California teacher union members pushed anti-Israel ideologies on students following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.
According to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education, California teachers at the Oakland Unified School District held a “Teach-in for Gaza.” One of the event’s guest speakers claimed that Israel is a “project to completely replace the indigenous population with a settler one. It’s an attempt to exterminate the Palestinians, carried out through a collusion between Israel, the U.S., the European Union, and other Western powers.”
Some of the questions presented to panelists included “What does Palestinian freedom mean to you?” and “How are you engaged with the Palestinian freedom struggle.”
District staff and students were also offered a presentation featuring slides on Hamas. One of the slides said the terrorist group is an “Islamist political group focused on Palestinian liberation.”
A resolution calling for “an end to the invasion and occupation of Gaza by the Israeli military” was also presented at an October 25 school board meeting.
In December 2023, an assignment presented to students called “War in Gaza Opinion Paragraph” instructed them to use a “slide deck to learn more about the current war in Gaza and write a paragraph for extra credit equivalent to one daily assignment in any class.”
Parents Defending Education also shared a document called “Educational Resources on Palestine.” “Our work is not to win our students over to a particular side nor indoctrinate them with our own political perspective on Israel-Palestine,” the document says, adding, “We do hold true that we are living in a world where the forces of imperialism and capitalism shape the decisions of global leaders and enact oppressive conditions upon various ethnic groups and often turn oppressed groups against each other.”
Some of the lesson plans included in the Educational Resources include “P is for Palestine,” “Colonialism, in Regards to Palestine,” “Settler Colonialism Worksheet,” and “Gaza Fights for Freedom.”
American Faith reported in January that the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) held a training session in Oakland called “Palestine in Our Classrooms: Teaching to the Moment — 75 Years of Resistance, Resilience, and Sumood.”
The event was advertised as an “intensive in-person conference focused on incorporating Palestinian history, narratives, and culture into K-12 classrooms.”
