Despite the ongoing fallout from rightwing attacks on critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools, the majority of U.S. teachers want every student to not only feel welcome in their classrooms but also learn about the ways history intersects with contemporary political life.
For many, Palestine is a pressing concern, a clear example of the ways cultural domination and settler colonialism intersect and operate.
But how best to broach a subject that is often seen as contentious?
As Rashid Khalidi wrote in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, the reality is relatively simple: “The modern history of Palestine can best be understood… 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.”
There is much more that can be added to this brief overview, and teachers and students interested in learning what has happened to the Palestinian people since Israel’s 1948 founding will find a great deal of excellent material—well-researched essays, memoir, poems and detailed lesson plans—in Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Voices, Stories. The beautifully illustrated book, geared toward middle and high school teachers and learners, is comprehensive and addresses both the destruction of Gaza since October 2023 and the region’s long history. The U.S. role there is also parsed.
While we’re currently experiencing intense domestic backlash against progressive, liberatory education, the book is a paean to winning a better, more equitable and peaceful world.
“Much about the world comes into focus when looked at from the point of view of people who do not benefit from existing power relations,” the editors write in the book’s introduction. This makes “Teaching Palestine partisan in that it centers Palestinian lives, uplifts and celebrates Palestinian’ struggle for justice, and denounces racism and inequality.”
The book also zeroes in on Zionism and situates the movement that led to the establishment of Israel on the heinous antisemitism that was endemic throughout Eastern Europe during the 19th century. “The story of today’s Palestine-Israel begins with anti-Semitic pogroms,” the editors explain. “This sparked the Zionist movement” that sought the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine well before the horrific Nazi-led genocide against the Jewish people (and other minorities) during World War II.
Their well-orchestrated and well-financed campaign for an exclusively Jewish state was, of course, ultimately successful, and the book chronicles the area’s evolution from a land controlled by the Ottoman Empire (1517–1917) to a land controlled by Great Britain per a League of Nations mandate that lasted until the United Nations ordered the partition of Palestine in 1947.
Zionists saw this as a resounding victory. But Palestinians? They call it the Nakba, or catastrophe.
The idea that perspective matters is a key message of Teaching Palestine, and the book asks readers to think about whose voices are included and whose are not. Throughout, the collection strives to include multiple, sometimes conflicting, outlooks. Nowhere is this clearer than in the book’s discussion of the foundation of Zionism. Arthur Ruppin, for example, a German Jew who moved to Israel in 1907 to direct the Palestine office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, is introduced as one of the movement’s most ardent supporters. “Land is the most necessary thing for our establishing roots in Palestine,” he wrote. “We are bound to remove the [Palestinian] peasants who cultivated the land so far, both owners of the land and tenants.”
But Ruppin had opponents. Activists like Pati Kremer, a member of the General Union of Jewish Workers of Russia, Lithuania and Poland, better known as the Bund, took a different tack. “Where we live, that is our country,” Kremer argued. Not only did Bund members have no interest in emigrating to Palestine—“where Jewish capitalists would continue to exploit” other Jews—but she and other Bundists saw what was unfolding as a battle between socialism and Zionism.
As interesting and important as this is, it is the personal essays and poems that provide the emotional core of Teaching Palestine. Eye-witness accounts of abuse at checkpoints, an overview of the day-to-day impact of disparate laws governing Jews and Palestinians, and reflections on the gut-wrenching loss of loved ones before and since October 7th are riveting.
So are calls for justice written by Jewish American educators.
“To be Jewish,” Hannah Klein and Jake Roth write, “means to come from the tradition of Jewish volunteers for the registration of Black voters during the Civil Rights Movement, who made up nearly a third of white volunteers, and who sometimes paid for their dedication with their lives. Being Jewish means to come from the tradition of Jewish workers who helped build the U.S. labor movement into an engine for transformative social change, winning the eight-hour workday, Social Security, and other reforms that make life more bearable for working people.”
They cite the concept of Tikkun Olam, a Jewish mandate to repair the world, as impossible to square with the ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinian people, and they call on teachers and others to promote justice in and beyond the Middle East.
Teaching Palestine includes an annotated resource list to make this easier. It also includes several model lesson plans and role plays that teachers can adapt to meet the specific needs of their students.
It will likely not be easy for instructors to teach this content. But while we’re currently experiencing intense domestic backlash against progressive, liberatory education, the book is a paean to winning a better, more equitable and peaceful world. As the editors note, “The erosion, the disappearance of Palestine appears inexorable. And yet… Never have there been more people in the world expressing solidarity with Palestine.”
As we fight Zionism and Trump 2.0, we need to remember that we can find solace in solidarity.
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Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices
Edited by Bill Bigelow, Jesse Hagopian, Suzanna Kassouf, Adam Sanchez and Samia Shoman
Rethinking Schools; 229 pages
Feb. 27, 2025
