In California, where Newsom signed a bill last October establishing a statewide K-12 Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator (The New York Times called this “a law restricting what teachers can say in the classroom”), examples of censorship abound. A state investigation found that a San Jose Ethnic Studies teacher “violated Jewish students’ rights by failing to intervene with another perspective during a student project on genocide with a slide titled ‘Genocide of Palestinians.’” A teacher in Oakland was fired for wearing a “Free Palestine” pin. Samia Shoman, a Palestinian American principal who was doxxed, received death threats, and became the target of a failed removal campaign in early 2023, was attacked again last year for attempting to lead a teacher training on “Humanizing Our Arab/Muslim Students.” In San Francisco, Ethnic Studies teachers were required to use a textbook that does not discuss Israel and Palestine. And in Santa Ana, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) boasted that its lawsuit disbanded the district’s Ethnic Studies Steering Committee and canceled three courses: Ethnic Studies World Geography, Ethnic Studies World Histories, and Ethnic Studies: Perspectives, Identities, and Social Justice.

Further north, in the Bay Area district where Isa recited her poem—and where I myself went to high school—Israel/Palestine was a standard World Studies unit before becoming so taboo that student poetry about it set off alarm bells. It was a standard unit before teachers began discouraging students from organizing a walkout for a ceasefire. And it was a standard unit long before a lesson on Gaza sparked backlash so disproportionate it grew national, and so influential it turned into California state policy.

Because of that lesson, California state Senator Josh Becker—whose son went to Menlo-Atherton, the high school where it was taught—co-authored AB 1468, a bill that sought to give government officials the power to censor teaching materials. When AB 1468 failed to become law, Becker (who did not respond to repeated requests for an interview) supported its replacement, AB 715, which did pass. Despite legal challenges to its constitutionality, the law went into effect this year. AB 715, Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said, “erase[s] Palestinian voices” and “repackage[s] censorship under the guise of combating antisemitism.”

The California legislature also approved a budget measure that stopped the statewide rollout of Ethnic Studies courses in schools. In other words, high schools across California will no longer be required to implement anti-racist education. They will, however, have an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator—one bound by a definition of antisemitism that condemns targeting the state of Israel—developing their training, resources, and enforcement strategies.

But let’s back up, for a moment, to before. Before the lesson on Gaza that so infuriated Becker. Before the backlash and the bills. The lesson, after all, was not the beginning. And Becker was not alone.

It was the summer of 2019. Earlier that year, experts had convened to develop an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) for California schools. But as soon as the curriculum was made public, backlash began to roll in. Most criticism, Jewish Currents reported, stemmed from “Zionist groups who opposed the inclusion of Palestinian topics—including a mention of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—within the Arab American studies portion” of the proposed curriculum. Those groups included the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, StandWithUs, and the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES)—the same organization that would denounce both Samia Shoman and Menlo-Atherton a few years later.

Each of these organizations, Jewish Currents reporter Gabi Kirk wrote, sought to turn Ethnic Studies into a “largely toothless multicultural diversity initiative rather than actually integrating an analysis of antisemitism into Ethnic Studies’ radical framework.” In response, in October of 2020, Governor Newsom vetoed an early version of a state bill requiring the class to be offered in high schools. A statewide requirement would be out of reach until the following year, when the bill would go to another vote.

This time, the model curriculum was nearly unrecognizable. California’s Department of Education had scrapped the original Arab-American Studies module entirely. Mentions of Palestine, BDS, activists like Linda Sarsour, and even Muslim-American politicians like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar had been erased. All 20 authors of the first model curriculum asked for their names to be removed from the new, final version. Shoman was one of them; for this, she was attacked by Fox News, which decried her “extreme version of Black Lives Matter curriculum” and supposed antisemitism. She was also doxxed and received death threats.

But it was this censored version, stamped with Newsom’s approval, that ultimately passed in 2021. The new law allowed for local development of curriculum, outside the now problematic domain of the ESMC. Many anti-racist students, teachers, and organizers celebrated, despite the censorship.

However, the fight, and the scrutiny, over the curriculum taught educators to watch what they said. In 2021, one Menlo-Atherton teacher told me that there was an outspoken cohort of parents that “didn’t want [teachers] talking about Palestine.” She said she knew parents were scrutinizing her course page on Canvas and “complaining to the assistant superintendent that they did not have a say in the curriculum development.” During one meeting, she said, parents presented administrators with a “four-inch binder with curriculum that they didn’t think was right to cover in an Ethnic Studies class.” In 2022, a teacher at the nearby Sequoia High School told me that parents who opposed Ethnic Studies were “combing through the [curriculum], looking for us to make a mistake.”

It is in this context that, years later, two teachers delivered a lesson on Gaza.

November 3, 2023, was a Friday, which meant that it was time for Chloe Gentile-Montgomery’s ninth-grade Ethnic Studies class to talk about the news. So far that year, there had been “current event Fridays” on the war in Ukraine, wildfires in Hawaii, police brutality in the United States, and protests in Iran, among other topics. But there was one issue that, despite its near-total ubiquity in the news at the time, had been avoided for weeks: Gaza.

It had not yet been addressed because Gentile-Montgomery felt unsure about how to do so. She wanted to be “careful,” but not ignore an “ongoing genocide,” she told me. When her students started asking questions about Gaza, and a coworker, whom we’ll call Teacher #1 (the teacher asked for their identity to be withheld for fear of retribution for sharing their story), e-mailed her a lesson plan, she overcame her hesitation.

Teacher #1 had taught about Israel and Palestine in their class a few weeks before, and it had gone well. The lesson had been simple: a short lecture, then independent classwork. Students combed through articles and considered how newspapers covered Palestine, and which perspectives took priority. For both teachers, the activity seemed like a timely example of a key concept on their syllabi: dominant and counter-narratives.

With this in mind, Gentile-Montgomery gave a lesson on Gaza. It went well. She posted the slides online for those who were absent, proud that, like Teacher #1, she had “done right by her students and the students of the world.” But the presentation wound up being leaked from a private student course page to pro-Israel organizations. Then came the backlash.

A slide defining dominant narratives (which did not mention Israel or Gaza but rather three examples of historically “powerful” identities: “men, white people, rich people”) featured a cartoon of a puppet and puppeteer that some viewers interpreted as “verg[ing] on antisemitism,” “recalling antisemitic tropes about secret Jewish control of government, the media and finance.” A slide with shrinking maps of Palestine that simplified the UN’s condemnation of illegal settlements (“Israel is a country created on Palestinian land. The United Nations says this is illegal”) was singled out for being “factually inaccurate.” (In fact, the 1947 map in the slideshow was labeled “UN plan” because it reflected the resolution that contemplated the creation of Israeli and Palestinian states; the UN’s highest court has since deemed Israel’s subsequent territorial expansion and occupation to be “illegal.”)

A video of a man in Gaza searching for his children beneath rubble, Teacher #1 said, was criticized by school administrators for “cultivating empathy for the Palestinians.” The school’s principal, Karl Losekoot, told me he “[did] not recall this exact statement, but did feel that the framing of the lesson and slide show was not consistent with our goals for teachers to present material from an unbiased perspective.”

The lesson was critiqued, too, for overlooking “Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native, and Latino Americans.” It was attacked for “run[ning] the risk of turning students into antisemites, inadvertently or not.”

The teacher who created the slides apologized to her supervisors and emphasized that she in no way intended to harm Jewish communities, much less accidentally invoke harmful iconography. Simultaneously, district educators shared an open letter in solidarity with their peers, identifying backlash to the lesson as “an attempt to instill fear among staff and censor academic discussion on a topic that students have every right to learn about.” Their letter was published in early 2024, by which point Israel had already killed more than 9,000 children. Some of those kids had been killed while hiding in classrooms. The IDF had bombed hundreds of schools. The International Court of Justice had recognized that charges of genocide against Israel were at least plausible. Soon, new labels would emerge: scholasticide, epistemicide, medicide. And yet the outrage over a lesson in California continued.

Parents complained to school board members and met with the principal. Some signed a petition, shaped in part by ACES, a group opposed to prioritizing “Critical Race Theory frameworks” in K-12, demanding that the superintendent take “immediate action.” Others decided the lesson was a basis to sue. (ACES’s founder, who does not have children enrolled in the district, canceled our interview hours before it was scheduled due to what she called my “biased, agenda-driven reporting.”)

Meanwhile, people sent Gentile-Montgomery so many messages that she changed her e-mail address. Others put up posters with images of Israeli hostages outside her door. The Deborah Project and the Zachor Institute, two pro-Israel legal advocacy groups based in Pennsylvania and Montana, respectively, filed public records requests for any and all mentions of “Zionism, Zionists, Israel, Israelis, Palestine, and/or Palestinians” in district teachers’ lessons, e-mails, and personal text messages. Parents Defending Education, the Virginia-based group that recently compiled a list of K-12 districts for Donald Trump to investigate, joined the chorus too, and sued.

The district received—and declined—interview requests from The New York Times, which cited the lesson’s slideshow in an article. School board meetings were verbal bloodbaths: At one, when an adult confronted a student who held up a notebook that read “Let’s not forget that the IDF lied about the beheading of babies,” police were called to intervene.

Behind the scenes, school administrators scrambled to address the situation. They landed on a solution championed by state Senator Becker: a “reteach lesson” to be delivered by both Gentile-Montgomery and Teacher #1 that would address specific parental concerns and provide additional context. The teachers, eager to teach, agreed. But this lesson, too, was censored.

“I am really sorry,” Losekoot, the school’s principal, wrote in an e-mail to Teacher #1 obtained by The Nation. “The district is directing us to narrow down what is covered…[and] minimize time spent.” The presentation would have to be just three slides, he said, and definitions of the Nakba had to be removed.

“I am surprised to see such a drastic change,” the teacher replied. “Is the district putting out a policy that we cannot at all discuss the current events in Gaza?… Why are we directed to leave out this educational content?” To these questions, there was no real response, then or now. (“I felt that it made the most sense to stick to the three identified slides.… [this] presented the most constructive way forward,” Losekoot told me.)

Instead, in February 2024, both teachers—neither of whom had tenure—were informed of their “non-re-elections.” Gentile-Montgomery described being told that she was let go because she was not a “good fit.” But “it was obviously,” she told me shortly after leaving the district, “because of the lesson.”

The next month, on the day the “reteach lesson” was scheduled, the principal instructed Teacher #1 to proceed with a formal apology but remove what little remained of their preapproved presentation—a video of Palestinian and Israeli parents whose children had been killed expressing their “shared pain”—from the lesson plan. Having already been let go, they gave the full lesson anyway. They gave another one, too, on genocides—the Holocaust, Cambodia, and whether Gaza should, according to UN criteria, be considered as such. Their students, they believed, had the right to learn.

By early 2025, a year after the teachers’ dismissals, much of the world agreed that Israel’s attacks amounted to a genocide. By the spring, the death toll in Gaza was confirmed to be at least 51,000 and estimated to be upwards of 186,000. Over 25,000 children had been injured, making Gaza the region with the largest concentration of child amputees in the world. More than 39,000 had lost one or both parents. UNICEF had calculated that the death toll for children in Gaza was equivalent to a classroom of 28 students being killed every day for nearly two years.

In April, backlash prompted the school’s district board to revisit its earlier decision requiring students take Ethnic Studies—the class Gentile-Montgomery taught—to graduate. In other Californian districts that implemented Ethnic Studies before the state mandated that they do so, the course is similarly under attack.

Menlo-Atherton, however one tallies its missteps and intentions, is a telling case study. The timeline and escalation of criticism reveal that the main issue was not really the accuracy of a particular lesson plan but the fact that Palestine had been taught at all. Backlash was not a correction, nor a commitment to truth, nor a fix to an existing curriculum. It was, and remains, an attempt to get rid of anti-racist, anti-colonial classes like Ethnic Studies altogether.

Across the country, the political strategy driving attacks on teaching Palestine—modeled by multimillion-dollar organizations like the ADL and the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) and multibillion-dollar law firms like Ropes & Gray, which is representing the plaintiffs suing the school district in which “the lesson” took place pro bono—has been the same. The throughline is a wholesale conflation of support for Palestinians with antisemitism; the goal is to erase Palestine from American schools.

Even the suggestion that Israel is committing a genocide can be presented as evidence of antisemitism. Project Shema, a nonprofit that leads trainings in K-12 districts, writes in a discussion guide that accusations of genocide “tap into latent antisemitism”; the CEO of ICAN, meanwhile, responded to a vague request for teaching “facts” even when they’re “uncomfortable” by saying: “Here’s a fact…that you may want to learn in your Ethnic Studies class: there is no genocide in Gaza.” (He did not respond to requests for an interview. Neither did the ADL or the Deborah Project.)

Pro-Israel groups like ICAN and the ADL work to suppress all discussion of state oppression that implicates Israel and the United States—an effort that is reinforced by both countries’ educational policies. In Israel, for instance, the state “ordered the removal of the word Nakba from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren” in 2009 and passed a law withholding public funding from institutions that taught about the ethnic cleansing in 2011. In the United States, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, passed by the House in 2023, equated criticisms of Israeli racism with anti-Jewish discrimination. And at the start of his second term, Trump ordered schools to stop teaching “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) if they want to keep receiving any federal money.

In the US, the very K-12 classes most often mischaracterized as CRT—Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, and any course that addresses structural oppression—are, as Jewish teachers themselves have pointed out, crucial to fighting both antisemitism and white supremacy precisely because they discuss histories of state violence. But groups that claim to “defend the civil rights of Jews,” like the Deborah Project, have aligned themselves with Trump in fighting anti-racist education, designating staff attorneys to litigate exclusively against “Critical Race Theory.”

ICAN shares “toolkits” with letter templates urging California legislators “not [to] fund…the ethnic studies high school graduation requirement.” The ADL celebrates its shutdown of Ethnic Studies courses. And at a forum cohosted by ACES and ICAN, invited speakers denounced not only historical truths about Palestine (like “maps [that] infer that Israel has stolen land from the Palestinians”), but also truths about systemic racism in the United States and the notion that “colonization and oppression define [US] history.”

If students recognize colonial violence somewhere, the fear seems to be that they’ll recognize it everywhere. And if teachers draw parallels between Israel and the United States—which they do—then Zionist claims that Israeli rights abuses are being unfairly “singled out” are unfounded.

The fraught alignment between Zionist organizations and, as Jewish Currents puts it, the elected white supremacists “intent on suppressing inconvenient histories,” may, then, come down to this: pro-Israel groups seek to erase lessons on US imperialism and structural discrimination because they might undermine Israel’s project for Palestine, and the Donald Trumps, Christopher Rufos, and Ron DeSantises of the world censor Palestine because it complicates their heroic mythologies of the United States.

As education scholar and author Eve L. Ewing notes, censorship of Palestine in American education stems precisely from the obvious parallels between two settler colonial contexts. (That talking about Gaza also implicates the present violence of the US military only strengthens the perceived need for erasure.) After all, for anyone with “a deep investment in the maintenance of the current hierarchy of domination of this country,” Ewing told me, it’s “really important that young people not develop too critical a lens, not start asking too many questions.” If they recognize that the United States and Israel are committing genocide, the earlier logic continues, they may feel inclined to resist. They might demand defunding the military or police, or a restitution of land.

Censorship of Palestine, then, is part of a broader project to whitewash American education—to manufacture consent for domestic state violence, American foreign policy, and the militarism that characterizes both. That is why, a decade ago, as a student in the very high school where Gentile-Montgomery once taught, I sat through a 10th-grade lesson on how the United States was justified in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is why, as our government becomes ever more authoritarian, we have witnessed a record-breaking number of banned books, anti-CRT legislation, assaults on trans youth at school, and attacks on Black Studies. It is why groups like ACES, which decry “unbalanced” critique of Israel, simultaneously denounce anti-imperialist figures like Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, and Vickie Castro for being “militant and/or Marxist.”

“The sin,” Ewing writes in Original Sins, “lies not only in the violence, but in the creation of the idea that makes the violence morally permissible.” In American public schools, that idea is reflected in the refusal to engage with the US role in killing tens of thousands of students in Gaza—an incomprehensible slaughter that American students themselves are begging to understand.

For Isa, and for millions of her peers around the country, school has become a place where questions are not answered and relevant news is not discussed. Instead, students are “seeing teachers who question the dominant narrative be punished,” and they’re “getting the message” that free speech does not apply to Palestine, Tori Porell, who tracks K-12 aid requests at Palestine Legal, told me. They’re learning about Palestine outside of class—on their own, on TikTok, from protests, and from friends.

Isa, for one, still writes about Gaza and goes to protests with her sisters. Alexis and Johnny (who requested the use of pseudonyms), twins and seniors at Isa’s high school, research Palestine in their free time, donate their after-school job money to Palestinian organizations, and mention Gaza in the classroom whenever they can. Samia Shoman’s kids, then eighth graders in a nearby district, began to boycott the McDonald’s down the street from their school in 2023. All five teenagers boycott pro-IDF brands. (“Why are we giving money,” Isa said, to corporations that support “killing younger kids, and people our age?”)

Meanwhile, their peers in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and dozens of other cities have led high school walkouts demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Middle schoolers in Oakland demanded “opportunities to discuss the conflict in class” and a curriculum that included “Palestinian perspectives.” Teenagers across the country were part of university encampments. And while some of these kids are exceptionally committed, polls show that American youth, on average, support Palestine.

That’s because young people are seeing “for themselves the images coming out of Gaza,” Porell explained. They have “seen a population that is literally [being starved] and understood, quite plainly, who—in a very basic construction—is the oppressed and who is the oppressor.” Johnny, for instance, imagines his counterparts in Palestine, where desks have become shields and attendance is a prayer. “We both want to learn, we both want to dream, we both have goals,” he said. “[But] theirs are prevented…because they keep getting bombed. Their schools are destroyed, are used to hold dead bodies. Their schools have become completely different [than mine]; full of suffering.”

Today, while kids like Johnny increasingly seek learning outside of classrooms, educators are resisting censorship within them. Teacher #1 gives lessons about Gaza at their new school; Isa’s teachers, the ones who warned her about the poem, have begun to encourage students to tackle the topic in class presentations. More than 2,000 educators attended Rethinking Schools’ webinar on teaching about Palestine after selling out the magazine’s most popular edition in years. In February, Shoman and five coeditors released a guide to “Teaching Palestine” in K-12. In July, the largest national teacher’s union cut ties with the ADL, citing the group’s unfounded conflation of “calls for Palestinian rights” with “hate speech.” And across the country, educators have consistently shown up to school board meetings to protest censorship and the removal of their peers.

But after more than two years of genocide with unbroken US military support, after a ceasefire that has already been breached more than 1,620 times, after the United States and Israel expanded their attacks, after the US bombed a girls’ elementary school in Iran, a commitment to truthful public education demands that more than just professional educators participate.

Instead, Ewing prompts, “if you [have] any kind of relationship with learners of all ages, what are the opportunities you can seize to engage in collective political education?” What if “instead of waiting to defend the teacher who’s about to lose their job for teaching Palestine, a group of parents were showing up and saying, ‘Why isn’t Palestine being taught in school?’ What would happen if there were a critical mass of folks making these demands?”

What would happen if we were more proactive in our imagination, and outspoken about what the purpose of education should be? Or if, like Isa, we asked just two questions—“How can we advocate?” and “How can we make sure [Palestine is] talked about?”—of everyone we knew? How many lives could we save?