The war at school
Nothing's the same after October 7th. I've thought a lot about how to get this newsletter involved amid the horror and I finally figured something out, at least for now. So much of the war takes place in, at, over, or through educational institutions and I think it's generative to examine that landscape. Over the last two months I've searched news aggregators for articles using the terms "Israel","Palestine", and "school" and kept notes along the way, limiting my search to English language reporting. This is a post about what I've found so far. It's obviously quite limited and I'm open to feedback.
Before the actual notes, a word about frames. Socialists tend to think of educational institutions--from daycares to graduate schools to consulting firms (though let me use the catch-all word "schools" here for simplicity)--as spaces of social reproduction. While all kinds of stuff happens at schools of course, and nothing is guaranteed, in terms of modern capitalist society as a formation of various forces and powers, schools are places where classes can make interventions to maintain the continuity of their preferred ideologies over time.
Consider some common educational slogans: "Children are the future" or "schools prepare students to be productive members of society," or the like. What it means to be a productive member of society--and thus the future--is always contested depending on the visions of society in conflict, and school is one arena where that contest is fought out, knowingly or unknowingly, by everyone who spends their days there.
One of the things that gets fought out, and maybe fought through, is the students' demands that the world not continue to be the same, that things be different, to challenge a reigning and dominant structure to its core.
Enrique Dussel, one of the foremost philosophers of liberation and decolonization, died November 5th. I had the honor to meet Dussel and co-translate his book Pedagogics of Liberation a few years ago, and while writing this post I've returned back to one of the epigraphs of that book. It's a quote from a 1918 student movement manifesto in Córdoba, Argentina: "Youth does not ask. It demands the recognition of its right to exte-riorize its own thinking." Social reproduction is a struggle at least partially because students, whom the existing social structure attempts to recruit to the status quo at school, to bring them into its program, demand to have their right to think beyond that structure recognized--to be and think outside of it.
In terms of life after October 7th, one thing I found while searching for news about schools and Israel/Palestine is that this social reproduction framework for schooling is true for the literal battle being fought in the territory of Palestine/Israel, but is also true, in a different way, for the ideological battle being fought in the schools at the center of the empire politically and financially supporting Israel, in the US.
"I want to go back to school"
The literal battle is a surreal, asphyxiating, and ontology-altering sequence of devastation. NBC reported on October 13th that, according to documents it "exclusively obtained" from the bodies of slain Israeli first-responders in the kibbutzim that had been attacked, Hamas fighters planned to target schools for taking hostages and holding points.
One page labeled “Top Secret” outlines a plan of attack for Kfar Sa’ad, saying “Combat unit 1” is directed to “contain the new Da’at school,” while “Combat unit 2” is to “collect hostages,” “search the Bnei Akiva youth center” and “search the old Da’at school.”
I had to seek this story out. There aren't many like it and I can't verify the documents themselves. What other role schools played during the initial attacks by Hamas on the kibbutzim, I'm not sure.
Most of the stories I've found when searching for the terms above during the last few months cover Israel's rampant destruction of schools in Gaza, specifically how Gazans, displaced by Israel's retaliatory bombing campaigns since the 7th, have sought refuge in school buildings and then were killed when Israel bombed or attacked those schools in their ground campaign, like at the Shadia Abu Ghazala School on December 13th.
Aside from Israel bombing schools--whether universities or primary schools or United Nations schools--there are other stories from the territory itself. There's a Quaker school in Ramallah whose students wrote an open letter to US Congress calling for ceasefire. They included in the letter that "around 625,000 students, our peers, have been deprived of education, essential needs, and the necessities of life, water, and food."
ABC News quoted a Gazan student talking about what this disruption meant to them:
"I'm scared," Mohammed said. "There is a big difference before the war and after. I used to go to school and have a normal life but in the war, it's becoming bad. A lot of my friends were killed and injured also the sheikh in our mosque was killed. There is no internet and nobody is making a push to end the war."
The Quaker school students' letter highlights the educational landscape there in the territory of the war itself, echoed in Mohammed's statement: decimation, not only in the present, but of Gazan future, since school is a place for the maintenance of continuity of ways of life. "I want to go back home and back to school," said Hanin, a ten year old refugee in Khan Younis, Southern Gaza, in that same article. She won't be able to go back to her school, nor will the thousands of other Gazan children killed, nor the hundreds of thousands of other children displaced as the havoc continues.
Meanwhile, Israel provides their soldiers' free college through increased scholarships backed by a tidal wave of US bond financing, and Israeli school kids made headlines when they sang a song cheering on the destruction of Gaza in a video recorded by the The Civil Front and shared by Kan News. I have to imagine there's ideological conflict occurring within Israeli schools, particularly the movements around hostage advocates and critics of Netanyahu's government, but I didn't have the scope for that this time around.
Walkout
In a nauseating and cinematic connection between regions, the three Palestinian college students shot by a middle-aged white man in Vermont--he felt threatened by their kaffiyehs--were graduates of the Quaker school in Ramallah. One of those students is now paralyzed from the neck down. A bullet went through his spine.
Despite this shooting, the physical battle in the United States is nonexistent compared to Israel/Palestine, yet the ideological battle is at a fever pitch and burning hot in the schools. The biggest stories cover higher education, even more specifically the elite universities like Harvard, MIT and University of Pennsylvania. You probably know about that coverage and, even if you don't, you can look it up. I find it tiresome so I haven't focused on it in my own notes--why the most ruling class universities are a stand-in for higher education as a whole, and why higher education is a stand-in for education as a whole, I'll never know.
Instead I've focused on what's happening at primary and secondary schools around the US. We don't hear as much about these, but there's a lot going on in them and I think they're important and interesting.
I've found the ideological conflict centers largely around whether and how expressions of solidarity with Palestine is antisemitic, and the lengths to which Zionist adults go to prevent students and teachers from expressing that solidarity inside and outside the classroom for fear of antisemitism.
Take this convoluted case from Los Angeles for a starting example. A charter school in the city called Citizens of the World is housed in a synagogue. The school itself, committed to a kind of multiculturalism, isn't a Jewish school, but rather pays rent to the synagogue to use its facilities. After Oct. 7th, the congregation put up Israeli flags in support of Israel. Teachers at the school, located in the building, complained to the principal about these flags, noting their influence on students, particularly given the school's curricular mission to teach "citizens of the world." First grade elementary school teachers, frustrated with the lack of administrative response, then taught a lesson on genocide in Gaza, posting about it on Instagram. After congregants found those posts and complained, and an intervention from the rabbi, the teachers and principal are now gone from the school, either fired or on administrative leave.
In another classroom case, in Farmington, CT students were listening to their history teacher extemporize on the conflict, didn't like what they heard, and recorded him. They sent the recording to their local CAIR chapter, who spoke out against Islamophobia. In Santa Ana, CA, an ethnic studies curriculum has been put on hold after Zionists sued the district, claiming that it shouldn't be taught since it "frames Jews as colonizers."
But rather than stuff inside classrooms, which you might expect, I'm seeing more student walkouts in solidarity with Palestine and adult backlash to those walkouts. The action is happening more as students leave the classroom than what they're learning in the classroom.
After students planned a pro-Palestine walkout in West Orange, CT, Zionist adults in the community got it cancelled over fears of anti-semitism. Even though the students cancelled the walkout under that adult pressure, the adults are still at it, doxxing student organizers online, creating fear for students' safety. Zionists in Teaneck, New Jersey tried the same thing, staging a counter-protest in advance of a student walkout, but the students went out anyway.
There have been more tense escalations. A Jewish community center in Philadelphia was vandalized. The spray-paint read "Free Palestine." Swastikas appeared at a high school in Newport Beach, CA. Then, in an unrelated incident, a student at that school said "Free Palestine" during class, which was seen as "threatening to another student" and was suspended for three days. A Palestinian high school student was suspended in Fort Lauderdale, Florida after his mother, a math tutor at her son's private school, posted on social media critiquing Israel's "collective brutality" against Palestine.
Other times, the students are strident and the district watches it play out. Students in Oakland, CA called for the school district to support Palestinians. Then at a board meeting, they put Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine on board members' chairs and got a standing ovation (the students are holding political education workshops all over Oakland). In San Francisco, communities rallied in front of the school district offices to win support for Arab and Palestinian students. Meanwhile, the Berkeley, CA school district is taking a neutral stance, wanting to "protect all students" and refuses to issue any position whatsoever.
A long-time principal in Montgomery County, MD, retired five days after he approved a pro-Palestine student walkout. He's saying his retirement is unrelated. Students at three other schools in nearby Prince William County planned a walkout in support of Palestine (no one's retired there yet). Maybe parroting their politician parents, students in Fairfax, VA did "humanitarian walkouts" throughout the county.
In Dearborn, MI, home to one of the country's largest Arab populations, students held actions supporting Palestine across a few different schools that some found threatening. Then, in Canton, MI students did a walkout in support of Palestine, for which the organizers got called into the principal's office. When one student refused to answer questions about their participation, they were suspended. In Framingham, MA a student was forced to remove clothing expressing Palestinian solidarity, while 100 students at the prestigious Boston Latin school walked out under the same banner.
In terms of more adult-oriented stuff around schools, City Journal published a Zionist rundown of various American teacher union actions/stances, with an interesting note about the NEA's solidarity with the General Union of Palestinian Teachers via the Education International. (An author of the City rundown is the Friedrichs of that recent SCOTUS case about freedom of religion in school). They don't mention how Portland teachers, after a successful strike, are turning their attention to Palestinian solidarity, or how Minneapolis Teachers Union passed a ceasefire resolution.
In Minneapolis, a letter signed by 800 Zionists demanded retraction of the teacher union's stance, claiming that "Jewish children in Minnesota have been bullied, gaslit, harassed, threatened, & even assaulted simply because they are Jewish" (I couldn't find examples of this, though it was all apparently happening just as students in Edina, Minnesota planned a walkout). Amnesty International and UNICEF held an event about the war at a high school in Scottsdale, AZ. Jewish parents and students "felt unsafe" during the presentation, reporting it to the state Department of Education, who then denounced the event. Just recently, a Palestinian-American official in the federal Department of Education resigned in protest against the Biden administration's support for Israel.
Not everything is tense and grinding, though. A student walkout went well in Westerville, Ohio: "80-100...students who participated were 'well behaved.' They gave speeches at the flagpole and walked around the outside of the building once before returning to class. The protest lasted about 20 minutes." Something similar might be said of the famously political Garfield High School in Seattle. Students there walked out and held a teach-in about the conflict. Organizers researched the history of the conflict and talked about sources of information and how to contact electeds.
These news stories show the push-pull and churn of ideological contestation in and around schools throughout the country, students demanding the right to exteriorize their thinking. But it's always a struggle, a ding of conflict and contradiction. I'll end with two anecdotes from NYC. New York Magazine covered how the divides are raking through schools in New York City in fine-grained detail, like this anecdote from the East Village where
someone drew a swastika on the sidewalk at an intersection nearby Friends Seminary, the K–12 private school. A schoolwide email went out; the NYPD, apparently, was alerted. “Everyone was in shock,” says 16-year-old Zaina, a junior who is a leader of the Muslim students association. “There hasn’t been any big case of antisemitism within our school before — it feels like it’s getting closer.” On TikTok and Instagram, she sees posts documenting the rise of Islamophobia, and it has put her on alert as she commutes to and from school. “There’s a little bit of fear,” she says.
But meanwhile, at Brooklyn's Millenium High School, Muslim and Jewish students issued a solidarity statement together:
“We all sat together with a counselor and a few teachers. And we spent two hours crafting a statement. Really, like, intentional with every sentence,” said Sivan Joffe-Hancock, 16, a senior, co-founder of Jewish Student Union.
In their statement, they recognize the pain both communities are experiencing, and that hate may be on the rise — and say they won’t condone the spread of antisemitism, islamophobia or any discrimination.
It reads, in part: “We urge all students of MBHS to be mindful of their words and actions, and to ensure that they do not incite fear or make other students feel targeted or unsafe. Collectively, we have the social obligation to be sensitive to the experiences of others, and we should all understand that for many of us in the community, this is personal.”