History teachers at Fort Lee High School in New Jersey recently gave an anti-Israel presentation to students that included assertions that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in its war against Hamas, claims that Hamas is simply a “resistance movement” rather than a terrorist organization, and characterizations of the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protest movement as “peaceful” and solely about divestment from Israel.
Before beginning their presentation, social-studies teachers Fathia Balgahoon and Stephen Wolowitz confiscated their students’ cell phones and warned the high-school juniors that the slideshow they’d be viewing was biased, offering to allow them to leave if that bias would make them uncomfortable, according to a source familiar with events.
The presentation slideshow, a copy of which was obtained by National Review, opens with a series of definitions of terms like Arab, Israeli, and Zionism, and instructs the students to “remember that not every Jewish person” believes in Israel’s right to exist and that “having anti-zionist stance [sic] does not mean you are anti-semitic.”
Another slide shows the “Green Map,” a commonly seen — and misleading — graphic used by anti-Israel organizations to demonstrate that all of what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza was formerly entirely Palestinian land. What the graphic leaves out is that, in 1946, when the United Kingdom controlled the area labeled as “Palestine,” much of the land was uninhabited, the Arab states rejected the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan while Israeli representatives accepted it, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip were not “Palestine” from 1949 to 1967 but had instead been invaded and occupied by Jordan and Egypt, respectively.
The slideshow refers to the “Nakba” as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and near destruction of Palestinian society at the time,” another misleading statement. While anti-Israel activists currently use the term to mean displacement of Palestinians, the “catastrophe” — the English translation of the term — initially referred to the Arab states’ defeat in a war that began after they invaded newly independent Israel in 1948y. Moreover, many Arabs within Israel left at the urging of neighboring Arab governments, which then refused to take them in.
On a slide titled “Naksa of 1967 or the Six Day War [sic],” the authors write that, “during 1967, another war breaks out between Israel and Palestine,” stating that “Israel gain[ed] control of East Jerusalem (Al-Quds), the West Bank and Gaza” through the war. The teachers fail to note that the war was not between Israel and Palestine but between Israel and invading Arab states and that Israel gained control of the West Bank and Gaza when those Arab states lost the war they started.
Another slide in the presentation describes Palestinians as “currently experiencing a genocide” while another invokes the phrase “Never Again.” Yet another discusses Hamas on a page titled “Who is Hamas?”
Balgahoom and Wolowitz write that Hamas is an “armed RESISTANCE MOVEMENT,” not a terrorist organization, arguing that it “establish[ed] itself as a force to be reckoned with” during the Second Intifada (with no mention of what the Second Intifada entailed). Hamas’s “current goals includes [sic] ‘freeing thousands of Palestinian prisoners, ending the Gaza blockade, implementing the right to return, and establishing a temporary Palestinian State (1967). [sic],” the pair wrote.
The Hamas charter includes the following quote, attributed to Mohammed: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The goal of Hamas, as evident in its October 7 massacres, is not simply to free Palestinian terrorists held as prisoners in Israel or establish a temporary Palestinian state but to eradicate Israel through violent means.
The last slide in the presentation deals with the protests and encampments that have roiled American institutions of higher education since October 7. Titled “Divestment Now! The Student Movement,” the slide describes anti-Israel activism on campuses as “peaceful rallies” aimed at “calling for an immediate divestment.”
As National Review and other outlets have reported, the anti-Israel protests and encampments have not been entirely peaceful, nor do the aims of their organizers end at divestment from companies that do business in Israel.
At Columbia University, protesters mobbed and punched Arab-Israeli journalist Yosef Haddad, who had been invited to campus to deliver a talk at an event organized by a Columbia student organization. On the same campus, anti-Israel demonstrators assaulted a Jewish student who attempted to recover a stolen Israeli flag and prevent it from being set on fire. It was also at Columbia where students broke into, stormed, and occupied a building — taking a custodian hostage in the process — and where an encampment organizer who professed his belief that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” went to school.
During the period of time in which the encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles stood, video footage emerged showing protesters beating a Jewish girl unconscious and holding a Jewish man inside the campus tent city against his will after chasing him down.
Northwestern University’s encampment saw a student journalist assaulted while filming the lawn on which tents stood and a Jewish student who wears a yarmulke reporting having been spat on while walking near the encampment.
On these campuses and plenty of others, student protesters have chanted for “intifada” both in Israel and in the United States and have told Jewish students to “go back” to Germany or Poland. In at least one case at Northwestern, a Jewish student reported being told to “get gassed.”
Lori Marcus, who serves as legal director for the Deborah Project — a public-interest law firm that represents Jewish students, faculty, and staff facing discrimination in K-12 schools and higher education — told National Review after reviewing the presentation slideshow that its contents, though “painfully predictable,” amount to “indoctrination with rabid antisemitic propaganda” rather than a legitimate lesson plan.
Marcus said that “one of the few sources for any of the ‘facts’ was Al Jazeera, a Qatari propaganda outlet, not a source of educational information,” and pointed to the “Green Map” as an example of misleading content in the lesson plan.
“The fifth slide is the nearly ubiquitous ‘disappearing Palestine’ set of four maps which purports to show how the land of ‘Palestine’ — a region, never a country — has been eaten away by Israel,” Marcus told NR. She clarified that the land, previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire, was divided by the United Nations before six Arab states rejected the offer and attacked. “The Arabs lost the war and so as a result of their hubris, received less than the land that would have been theirs before their refusal and call to arms.”
In addition to the lesson plan’s narrative about the founding of Israel and the Six-Day War, Marcus took issue with its description of the country’s ongoing war against Hamas.
“There is no discussion of the fact that Israel removed every Israeli — living and dead — from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and that the only reason Israel has finally unleashed a full-scale war on Gaza is because of the brutal massacre of more than a thousand people in less than two days by the terrorist organization Hamas and its supporters,” she told NR.
Marcus added that Balgahoon and Wolowitz made no mention of the fact that Hamas places weaponry in homes, schools, hospitals and mosques or that the terrorist organization uses money meant for humanitarian aid to build tunnels for its leaders.
“The Fort Lee School District is guilty of educational malpractice,” Marcus said. “Any Jewish students in the Fort Lee School District who have been force-fed this flotsam should bring claims for hostile learning environments, and all the taxpayers whose money has been used to fund this effluvia should bring taxpayer suits against the district.”
Responding to National Review‘s request for comment, Fort Lee Public School District superintendent Robert Kravitz said he could “not make any comment at this time as it is a personnel and legal matter that is currently under review” but added that “the Fort Lee School District values a harmonious culture and climate with board of education approved policies and procedures that honor our curriculum and diversity.”