Since Hamas slaughtered some 1,400 Israelis earlier this month, a spotlight has illuminated rampant antisemitism in American universities. Far less attention has been paid to recent efforts to insert the same ideology into K-12 education.
Just as some Arab countries have begun educating students for peace, and the European Union condemns Palestinians’ teaching anti-Israel hatred in schools, California is pursuing the opposite path. Under the guise of teaching “ethnic studies,” several California public schools now demonize Israel as part of their curriculum.
In 2021, California passed a law mandating that ethnic studies courses be offered in high schools by the 2025-2026 school year. Some school districts already require it. The passage of this law coincided with a 32 percent increase in antisemitic hate-crimes in the state, according to California’s Department of Justice. Additionally, since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Jews have been targeted in a hate crime in Fresno, for harassment at Stanford University and with antisemitic flyers in Orange County.
Is there a connection? The content of the curriculum itself might offer a few clues.
The state’s model curriculum offers a toned-down version of an earlier, rabidly anti-Israel draft, but school districts aren’t required to use the toned-down version. Some districts have hired the people behind the original draft to write their curricula, while others use their own hate-filled versions.
Schools’ methodologies of hate are varied. Some of their materials contain outright lies against Israel and Jews. More often, they mischaracterize events by placing Israeli or Jewish actions under a microscope, while ignoring or sanitizing Palestinian and Arab actions. Sometimes they reverse cause and effect. It’s the equivalent of teaching that Americans shot many Japanese men and bombed many Japanese women and children without mentioning Pearl Harbor or the war; or worse, teaching that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in response to America’s military campaign in the Pacific.
Some ethnic studies materials employ classic antisemitic tropes, such as, “Christians didn’t like Jews because Jesus spoke against Jewish faith,” or because “Jews killed Jesus,” or because those Christians “owed money to Jewish moneylenders.”
The upshot is that public school materials in some districts delegitimize, demonize and sometimes endorse violent struggle against Israel. These are techniques the Israeli research group Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center identified as tools of Israel-hating indoctrination in its evaluation of Palestinian textbooks.
Another Israeli think-tank, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), explained that Palestinian textbooks foster the rejection of peace and promote terrorist radicalization by presenting today’s Jewish presence in Israel as colonialist aggression, and by failing to teach peaceful resolution as the ultimate (or even as a possible) goal. Instead, IMPACT-se concluded, Palestinian textbooks incite children to “martyrdom” by emphasizing the “need for continuous struggle.”
These same disturbing characteristics describe some California course materials.
For example, Santa Ana Unified School District’s draft History 10 Ethnic Studies World History recommends that teachers use Michael Mann’s “The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing in their classrooms.” The text demonizes Israel for “murderously” ethnically “cleansing the occupied territories of native Arabs.” The course outline also includes an editorial by Middle East Monitor (which even the casually antisemitic, reflexively anti-Israel BBC has described as a “pro-Hamas publication”) likewise accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing.
Dublin Unified School District’s “Arab Israeli Conflict” Power-Point presentation promotes conflict while completely rejecting Israel’s right to exist. It presents the PLO/Arafat as saying, “Then it’s time for us to do what it takes to get you off of our land!” It further rationalizes violence by putting these words into Palestinians’ mouths: “But terrorism is the only way we feel we can get your attention and resist occupation.” It also uses the nomenclature “Jews” when referring to Israelis, giving the lie to contemporary apologists who pretend anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism. It further demonizes Israel by omitting the context of Palestinian actions to imply that Israel is maliciously gobbling up “Palestinian” land.
Oakland Unified School District’s Arab American History Month resource guide demonizes Israel, promotes conflict, and rejects Israel’s existence. It includes a drawing containing the infamous slogan “Zionism is Racism” and others, including “Hands Off Sacred Land from Shellmound to Jerusalem,” and “Free Ahed Tamimi” (a Palestinian arrested for physically assaulting Israeli soldiers). The guide contains a map of the Arab world that includes Palestine and seems not to include Israel at all; that is, it shows Palestine “from the river to the sea.”
By relying on these and similar sources, several California school districts are delegitimizing, demonizing, and in some cases even endorsing violent struggle against Israel. They are pushing a narrative that Israel is a colonialist occupier and failing to teach that peaceful compromise is possible or even desirable.
These techniques have been used for years in the Arab world, not least in UN schools currently operating in Gaza, and they have contributed to extremist radicalization leading to endless, bloody conflict.
Why is California now imitating these breeding grounds of extremism? What does it expect will be the result?
Johanna Markind is an attorney and former assistant general counsel for the U.S. Parole Commission from 2009 to 2014.