A high school teacher in Washington State’s Renton School District sent education officials a statement in November “regarding . . . condemning the attacks by Hamas,” parental-rights organization Parents Defending Education recently found.
“I would not like my name attached to any statement condemning Hamas that does not also recognize the atrocities committed by the Israeli government, condemning them as well,” the social-studies teacher said. “Hamas owes its very existence to the Israeli government and was propped up by Prime Minister Netanyahu in an effort to divide the Palestinian people and reduce the influence and effectiveness of the Palestinian Authority. Any statement that does not acknowledge this is incomplete. Hamas (labeled a terrorist organization) exists purely because of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.”
“Do I condemn Hamas?” he continued. “No. Do I approve of all their actions? Absolutely not. I also recognize that my place of privilege as a white man in the imperial core allows me no moral ground on which to judge indigenous resistance against these same western colonial powers. What I can and do condemn is the state of Israel for its actions against the Palestinian people over the last 75 years. What I can and do condemn is anti-black racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, fascist governments, and militarized oppression of indigenous people.”
In the same district, a middle school social-studies teacher posted on a teachers’ forum that “with the support” of her school district’s administration, she created a “mini unit” to put together “an engaging, challenging lesson on the Israel-Palestine conflict.” She used a “perfect” online lesson plan called the Seeds of Violence to help students “focus on the genesis of the conflict instead of who is right and wrong.”
Seeds of Violence is a “mixer/mystery activity on Zionism, anti-Zionism, peasant resistance, the Great War, the British Mandate, and more,” published by the Zinn Education Project (an organization that teaches “the people’s history”). The lesson plan quotes from The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, the “essential” book by Rashid Khalidi, who called Hamas’s reign an inevitable result of “continued occupation and continued colonization.” A quote from the book in the lesson plan: “‘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.'”
Students are supposed to analyze the various roots of violence in Palestinian territories and ultimately ask themselves: “Who or what in Palestine’s early history was ‘guilty’ of laying the groundwork, or somehow contributing to today’s violence?”