High schoolers have joined in on the pro-Hamas craze sweeping through college campuses. To stand in solidarity with anti-Israel university protesters, hundreds of students in Illinois, Washington, Texas, and New Jersey public schools planned anti-Israel sit-ins and protests during school hours this week.
Chicago Youth For Justice (CYFJ), a self-described “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students from 25+ Chicagoland high schools,” organized rallies at Northtown High School, Kenwood High School, Jones College Prep, Kenwood Academy High School, and Hancock College Prep, and led chants such as “shut it down,” “viva, viva Palestina,” and “free Palestine.”
“We wanted to show our support to growing encampments around the country, including Northwestern, Columbia and general protest for Palestinian genocide,” one organizer of the Jones sit-in, who only identified himself as Atticus, said.
Lincoln Park students marched to DePaul University to support DePaul’s student encampment on Wednesday. Kenwood students marched to the University of Chicago’s campus after their high school sit-in to join the university’s encampment, where one high school student held a sign that read, “Where does [Chicago Public Schools’] money go?” Kenwood organizers clarified on social media that participants would not be penalized for walking out, and that students would still “get [their] attendance as well.”
Students in Washington public schools, including in Seattle, Redmond, Renton, Issaquah, and Woodinville school districts, led walk-outs last month after the first night of Passover to “protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine perpetrated by Israel, and the United States’ complicity.” West Seattle High School protest organizers said on social media that they “refuse to look away and be silent as Israel and the United States use our tax dollars to commit a horrific genocide.”
“Additionally we recognize that the recent genocide against the Palestinian people has its roots in 75 years of Israeli aggression,” students said online. “Zionists have tried to silence student voices and student protest, by labelling us as ‘Anti-Semites’, since we refuse to support the genocide of 35,000 Palestinians and the colony of Israel. We find this claim unfounded, considering the large involvement Jewish students had in Washington’s protests, from planning and logistics to actually walking out.”
Some high schoolers in Austin, Texas public schools also staged pro-Palestinian walk-outs, to support college protesters at the University of Texas. One protest organizer at McCallum High said that “a lot of us feel immense empathy for the people that are suffering in Palestine.”
Students in Reno, Nevada, organized by Palestine Solidarity Reno, led a walk-out to the city’s Federal Courthouse on Wednesday. Washoe County School District marked participators tardy or absent, and said that “while they encourage students to express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about local, national, and international issues, their first priority is educating them,” according to local news station KUNR.
School administrators shut down a walk-out scheduled by New Jersey high schoolers last week, after Camden County officials voiced concerns over the rally, which students planned to coincide with Passover.
“Needless to say I’m thrilled that the school has canceled the event,” Camden County Commissioner Jeff Nash said. “I’m extremely happy that the students worked this out together to cancel an event that was filled with hate and instead hold a peace rally.”
Anti-Israel sentiment hasn’t just trickled down to high schoolers. Anti-Israel sentiment starts in K–12 schools. Parents Defending Education has done good work tracking the various ways anti-semitic curricula infiltrate K-12 schools; one public school teacher-led education consulting group in New Jersey, for example, works to “actively include social justice, anti-racist, and anti-Islamophobic curricula and educators in our schools,” and has anti-Israel resources planted in various local public school districts.
College students raising hell at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, and more, didn’t first encounter anti-Israel vitriol in their freshman-year intro classes; maybe some did, but for many, the ethnic studies programs now deeply rooted into K–12 education laid the groundwork for such radical embrace of Marxist ideology.