NYC School Teachers Plan MLK Day Palestine Teach-In

New York City Educators for Palestine are planning a teach-in on Palestine for children aged 6-18 to be held on Martin Luther King Day, January 19. This will be the first in a series of 6 teach-ins which will cover

the history, meaning, and context of zionism [sic]. Subsequent teach-ins in this series will dive beyond zionism [sic] to consider contemporary and historical Palestinian resistance, Palestinian culture, Palestine’s deliberate absence from the mainstream classroom, and paths toward action. (emphasis added)

NYC Educators for Palestine claim that the lessons will be taught by “trained” educators and “mental health professionals.”

New York City Educators for Palestine

NYC Educators for Palestine are public school educators who work for “Palestinian liberation” within the NYC school system.

The organization believes that “education should be a tool for liberation NOT occupation and that we must work both inside and outside the classroom because the struggle for justice does not end at the doors of the schoolhouse.”

NYC Educators for Palestine are associated with the Movement for Rank and File Educators (MORE) Caucus within the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union.

MORE Caucus, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Zohran Mamdani

The New York City branch of the DSA identified the MORE caucus as the best entryway to influence the UFT. In a strategy memo published in 2018, the NYC-DSA wrote:

Political Status: UFT is the largest local of one of the largest unions in the country. It has the potential to be extremely influential in electoral politics. It is extremely internally undemocratic, but there is a reform caucus, MORE, which has many active DSA members.

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There are many DSA teachers, and there is a large support network for new teachers and teacher activists….here is a reform caucus, MORE, which has many active DSA members.

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DSA Member Density - Anecdotally speaking, education seems to be one of the sectors with the largest concentration of NYC DSA active union membership. The teachers’ working group meets regularly and has regular happy hours, and has already had some success encouraging and supporting DSA members in making the career switch into education. Even beyond active labor branch members, it seems possible that there could be over a hundred DSA teachers (numbers that would make our teacher membership larger than the most significant UFT reform caucus). There is a significant support network for new DSA teachers, with a large number of experienced rank and file activists and leaders in the organization.

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There is a reform caucus, the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) that shows promise and has many DSA members that participate actively. With more DSA teachers, we could bolster and significantly support the internal movement for democracy and militant organizing within the union, but it will likely take years to reform the UFT, for new teachers to gain the experience and credibility that it will take to play a meaningful role in that work, and for the landscape to shift in such a way as to be amenable to the kind of militancy and worker democracy to which we aspire.

MORE members canvassed for DSA-backed mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

In April 2024, a member of the MORE steering committee appeared on a panel at an NYC-DSA town hall, hosted by the People’s Forum, discussing public sector organizing.

NYC Educators for Palestine organize “actions” like flyering schools and organizing walkouts. It has also been a central organization in many of the anti-Israel protests in New York City.

The teach-in is being held in collaboration with Rethinking Schools.

This may give some indication of the content to be taught to the children on January 19th.

Rethinking Schools describes itself as a

nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism. Our magazine, books, and other resources promote equity and racial justice in the classroom. We encourage grassroots efforts in our schools and communities to enhance the learning and well-being of our children and to build a broad democratic movement for social and environmental justice.

Our Zinn Education Project — coordinated with Teaching for Change — has more than 100,000 educators who have registered to access our “people’s history” materials.

Books by Rethinking Schools include Teaching Palestine (for which Rethinking Schools has sponsored educator study groups and held seminars at teachers associations).

Rethinking Schools also published an issue of its magazine titled “Don’t Stop Teaching About Gaza.” The issue includes“What’s Missing In Holocaust Education” from CodePink’s Marcy Winograd:

And yet the common approach in K–12 Holocaust education is to teach the Holocaust as an isolated and unique horror. Students in middle or high school are generally not taught the nightmare that followed the immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine, where Zionist militias massacred Palestinians, burned their olive trees, and erased Arabic names from streets and towns. The failure to teach the trauma of Palestinian displacement and dispossession sanitizes the violent establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian graves and erases Jewish voices of resistance to the colonization of Palestine. In a comparative curriculum, students could learn of the cycle of abuse — Germany exterminating Jews, Zionist militias slaughtering Palestinians — and the inherent danger in a state defined by ethnic superiority.

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While students throughout the United States read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl to imagine themselves cooped up in an attic for two years, hiding from Nazi storm troopers, few learn of the Nakba. Even fewer are taught the Holocaust and the Nakba simultaneously or back-to-back, not as isolated historical chapters but as interlinked tragedies of scapegoating and ethnic cleansing that continue to this day.

A reading of Anne Frank could be followed by the story of Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who dreamed of becoming a dentist.

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In his chapter in The Holocaust and the Nakba detailing the Kowalskis’ story that began this article, Confino asks us to imagine a “counterfactual” history, a “what if” scenario: “What would have happened if the Jews, whose justification for settling in the land of Israel derived from the Bible, would have exercised a policy in 1948 based on the principle ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to others’[sic]?”

Now that’s a question for classroom discussion.

(emphasis added)

NAVI has covered the “Teaching Palestine” book extensively.

The book provides lesson plans for teachers to educate students about Israel’s “apartheid” and “genocide.”

Lessons include role plays for students to “simulate” the “apartheid-system” in Israel.

Another lesson by Adam Sanchez, “The United States and Palestine-Israel: FiftyYears of Choices (1956–2006),” asks students “imagine...we had a government that cared about promoting equality, justice, and ending oppression.”

In describing student feedback to the lesson, which Sanchez has already taught in his classes:

He concludes with a quote from a student that the lesson helped her “understand the frustrations that led to Oct. 7” and another who said that “[t]he U.S. helped Israel ruin so many lives and helped kill countless children and civilians. People need to understand this as the buildup to Oct. 7” (Teaching Palestine, 54).

NYC Educators for Palestine has also worked with Teaching While Muslim to run its “Teach Palestine Week” initiative in which they provide resources and guides for teachers to incorporate “Palestine” into the classroom.

This week, we encourage teachers to take time out of the school day to discuss what is happening in Palestine….May 15th marks the commemoration of the Nakba, and while it is imperative in the context of a genocide that we dedicate time during our school day to discuss the events of the Nakba, it is crucial that we do not begin conversation about Palestinian history from a place of conflict…

We teach in oppressive contexts; therefore, it is our obligation to make choices every day which rebuke systematic repression and dehumanization. Failing to do so only perpetuates the societal apathy and ignorance which allows the arbiters of settler-colonial imperialism to continue their bidding.

Some of the Teach Palestine week material given to elementary, middle and high school teachers can be seen below:

On Day 1, for elementary school students, teachers will show the short cartoon “I am from Palestine” - in the story, Saamidah is in a classroom filled with blonde-haired, blue-eyed children. The teacher struggles to pronounce Saamidah’s name. The students are all called upon to show on the world map where their ancestors are from. When Saamidah goes up, she sees Israel on the map and is confused. When she goes home, her father tells her that one day they will return to Palestine. The next day, Saamidah returns to the class with a new map showing Palestine in place of Israel.

The MORE Caucus and NYC Educators for Palestine also shared a list of demands for Mamdani’s administration, endorsed by Mamdani-ally Jamaal Bowman.

NYC Educators for Palestine, a group within a DSA-aligned caucus, might find they have more support within the socialist and anti-Israel Mamdani administration. Regardless of the current political environment,it is clear that these activist “educators” are thinking ahead and beyond the classroom, working to further their mission to bring pro-Palestine activism to children.