Teaching Palestine

Palestine has long been one of the great silences in the official curriculum. Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices provides educators with powerful tools to uncover the history and current context of Palestine-Israel in the classroom — poetry, personal narratives, interviews, role plays, critical reading and writing activities, and more. Teaching Palestine offers a full-throated defense of Palestinian humanity centering Palestinian lives, uplifting and celebrating Palestinians’ struggle for justice, and critiquing racism and inequality.

Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction

Reviews:

“Teaching Palestine is an urgently needed resource for teachers and students. It fills a huge gap in the school curriculum with regard to a hundred-year-old injustice in whose perpetuation the United States is deeply complicit. There is no better time to publish such a rich resource than now, when the whole world, especially young people, are watching genocide in Gaza being committed with impunity. They want to learn more about the Palestinian story from the Palestinians and their supporters. This book provides resources for a deep, objective understanding of the issues.”
Mona Khalidi, Former librarian at University of Chicago Lab Schools and assistant dean of student affairs and the assistant director of graduate studies of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

“This book is a brilliant and much-needed antidote to the biased, distorted, and harmful narratives in schools and mainstream media that dehumanize Palestinians and justify their death and dispossession. Thoughtfully curated for educators, this collection is just as essential for organizers working for justice from the U.S. to Palestine. I’m especially grateful for the accessible resources that explain how false accusations of antisemitism are weaponized to shield the Israeli government from accountability for decades of oppression of Palestinians. Instead, this collection situates the fight against antisemitism exactly where it belongs: alongside, and inseparable from the struggle for Palestinian freedom. This book is a generous offer for all of us fighting for that world — where Palestinians, and all people, live with justice, dignity and freedom.”
Stefanie Fox, Executive Director, Jewish Voice for Peace

“If the old adage, ‘the world is a classroom,’ is true, then every educator on the planet needs this book. A carefully curated collection of essays, poetry, stories, art, photographs, documents, maps, and lesson plans, this is a text that can correct lies, open minds, and possibly save lives. Any book that can do that is worth fighting for.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, UCLA; author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“This well documented teaching resource about Palestine is a much-needed correction to the pervasive mythology and disinformation promulgated in public spaces. For decades, a manipulative Zionist narrative with no historic or forensic basis has been pushed into schools and imposed on popular imagination, while indigenous Palestinian voices were excluded or muted. But the truth, like water, has a way of seeping through the most fortified lies. We’re seeing that happen now in Western discourse, and it’s vital to have such resources on hand to bolster these public and formal education conversations with the documented historic audit.”
Susan Abulhawa, author Mornings in Jenin, The Blue Between Sky and Water, Against the Loveless World

The K–12 curriculum across the United States teaches children what is important, what knowledge matters — and crucially, whose lives matter. But silence is also a part of the curriculum. What is missing from school tells young people what not to consider, what not to question, and whose lives do not count. Palestine has long been one of the great silences in the official curriculum.

Of course, this is most acutely felt by Palestinians themselves. As Nina Shoman-Dajani writes in her article (p. 21): “Of the hundreds of assignments my children have brought home from school over the years, not one of them has referred to Palestine.” In describing children’s books on Palestine in “Resources for Teaching Palestine” (p. 204), Nadine Foty writes: “As a child, I remember feeling like I didn’t belong because I could never walk over to a map in my classrooms and see my father’s home, Palestine. When I asked, I was met by responses that Palestine didn’t exist.” Even in schools that attempt to foster global awareness, Palestinian culture is marginalized, sometimes demonized, as Nassim Elbardouh describes in, “I Too Have Hope: Anti-Palestinian Racism in Schools and What We Can Do” (p. 23). She recounts an incident when — on the school’s culture day — a principal ordered a 7th-grade Palestinian student to remove his keffiyeh claiming it was a “sign of war.”

And there is another kind of silencing. How often have we heard, “Israel and Palestine is just too complicated to teach.” Of course, everything is complicated. There is no subject in our curriculum that we could not teach in greater depth. But as the articles in this book show, the outline of the conflict in Palestine-Israel is no more complicated than other areas that are classroom staples.

The curricular erasure of Palestine must stop. Not only to welcome Palestinians into our schools and classrooms — although that is essential — but also because widespread U.S. ignorance about Palestine has helped produce the injustice that Palestinians have experienced for decades, and continue to experience today. Indeed, discussing the war on Gaza and the West Bank in 2024, a senior Israeli air force official told Haaretz that “without the Americans’ supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces . . . Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war.” U.S. students need a curriculum that helps them decide whether they want their tax dollars used by Israel to oppress Palestinians.

This book insists that yes, Palestine matters; we need to teach Palestinians’ history, stories, struggles, and aspirations and this does not have to come at the expense of silencing or erasing others’ stories. Centering Palestinians’ stories and voices is not to say that we value Palestinian lives over Israeli lives: As educators, we affirm that every human life is precious. But just as the Black Lives Matter movement draws attention to the devaluing of Black life, we emphasize the dignity and worth of Palestinians, whose humanity is so often disregarded in the mainstream narrative.

Confronting the Backlash

Let’s acknowledge at the outset that this endeavor is fraught. Advocates for Israel have long used false accusations of antisemitism to silence supporters of Palestinians and teaching about Palestine. But right-wing politicians and networks have amplified these accusations in the wake of the Israeli assault on Gaza that began in 2023.

Almost half of all children going to public schools in the United States are subjected to either state or school district restrictions on anti-racist teaching. The weaponization of antisemitism — even supported by some “liberal” politicians — means that educators who teach for social and racial justice in locations previously untouched by the battle over “Critical Race Theory” are now targeted.

As we reported in Rethinking Schools magazine in the spring of 2024, four teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland, were placed on administrative leave for public expressions of support for Palestinians. A charter school in Los Angeles fired two 1st-grade teachers and placed their principal on leave after one teacher revealed on Instagram they had taught a “lesson on the genocide in Palestine.” The Decatur, Georgia, school district suspended their equity coordinator for sharing “Resources for Learning & Actions to Support Gaza.” In Philadelphia, several leading educators in the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, where the idea for the national Black Lives Matter Week of Action originated, have been the targets of a campaign to label them antisemitic and remove them from the classroom for speaking out about Israel’s atrocities. The campaign has included doxing, email blasts requesting their termination, and inflammatory mobile billboards sent to teachers’ homes and schools.

So in most schools and school districts, “teaching Palestine” takes courage. But it is also a crucial way educators can resist attempts to censor a more socially aware curriculum and silence dissent. This is why the Rethinking Schools’ spring 2024 “Teach Palestine” issue was our most popular in years, and we had to go back to the printer to keep up with requests. Our subsequent “Teach Palestine” webinar attracted more than 2,000 teachers. Educators across North America want to join a community of conscience to teach a fuller, more truthful history of Palestine and defeat the backlash against social justice teaching.

It is important that we show up for each other in this work, and not attempt to resist organized repression as unorganized individuals. We need to create and strengthen networks of teachers, parents, and students to defend the teaching of Palestine. We need to push our unions and professional organizations to defend our right to teach about what matters. We need to reach out to community groups that have a stake in a fuller curriculum on Palestine-Israel to hold joint teach-ins, conversations, curriculum fairs, and forums. (See “What We Learned from Our ‘Oakland-to-Gaza’ K–12 Teach-In,” in Chapter 6, “Solidarity with Palestine.”) Educators can form Teaching Palestine study groups, patterned after other Rethinking Schools study groups around our books Teaching for Black Lives and Teacher Unions and Social Justice. We hope Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices inspires teachers to find, support, and draw courage from each other in this crucial work.

Premises

A glance at our table of contents reveals some of Teaching Palestine’s premises. The first is that our students cannot understand today’s Palestine-Israel without knowing key pieces of its history. That history did not begin on Oct. 7, 2023, or with the Six Day War, or even with what Israelis call their war of Independence and Palestinians know as the Nakba, the Catastrophe, in 1948. The story of today’s Palestine-Israel begins with the 19th-century antisemitic pogroms of Eastern Europe, sparking the Zionist movement, which sought “the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine,” as expressed by the World Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. The current website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs opens its history of Israel with an epigraph by Zionism’s founding father, Theodor Herzl: “At Basel I founded the Jewish State.”

However, before there was a Jewish state, there was Palestine — ruled by the Ottoman Empire from 1517 to 1917, then by the British Empire under a League of Nations Mandate, until the U.N.-ordered partition of Palestine in 1947. In 1948, Great Britain surrendered its mandate and left. But Palestine was Palestinian, regardless of which imperial power laid claim to it. In our book, we use the term Palestine-Israel, to acknowledge that Palestine preceded Israel, but that the state of Israel exists. The imperial hubris and violence that led to Israel’s establishment are often hidden from students, but there is abundant scholarship that reveals the Zionists’ partnership with the British, articulated succinctly in the 1917 Balfour Declaration — which simultaneously promised “a national home for the Jewish people,” and buried more than 90 percent of Palestinians with the term, “non-Jewish communities.”

In a sadly prescient letter from Jewish historian Hans Kohn to the Zionist journalist and politician Berthold Feiwel in 1929, Kohn wrote:

We have been in Palestine for twelve years without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people . . . I believe that it will be possible for us to hold Palestine and continue to grow for a long time. This will be done first with British aid and then later with the help of our own bayonets . . . by that time we will not be able to do without the bayonets. The means will have determined the goal.

We agree with the thesis of Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, that “the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Of course, there is lots more to be said about these decades of dispossession, but a careful look at the history of Palestine-Israel, some of which is featured in our Chapter 2, “Teaching the History of Palestine-Israel,” lands on Khalidi’s conclusion.

Centering the history of Zionism in the story of Palestine collides with today’s attempts to outlaw critical discussion of Zionism in schools — as a number of articles, many from Jewish writers, document in Chapter 5, “Antisemitism.” Nowhere in the book do we use “Zionist” as a slur. Zionism animated the quest for an exclusively Jewish state. Without some knowledge of the theory and practice of Zionism, students cannot evaluate any of the competing claims about Israel’s genesis. Inherent in academic exploration and learning about multiple perspectives is the right to make up one’s own mind about what is factually correct or incorrect, and about what is morally right or wrong. For organizations to insist a priori that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is intellectually dishonest, and disrespects both teachers and students.

That is another premise of our book: that a critical examination of Zionism is central to “teaching Palestine,” and is not, on its own, antisemitic. Articles in the “Antisemitism” chapter insist on this distinction. At the same time, articles in the chapter and elsewhere in the book emphasize the persistence of antisemitism, revealed in common stereotypes and tropes, but also through history in horrific attacks aimed at Jewish communities, and more recently in white nationalist violence like the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, with white men marching with tiki torches and chants of “Jews will not replace us!” and the 2018 murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

As Nina Mehta and Donna Nevel, argue in “What Antisemitism Is and What It Is Not” (p. 161), safety for both Jews and Palestinians “never grows from guns, checkpoints, walls, and a police state. True safety is built through forging solidarity with those fighting for a more just world.”

Apartheid and Settler Colonialism

Another premise of Teaching Palestine is that today’s Palestine-Israel is fundamentally unequal. Chapter 4, “Israeli Apartheid and Settler Colonialism,” puts this inequality in the spotlight. As Amnesty International describes in a 2022 investigation: “Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories], and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.”

But these are not simply conclusions teachers should impose on students. Articles in the chapter show how we can engage students in exploring the contours of social inequality through lively activities that respect students as intellectuals. The terms apartheid or settler colonialism are not used as epithets, but as invitations to the questions raised by the movement for justice in Palestine. What is settler colonialism? Does that term help us describe common characteristics of Israel and the United States? Should the term apartheid be applied to Israel? Why or why not? Stories in Chapter 4 — and throughout the book — show how simulation, problem-posing, critical reading, and searching for conceptual patterns can help students discover and describe the nature of Palestine-Israel.

Gaza

We assembled this book through the summer and early fall of 2024, as the genocide in Gaza expanded and intensified. And we use this term, genocide, precisely, in accordance with the U.N. Genocide Convention, which names acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” — and then enumerates what we witness in reports coming out of Gaza every day: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group . . . ”

Chapter 3, on Gaza, seeks to present readings, stories, poems, and activities to help young people grasp the enormity of the genocide. In one of the poems, “Aunt May” writes:

My wish is that they drop the bombs on us while

we are sleeping and that we all die together. This is

why we are here together. So that nobody is left

alive to mourn those who were killed.

No one should find themselves in circumstances where they wish to die all together. But the chapter seeks to remind students — and all the rest of us — that Gazans are full human beings, and not merely victims of an ongoing genocide. For example, Marta Vidal’s evocative “‘Birds Know No Borders’ — The Love of Bird-Watching in Gaza,” describes the work of twin sisters, Mandy and Lara Sirdah. Gaza “is one of the world’s busiest corridors for bird migration,” and Vidal describes how the Sirdah sisters spread the joy of bird-watching throughout Gaza, especially to people with disabilities. Gaza might be an “open-air prison,” but it has long been a place where people assert their humanity in loving and imaginative ways.

It is the Israel Defense Forces executing the war against Gazans, but it is the United States of America funding and supplying this war. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has been the world’s overall largest recipient of U.S. military aid — $158 billion as of March 2023. As Reuters reported, “Between the beginning of the war in October 2023 and the end of June 2024, the United States “has transferred at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions.” On August 9, a few days after our five editors met in Portland to shape this book, the United States sent Israel another $3.5 billion to spend on U.S.-made weapons. It bears emphasizing that the provision of U.S. war materiel has long been a bipartisan affair.

This is “our” war, even if we oppose it. And as educators, we have a moral, and an educational, duty to expose our students to the human, cultural, economic, and ecological consequences of the war on Gaza. The charge “Don’t stop talking about Gaza” is all over social media. To that we add: Don’t stop teaching about Gaza.

Solidarity

Articles in Chapter 6 invite students to consider a variety of ways people have expressed solidarity with Palestine — and can continue to. The chapter has a focus on the special connection that Black activists have felt and enacted with Palestine for decades, beginning most publicly with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. As writers note in “Teaching Solidarity: The Black Freedom Struggle and Palestine-Israel” (p. 177): “Black Power activists increasingly saw the Palestinians as allies in a common struggle against a global U.S. empire driven by and for racial capitalism.” In 1970, here is James Baldwin, author of The Fire Next Time: “I am against the state of Israel. I don’t mean I am against the Jews when I say that. I mean I am against the state of Israel because I think a great injustice has been done to the Arabs.” (The title of Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa’s moving novel, Against the Loveless World, is drawn from a James Baldwin quote; Abulhawa notes why Palestinians, in return, feel such connection with Black Americans: “There were others in the world who, like us, were seen as worthless, not expected to aspire or excel, for whom mediocrity was predestined, and who should expect to be told where to go, what to do, whom to marry, and where to live.”)

The “Teaching Solidarity” article asks students to imagine themselves as Civil Rights and Black Power activists and to compare what solidarity — with Palestine or with Israel — means to them, and to decide what their position would be on the 1975 U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a form of racism.

The final article in the chapter, Lara Kiswani’s “Dear Teachers, Please Support BDS,” articulates why the call from Palestinian civil society to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel should matter to teachers here. Given the paucity of ways to influence Israel’s stance toward Palestinians, BDS is a nonviolent movement that aims to press Israel toward authentic dialogue with Palestinians. It draws inspiration from the successful anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s that simultaneously raised consciousness about South African racism, as it choked off trade, investment, and cultural ties, pressuring the regime to negotiate with leaders of the anti-apartheid movement. North American teachers and students were major players in that movement in solidarity with the anti-racist, democratic struggle in South Africa.

Hope

As we look at the history of Palestine-Israel, from the beginning of the Zionist movement to the Nakba to the events today in Gaza and the West Bank, it seems reasonable to despair. But one of the wonderful things about being an educator is that our work begins with an unshakable belief in the future. To step into a classroom is to express confidence in young people’s capacity to learn, to grow, to change, to make a difference — to do good in the world. Education is anchored in hope. A book about teaching Palestine is also a book about teaching hope. Look at the Visualizing Palestine graphic, “Palestine Shrinking, Expanding Israel,” on pages 48–49. The erosion, the disappearance of Palestine appears inexorable. And yet.

Never have there been more people in the world expressing solidarity with Palestine. Never have there been more students demanding justice for Palestinians. Never has there been more consciousness about the ongoing Nakba Palestinians have experienced. There has been a rupture in the silence about Palestine. As Reem Abuelhaj comments in her article, “Talking to Young Children About Gaza” (p. 84), “I never imagined I would walk through my neighborhood in Philadelphia and see people sitting at coffee shops wearing keffiyehs or see so many Palestinian flags in the windows of my neighbors’ homes.”

We conclude our chapter on Gaza with an essay by Palestinian American poet and reporter Noor Hindi, “Occupied by Hope”:

When I ask my father, “Is there hope?,” his response is swift.

“Of course there is hope.”

“From where?” I ask.

“I haven’t let go of my hope.”

Here is the truth about being Palestinian: In this lifetime, and the one after, and the one thereafter, we will always choose Palestine. There is little that endures more than our hope.

In the face of the unimaginable, this is what I hold on to.

When we teach about Palestine, this too is what we must hold on to.

— Bill Bigelow, Jesse Hagopian, Suzanna Kassouf, Adam Sanchez, and Samia Shoman

Teaching Palestine

Lessons, Stories, Voices

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Reviews:

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: Why Teach About Palestine

Chapter 2: History of Palestine-Israel

Chapter 3: Gaza

Chapter 4: Israeli Apartheid and Settler Colonialism

Chapter 5: Challenging Zionism and Antisemitism

Chapter 6: Solidarity with Palestine

Chapter 7: More Teaching Ideas and Resources

Palestine in Our Classrooms