humanity of Palestinians. Nearly fifty years after the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State and University of California, Berkeley, created the first ethnic studies courses, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill in September 2016 to create an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which would “provide direction for districts interested in implementing high school ethnic studies courses.”

In August 2019, the draft curriculum went up for public comment. However, a “well-organized right-wing campaign headed by a pro-Israel lobby committed to preventing any critical discussion of Israel, flooded the CDE [California Department of Education] demands to remove the Arab American curriculum—especially all mention of Palestine—and the anti-colonial, anti- racist framing of the entire curriculum.”

Then the California Department of Education and Governor Newsom caved. A formidable coalition in support of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum emerged, including the Association for Asian American Studies, the Arab American Studies Association, Black Lives Matter, Jewish Voice for Peace, veterans of the 1968 student strikes for ethnic studies, and many internationally recognized scholars, such as Angela Davis and Robin D. G. Kelley. “Progressive Jewish educators and activists made it clear that the pro-Israel lobby does not speak for them,” wrote truth teacher and co-coordinator of the Teach Palestine Project, Jody Sokolower.

During this struggle, a student named Hedaia addressed California’s Instructional Quality Commission, the body charged with overseeing the process. “I am a Palestinian Arab student,” she said, adding:

Do you know how it feels to be called a terrorist by your teacher and classmates? It’s dehumanizing. As much as I tried to assimilate at my high school, I was always a scary Arab with a hard name to pronounce. This is how I grew up, facing Islamophobic and Arab slurs in and out of school. Explaining myself in classes where Arabs and Muslims are mentioned for one day each year: on Sept. 11. My people are not the stereotypes. We are teachers, students, health care workers, politicians, everything. By removing Arab American studies from the central curriculum, you are removing the existence of people who have contributed to this society and need to be represented in a positive light. Representation matters.

There is no question that antisemitism is also on the rise; but it’s important to understand that the uncritical race theorists who have attacked antiracist teaching are the same ones who are primarily responsible for the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment—not Palestinians or hundreds of millions of people around the world who have participated in the movement for a ceasefire in Gaza. Remember that when protestors confronted the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, North Carolina, who chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” then president Donald Trump said there were “fine people on both sides.” This contributed to the fact that when Trump attacked CRT in the wake of the 2020 uprising for Black lives, anti-Black education policy also coincided with a rise in antisemitism.

In 2022, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus. In Texas, the Carroll Independent School District held a training for educators, where the executive director of curriculum and instruction explained in an online forum to teachers how to determine which books teachers can keep in classroom libraries.

In despicable remarks captured on an audio recording, the director instructed teachers to remember the requirements of the new Texas anti-CRT law, “and make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives”—an abhorrent, antisemitic expression of uncritical race theory that asserts there could be a legitimate way to deny the Holocaust happened or show support for the Nazi genocide of more than six million Jewish people.

In the context of Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” act, a school in Indian River County, Florida, banned the book Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation—a 2019 retelling of the diary Anne Frank wrote while hiding out for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In addition, DeSantis directed his department of education to ban two textbooks about the Holocaust.

At the same time DeSantis’s policies have bolstered antisemitism, the governor is one of the most zealous defenders of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. For example, he has called for banning Palestinian refugees from entering the United States and boasted that he sent weapons and ammunition to Israel from the state of Florida to aid the destruction of Gaza.

Additionally, despite his outrage over cancel culture, DeSantis issued a ban on Students for Justice in Palestine on Florida’s college campuses. This aligns with a larger trend where the right suppresses educational initiatives that aim to honestly confront antisemitism while unequivocally endorsing Israel’s attack on Palestinians. This support for Israel isn’t rooted in genuine concern for the Jewish community; rather, it serves to bolster the Israeli state as a strategic ally to the United States in the oil-rich Middle East.

Christopher Rufo demonstrated this when he offered his colonial strategy for using education to help maintain Israeli and US military power: “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM [Black Lives Matter], DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.”

The strategy of trying to make anyone who opposes genocide in Gaza a “political untouchable” has largely been advanced by attacking supporters of Palestine as being antisemitic. In doing so, they not only disregard the outpouring of Jewish activists nationwide advocating for a ceasefire but also dangerously intertwine the fate of the Jewish diaspora with the Israeli government’s war crimes—thus fueling actual antisemitism.

The largest and most influential human rights organizations in the world—including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—have described Israel as an apartheid state. South Africa brought Israel up on charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice, arguing that Israel has been “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, civilian objects and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected; torture; the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; and other war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The International Court of Justice then issued a preliminary ruling finding the claim “plausible” and issued an order to Israel requiring them to take all measures within their power to prevent acts of genocide and to allow basic humanitarian services into Gaza. United Nations secretary-general António Guterres described Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza as turning it into a “graveyard for children.”

Jewish Voice for Peace issued a statement saying, “The Israeli government has declared a genocidal war on the people of Gaza. . . . This war is a continuation of the Nakba, when in 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing violence sought refuge in Gaza. It’s a continuation of 75 years of Israeli occupation and apartheid.”

On November 7, a group of Palestinian children held a press conference outside the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, pleading for the world to intervene to stop Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. “Since October 7, we’ve faced extermination, killing, bombing over our heads—all of this in front of the world,” one young spokesperson for the group implored in English. “They lied to the world that they kill the fighters, but they kill the people of Gaza, their dreams and their future. Kids of Gaza run out of their hopes and wants.”

The children of Gaza are asking the world to stop lying. Honest educators believe that those who oppose Israeli repression and genocide—a movement made up of hundreds of millions of people all over the world— should not be censored in the classroom and that students have a right to learn about the movement for a free Palestine. “Young people are now watching genocide live streamed on social media as we speak, thousands more children are starved, injured, and murdered with weapons purchased with our United States tax dollars,” the children’s book author of Our Skin, Megan Madison, told me when I asked her about why it was important to resist truthcrime laws. “They don’t just want to ban books. They want to hurt trans kids. They want to silence Black progressive leadership, and they are preying on the trauma of Jewish people . . .” As challenging as it can be to teach truth about Palestine in the current period, as Rethinking Schools editorialized, “We should understand and take hope in the reason this backlash has grown in intensity: More people than ever are refusing to stay quiet in the face of racism and injustice.”