Bringing Anti-Israel Activism to Schools Under the Guise of Arab Heritage

It was April 30, the last day of Arab American Heritage Month. To honor this cultural commemoration, a Palestinian publisher and three educators presented a webinar for teachers titled “From Egypt to Palestine: Celebrating Arab Heritage in Teaching and Learning.” English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), a constituent group of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), hosted the event.

But there was something curious about this presentation ostensibly meant to broaden teachers’ knowledge of Arab culture. The content was less about Arab culture and more about controversial issues from a one-sided perspective: Israel was accused of committing genocide six times. The pedagogy was less about presenting new content knowledge and more about encouraging partisan student activism.

The most prominent of the speakers was Sawsan Jaber, an award-winning high school English department head and instructor of pre-service teachers, who herself has stated on more than one occasion that her goal in teaching is to turn her students into activists.

The project she described offered an example of how she does this. To teach her students about genocide, Jaber first assigns texts on 16 historic instances of “dehumanization,” including the Holocaust, the extermination of native American tribes, the enslavement of black Americans, and “Palestine.”  She then gives students the “definition of genocide from the United Nations.” Their assignment is to “create a five-minute documentary deciding if what they were researching was an actual genocide.”

Here’s how she describes the assignment:

We don’t call what happened to Native Americans a genocide, but it is a genocide. We don’t call what happened to Black Americans that were enslaved a genocide, and it is a genocide. We refuse to call what’s happening in Palestine today a genocide, and it is a genocide. And so we give them the definition, but we let them decide. Is this fitting based on your research? Is this an act of genocide or not?

It is an odd pedagogical approach to encourage students without training in international law to reach conclusions about the validity of the UN definition of genocide based on their emotional reactions rather than on critical thinking. That legal definition, carefully crafted by experts in international law, is precise:  “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Emphasis added).

Based on Jaber’s description of her assignment, and counter to the UN definition, students are encouraged to conclude that the enslavement of Africans was a form of genocide, although slaves were treated by their owners as valuable property and encouraged to “breed,” which hardly reflects “the intent to destroy . . . an ethnical . . . group.”

Similarly, counter to the legal definition, students are encouraged to view the mistreatment of native Americans as a genocide. In fact, while some native Americans died through mistreatment and forced labor, or were victims of massacres by American settlers or rival native tribes, others, like the Cherokees, were displaced.^[i]

Regarding Israel, many international jurists have made the case that Israel’s actions in Gaza do not constitute genocide.  For example, Irwin Cotler indicated that:

Israel’s actions in Gaza are impossible to reconcile with the intention to commit genocide — a necessary element of the crime. Israel consistently seeks to minimize harm to civilians ­using measures including leaflets, messages and phone calls to urge civilians to evacuate targeted areas, creating humanitarian zones and corridors, and facilitating humanitarian aid.

Had the goal been to encourage critical thinking, Jaber might have assigned Cotler’s essay as required reading. But her lessons appeared more focused on convincing students that Israel is committing genocide.

Jaber’s co-presenter was Hannah Moushabeck, author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine and co-owner of Interlink Publishing House, described as “the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States.” Two other instructors of pre-service teachers backed up the discussion: Nadia Behizadeh, who teaches at Georgia State University, and Theresa Burruel Stone, from the English department at Sonoma State University.

Behizadeh and Stone both center Palestine in the classroom, but appear less focused on literature than on what they consider “justice.”

Behizadeh aims to develop “justice-centered educators.”  Critical for this is “the importance of love . . . that requires solidarity with your students,” which “means you know who they are, you know their backgrounds, you know their cultures” and “the histories that they bring with them and also to understand what’s happening in the nations and nation states to which they’re connected.”

Studying the literature of Palestine, she says, “provides us a grounding to think about well, when there is a genocide taking place in Palestine, how do we educate people about that? How do we decide what are the actions that we need to take as an individual, as a collective, and as a nation to try to stop this?” The controversial suggestion that Israel is committing genocide is presented as uncontested fact.

Stone, who also teaches pre-service teachers, agrees: “I’ve been fortunate to be able to talk about Palestine with my students, . . . . because there are young people who are preparing to become classroom teachers and they’re going to have students who are Arab. They’re going to have students who are Palestinian.”   She assigned Ahed Tamimi’s They Called Me a Lioness  because “it’s really important . . . for us as we’re understanding the current genocide, . . . to understand the long history, starting with the Nakba.” This gives her students, she states, “a justice and historical literacy.”

In fact,  They Called Me a Lioness is a whitewash of a vocal supporter of terrorism. Ahed Tamimi does not stand for nonviolence and human rights. She has appeared at conferences with representatives of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. Her words to Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 pogrom are telling:

We are waiting for you in all the West Bank cities from Hebron to Jenin – we will slaughter you and you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke. We will drink your blood and eat your skull. Come on, we are waiting for you.

The controversial nature of this and other recent children’s books promoted later in the webinar suggest that the presenters have reached the strange conclusion that the positions of radical Palestinians alone fit the bill for children’s literature focused on social justice.

The long, rich history of English-language literature for young readers offers many classic texts that confront injustice. One example is the Newbery Honor book, Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton, which uses a black child narrator to paint a grimly realistic picture of the cruelty of slave hunters in the pre-Civil War period. This beautifully written novel offers the young reader something none of the recommended books does: genuine literary merit.^[ii]

Whatever teachers’ personal politics, they should avoid using the classroom as a platform to promote their own (often controversial) views. For example, teachers should not employ the term “genocide” to describe what so many people view as Israel’s defensive actions against a terrorist group that has vowed to destroy it.  That Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people is not an incontrovertible fact, but a controversial view which many prominent experts have refuted.

For example, Col. Richard Kemp, who commanded British troops in Afghanistan,  has stated categorically, “An army intent on genocide would want to maximize civilian deaths, through starvation, deprivation of water, or direct killing. The IDF is doing the opposite.”

Many others have refuted the premise, as well. For example, Questionable Counting, the Henry Jackson Society’s recent report on Hamas’ fatality statistics, undermines the oft-repeated claims of overwhelming civilian casualties.

Similarly, the claim from the early days of the war that Israel was starving Gazan civilians has been rebutted.

However passionately teachers may fight for their beliefs and narratives in their private lives, their obligation as professionals is to maintain political neutrality in the classroom.

Along with promoting anti-Israel activism, the same educator-activists use their privileged positions to promote the ideology of “anti-colonialism.”  Stone’s goal, she says, is to develop “anti-colonial literacies and really think about how we can move and act and be in solidarity.”

But a wholly negative view of colonialism is not universal among historians.  Modern scholars like Britain’s Nigel Biggar, in his monumental study Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning,^[iii] paint a nuanced picture of British colonialism, condemning it when it was brutal, but noting that “[f]rom the early decades of the nineteenth century its natural, innocent concerns to promote trade and maintain strategic advantage were increasingly supplemented and tempered by Christian humanitarianism, a commitment to public service and a liberal vision of political life” (286).

The nuanced observations of Nigerian nationalist Chinua Achebe about British colonialism also attenuate the anticolonial narrative: “The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care. . . . One was not consumed by fear of abduction or armed robbery” (199).  In other words, people felt safer under British governance.

Would Jaber, Behizadeh, and Stone condemn Islamic colonialism, which began when Arab armies swept through the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain, and as far east as Sind (in India) between 623 and 712, gradually replacing indigenous languages with Arabic and reducing the practice of Christianity with financial incentives to convert to Islam? ^[iv]

In fact, it was the so-called colonial “settlers” of British Columbia, Canada who tried hard to convince the indigenous people of the region to abandon the practice of slavery. In the nineteenth century, James Douglass, commander of Fort Vancouver, observed predatory slave raids by the Haida and tried to end the practice by moral suasion, denouncing it as a “detestable traffic.” Unfortunately, he found “no remedy within our power” to do so, with white settlers outnumbered two to one by Indigenous peoples.”^[v] So, if it was the white “settlers” who tried to extirpate slavery, and the indigenous people who insisted on keeping it, who was the perpetrator and who was the victim?

These examples argue for presenting a more nuanced view and avoiding a simplistic anti-colonialist ideology – and also show how critical is in-depth historical knowledge to making moral judgements about the past. That is what students need to be taught.

Arab – or Palestinian? – Heritage Month

“From Egypt to Palestine” failed to adhere to its stated theme of “Arab Heritage.” With few exceptions (like references to the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum), it focused almost exclusively on Palestinian culture, ignoring the diversity of the Arab world. It opened with a musical video with visual references to Palestinian flags, to the newly popular use of the watermelon as a symbol of “Palestine,” to keffiyehs, and to the “debkeh” dance.  It ended with a poetic evocation of suffering in Gaza. Of the books displayed on the slides, most are on Palestine, not the Arab world.

Similarly, the shared teaching resources were exclusively about Palestine:

Publisher Hannah Moushabeck discussed negative media stereotypes of Arabs, as epitomized in Disney’s Aladdin. She rightly drew her listeners’ attention to the “3B syndrome” – seeing Arabs as “bombers, bellydancers, and billionaires.”

But, while the speakers repeatedly used the word “genocide” to condemn Israel, they had nothing to say about jihadist violence by terrorist entities such as Hamas, ISIS, Islamic Jihad, and the Taliban, or about the slaughter of at least half a million people in the Syrian civil war or the ongoing genocide in Sudan. Although it should not color perceptions of every Arab or Muslim, it is not surprising that this widespread violence has shaped perceptions of the Islamic world.

Finally, Moushabeck’s map of countries where Arabs live erases Israel, which is 20 percent Arab, and claims the disputed West Bank territories as “Palestine.” She also distorts the Jewish presence in the Arab world:

You know, the Arab world is the epicenter of so many different religions. We have some of them named here. We have Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze. We really encompass the entire spectrum. There’s even Arab Buddhists.

The Arab world did indeed have a huge Jewish presence, but drove out its 850,000 Jews between the 1940s and 1960s, leaving a mere handful, so this is no longer true.

Empty Words, Empty Minds

A striking feature of the “From Egypt to Palestine” webinar was the speakers’ heavy reliance on buzzwords, which echoed throughout the discussion like a chorus. Terms like “solidarity,” “elevate voices,” “uplift students,” and the ever-present “decolonize”—whether of literacy, history, or America—were used with near-religious fervor.

For today’s activist-educators, these words signal virtue. Teachers who “elevate” and “decolonize” are the enlightened, while those teachers who choose to transmit core knowledge to the next generation are caricatured as relics of the Eurocentric system we’re now told to reject.

But buzzwords can replace thought. They invite educators to join an ideological club, using shared language to mark insiders and exclude dissenters. This kind of signaling discourages honest debate and stifles intellectual curiosity.

What truly limits student voices is enforced ideological conformity. And what hinders intellectual growth is pushing students into activism before they’ve acquired the historical grounding and analytical skills needed to make informed judgments—something that takes years of study.

Designing lessons around the perspectives of students who haven’t yet learned history is educational malpractice. Students come to school to learn, not to teach. When teachers allow students to conflate enslaved African Americans in 1865 with Jewish victims of death camps in 1945, they’re not empowering them—they’re misinforming them. That’s not liberation through knowledge; it’s confusion through ignorance.

Likewise, teaching about colonialism without acknowledging its complexities—ignoring, for example, that some colonial societies were better managed than the tribal societies that preceded them, or that some indigenous groups participated in the slave trade while some Europeans sought to end it—doesn’t broaden young minds. It narrows them.

Students from marginalized backgrounds, in particular, deserve better. They need unbiased education—not simplified narratives or political indoctrination. They need to be exposed to opposing ideas and engage with history in its full, often uncomfortable, complexity.

Here’s a better vision for education: Put a premium on fact-based knowledge. Keep ideological activism—especially on divisive issues—out of the classroom. If students want to make a difference, encourage them to volunteer at a homeless shelter, read to immigrant children, or spend time with seniors. Let them develop compassion and civic responsibility through action, not slogans.

Meanwhile, in school, they can study history from multiple perspectives—without being manipulated by teachers who smuggle their political agendas into public school classrooms and into susceptible young minds.

^[i] See the chapter “Did Europeans Commit Genocide in the New World?” in Jeff Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen:The Truth About European Colonialism in the Third World,” Bombardier, 2023, pp. 24-44.

^[ii] Many other classic children’s novels address injustice. One American example is Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremaine, winner of the 1944 John Newbery Medal for “most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” Unlike Ahed Tamimi’s inaccurate anti-Israel diatribe, this historical novel of the Revolutionary War “gives no one-sided account of pre-Revolutionary days but makes the colonists and redcoats come alive as histories never seem to. . . All the details of the everyday life of the period are expertly woven into the story, never dragged in for themselves.” Zena Sutherland and May Hill Arbuthnot, Children and Books, 5^th ed., Scott Foresman, 385. Another classic is Joan Aiken’s Midnight is a Place, which offers a chilling picture of child labor in carpet factories in England during the Industrial Revolution.

^[iii]Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, William Collins, 2013.

^[iv] Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book, Jewish Publication Society, 1979, xxiii-xxiv.  Hammond Atlas of World History, 5^th ed., pp. 98-99.

^[v] Mark Milke, The Victim Cult: How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilizations, Thomas and Black, 2019, pp. 222-223.