K-12 educators around the U.S. who show support for Palestine have been targeted with false charges of antisemitism and have faced a clear pattern of punishment without due process based on disturbing double standards.
By Mimi Kirk
September 4, 2024
MONDOWEISS
Artwork created in solidarity with Palestine by Oakland High students posted in school hallways in the spring of 2024. (Photo: Oakland Education Association for Palestine Group via Rethinking Schools)
In a May 2024 congressional hearing, the Committee on Education and the Workforce questioned leaders of three public school districts: New York City; the Washington, DC suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland; and Berkeley, California. Similar to earlier hearings that cross-examined the presidents of Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, the event was premised on “pervasive antisemitism” in U.S. education and a demand for accountability from its leaders.
As NPR reported, the K-12 hearing did not net the “headline moments” that lawmakers enjoyed with the university presidents, which saw the leaders struggle to answer questions and which helped bring about the resignation of three of them. Yet despite the lower profile of K-12 education in the current controversy over pro-Palestine speech in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, teachers are being punished for expressing what the lawmakers maintain is antisemitic rhetoric that makes Jewish students and fellow teachers “unsafe.”
But are the teachers actually antisemitic, as the lawmakers would have us believe? And whose safety is in fact in question? A deeper look into the allegations demonstrates a problematic definition of antisemitism and a tendency to punish immediately, without due process, analysis, or care.
Aaron Bean (R-FL) kicked off the hearing’s questioning by asking the school officials a series of “yes or no” questions, including “Does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?” and “Does the phrase, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – is that antisemitic?” The officials replied in the affirmative. As such, the event immediately took as a given the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism, which claims that it is antisemitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist behavior.”
The IHRA definition, which is at present legally nonbinding but under consideration as a bill in the Senate after being passed in the House, as well as touted by the U.S. State Department, has been criticized for being weaponized as a tool to suppress critics of the state of Israel by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Even the lead drafter of the definition, Kenneth Stern, has decried this weaponized use of his work.
Several cases of teachers “teaching hate” were referenced during the hearing, and the school officials asked about actions taken to punish these employees. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), for instance, questioned Chancellor of New York City Public Schools David Banks about Mohammad Ahmad, a math teacher at Gotham Tech High School in Queens who on October 7 posted an image of a paraglider to his social media with the line, “I stand with Palestine.” Stefanik held up a copy of the image, proclaiming, “This is a Hamas paraglider who slaughtered Jews. We all have seen the horrific footage, who cooked babies! These are terrorists!”
It must first be noted that Stefanik’s reference to cooking babies is one of many regarding Hamas violence against women and children on October 7 that have been debunked. And while Ahmad may have posted the image to his personal social media, his superior did not defend his right to do so or question Stefanik’s one-dimensional interpretation.
“I think what that employee did was absolutely disgusting and we took action,” Chancellor David Banks replied.
Ahmad had posted the image to his private Facebook page after hearing about the armed resistance forces breaking out of Gaza. “We heard how many military bases they took, and we didn’t know anything else,” he told me. Though he subsequently took down the image, because it had been his “cover” photo, it remained in feeds. The New York Post, Fox News, and the Daily Mail published stories about it and other anti-Zionist opinions Ahmad posted.
“My family received death threats and phone calls in the middle of the night,” Ahmad says. He was doxed, and an employee from the right-wing outfit Accuracy in Media came to his home. A disciplinary letter from New York City Public Schools was put in his file. In contrast, a teacher at another Queens public high school posted an image of herself at a rally with the sign, “I stand with Israel.” When students at her school protested in the halls, calling for her to be fired, the school held a press conference in which students apologized. She was also given a union escort to accompany her to class.
“I post something and I receive a disciplinary letter, and a Zionist teacher called in sick to attend a rally, which is a breach of contract,” says Ahmad. “I’m not saying I want a press conference or an escort, but you see the difference in how we were treated.”
In November 2023 in Montgomery County, Maryland, middle school math teacher Hajur El-Haggan was put on administrative leave for having “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in her internal, staff-facing email signature. She has since been moved to another school.
A few days before El-Haggan found out she was being put on leave, her car was vandalized in the school parking lot. In October 2023 she had placed a Palestinian flag embroidered with “Free Palestine” on the windshield. “I walked out to my car ready to go home and I noticed that my flag was no longer on my car,” she says. “I saw that there were plastic remains of it on the top of my sunroof; someone had slashed it off my car. I felt very unsafe.”
El-Haggan notes that many fellow teachers have “Black Lives Matter” or text supporting LGBTQ+ rights in their internal email signatures. “If my signature was any other quote, this would not have happened to me,” she says, adding that the phrase must be understood as a call for equal rights for all. “It’s a call for freedom from one body of water to the other body of water in historic Palestine,” she explains. “It wants everyone in that land to be free.”
El-Haggan is filing a lawsuit against the Montgomery County Board of Education with two other teachers who have been punished for privately expressed pro-Palestinian views, including middle school English teacher Angela Wolf. Wolf was also put on leave and then moved to another school for posts on her personal Facebook page critical of Israel, such as condemnation of Israel’s bombing of al-Shifa Hospital. She was also attacked for a post from 2020 on a private teachers’ page in which she criticized Montgomery County billionaires for not doing enough to help students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I was angry because teachers were running around like crazy using their own funds to try to help students and their families and here are five billionaires who live in the county,” she says. “I named them and I called them thieves.” Not all of the billionaires were Jewish, but Wolf was accused of using an antisemitic trope.
“It didn’t even register that some of them were Jewish,” Wolf says. “I could immediately see that the interest is not in rooting out actual antisemitism; this is political and there’s a real effort to make sure criticism of Israel is silenced.”
One need only listen to the beginning of the Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing and look into Committee lawmakers’ records to confirm Wolf’s opinion. Before questioning began, Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) recounted antisemitic statements by former president Donald Trump, including one in which he said that Hitler had “done some good things.”
“Despite these persistent examples of comments that others have called antisemitic, and continued relationships with well-known antisemites, I have not heard one word of concern from my colleagues across the aisle,” Bonamici said. “In fact, what we have seen is consolidation of support for the former president.” When Bonamici then asked the lawmakers present to condemn Trump’s previous comments, there was silence. “Let the record show that no one spoke up,” she said.
Moreover, analysts and officials have pointed to Elise Stefanik’s passionate support for Trump as well as her own proclivity to traffic in antisemitic tropes, such as the great replacement theory – the idea that Jewish and other elites are bringing immigrants to the country to change its demographic makeup.
As the Middle East Studies Association pointed out in response to the Committee’s questioning of the university presidents, “the framing and content of these hearings make it clear that many committee members are less concerned with combatting invidious discrimination than with suppressing and punishing pro-Palestine speech” as well as using the opportunity to further their own agenda of cracking down on progressive education more broadly. Aaron Bean’s voting record, for instance, shows his support for empowering (conservative) parents to have more of a say in school curricula and the books school libraries contain.
This craven weaponization of antisemitism in the Congressional hearings and beyond peddles the idea of “Jewish safety,” despite the fact that many Jewish students and teachers are anti-Zionist and have been extremely active in and even spearheading the protests on college campuses and elsewhere that have swept the United States over the past months. It is in fact Palestinians and their allies who are on the whole facing doxing, harassment, and being made to feel – and be – unsafe. Mohammed Ahmad and Hajur El-Haggan can attest to that. As Chris Godshall-Bennett, Legal Director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says, “Jewish students deserve to be safe, but not at the expense of someone else.”
Such performative hand wringing about antisemitism serves to distract not only from actual antisemitism in the United States perpetuated by white supremacists and Christian nationalists but, crucially, what is occurring on the ground in Gaza, namely a genocide being live-streamed on our phones and funded by our tax dollars. K-12 education ended for Palestinian children on October 7 and, as of this writing, nearly 17,000 have been killed by Israeli bombs, starvation, and disease. The most unsafe place in the world is the Gaza Strip. This is what should concern us, and those who call attention to it should be heeded rather than punished.
MONDOWEISS
Artwork created in solidarity with Palestine by Oakland High students posted in school hallways in the spring of 2024. (Photo: Oakland Education Association for Palestine Group via Rethinking Schools)In a May 2024 congressional hearing, the Committee on Education and the Workforce questioned leaders of three public school districts: New York City; the Washington, DC suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland; and Berkeley, California. Similar to earlier hearings that cross-examined the presidents of Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, the event was premised on “pervasive antisemitism” in U.S. education and a demand for accountability from its leaders.
As NPR reported, the K-12 hearing did not net the “headline moments” that lawmakers enjoyed with the university presidents, which saw the leaders struggle to answer questions and which helped bring about the resignation of three of them. Yet despite the lower profile of K-12 education in the current controversy over pro-Palestine speech in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, teachers are being punished for expressing what the lawmakers maintain is antisemitic rhetoric that makes Jewish students and fellow teachers “unsafe.”
But are the teachers actually antisemitic, as the lawmakers would have us believe? And whose safety is in fact in question? A deeper look into the allegations demonstrates a problematic definition of antisemitism and a tendency to punish immediately, without due process, analysis, or care.
Aaron Bean (R-FL) kicked off the hearing’s questioning by asking the school officials a series of “yes or no” questions, including “Does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?” and “Does the phrase, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – is that antisemitic?” The officials replied in the affirmative. As such, the event immediately took as a given the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism, which claims that it is antisemitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist behavior.”
The IHRA definition, which is at present legally nonbinding but under consideration as a bill in the Senate after being passed in the House, as well as touted by the U.S. State Department, has been criticized for being weaponized as a tool to suppress critics of the state of Israel by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Even the lead drafter of the definition, Kenneth Stern, has decried this weaponized use of his work.
Several cases of teachers “teaching hate” were referenced during the hearing, and the school officials asked about actions taken to punish these employees. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), for instance, questioned Chancellor of New York City Public Schools David Banks about Mohammad Ahmad, a math teacher at Gotham Tech High School in Queens who on October 7 posted an image of a paraglider to his social media with the line, “I stand with Palestine.” Stefanik held up a copy of the image, proclaiming, “This is a Hamas paraglider who slaughtered Jews. We all have seen the horrific footage, who cooked babies! These are terrorists!”
It must first be noted that Stefanik’s reference to cooking babies is one of many regarding Hamas violence against women and children on October 7 that have been debunked. And while Ahmad may have posted the image to his personal social media, his superior did not defend his right to do so or question Stefanik’s one-dimensional interpretation.
“I think what that employee did was absolutely disgusting and we took action,” Chancellor David Banks replied.
Ahmad had posted the image to his private Facebook page after hearing about the armed resistance forces breaking out of Gaza. “We heard how many military bases they took, and we didn’t know anything else,” he told me. Though he subsequently took down the image, because it had been his “cover” photo, it remained in feeds. The New York Post, Fox News, and the Daily Mail published stories about it and other anti-Zionist opinions Ahmad posted.
“My family received death threats and phone calls in the middle of the night,” Ahmad says. He was doxed, and an employee from the right-wing outfit Accuracy in Media came to his home. A disciplinary letter from New York City Public Schools was put in his file. In contrast, a teacher at another Queens public high school posted an image of herself at a rally with the sign, “I stand with Israel.” When students at her school protested in the halls, calling for her to be fired, the school held a press conference in which students apologized. She was also given a union escort to accompany her to class.
“I post something and I receive a disciplinary letter, and a Zionist teacher called in sick to attend a rally, which is a breach of contract,” says Ahmad. “I’m not saying I want a press conference or an escort, but you see the difference in how we were treated.”
In November 2023 in Montgomery County, Maryland, middle school math teacher Hajur El-Haggan was put on administrative leave for having “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in her internal, staff-facing email signature. She has since been moved to another school.
A few days before El-Haggan found out she was being put on leave, her car was vandalized in the school parking lot. In October 2023 she had placed a Palestinian flag embroidered with “Free Palestine” on the windshield. “I walked out to my car ready to go home and I noticed that my flag was no longer on my car,” she says. “I saw that there were plastic remains of it on the top of my sunroof; someone had slashed it off my car. I felt very unsafe.”
El-Haggan notes that many fellow teachers have “Black Lives Matter” or text supporting LGBTQ+ rights in their internal email signatures. “If my signature was any other quote, this would not have happened to me,” she says, adding that the phrase must be understood as a call for equal rights for all. “It’s a call for freedom from one body of water to the other body of water in historic Palestine,” she explains. “It wants everyone in that land to be free.”
El-Haggan is filing a lawsuit against the Montgomery County Board of Education with two other teachers who have been punished for privately expressed pro-Palestinian views, including middle school English teacher Angela Wolf. Wolf was also put on leave and then moved to another school for posts on her personal Facebook page critical of Israel, such as condemnation of Israel’s bombing of al-Shifa Hospital. She was also attacked for a post from 2020 on a private teachers’ page in which she criticized Montgomery County billionaires for not doing enough to help students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I was angry because teachers were running around like crazy using their own funds to try to help students and their families and here are five billionaires who live in the county,” she says. “I named them and I called them thieves.” Not all of the billionaires were Jewish, but Wolf was accused of using an antisemitic trope.
“It didn’t even register that some of them were Jewish,” Wolf says. “I could immediately see that the interest is not in rooting out actual antisemitism; this is political and there’s a real effort to make sure criticism of Israel is silenced.”
One need only listen to the beginning of the Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing and look into Committee lawmakers’ records to confirm Wolf’s opinion. Before questioning began, Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) recounted antisemitic statements by former president Donald Trump, including one in which he said that Hitler had “done some good things.”
“Despite these persistent examples of comments that others have called antisemitic, and continued relationships with well-known antisemites, I have not heard one word of concern from my colleagues across the aisle,” Bonamici said. “In fact, what we have seen is consolidation of support for the former president.” When Bonamici then asked the lawmakers present to condemn Trump’s previous comments, there was silence. “Let the record show that no one spoke up,” she said.
Moreover, analysts and officials have pointed to Elise Stefanik’s passionate support for Trump as well as her own proclivity to traffic in antisemitic tropes, such as the great replacement theory – the idea that Jewish and other elites are bringing immigrants to the country to change its demographic makeup.
As the Middle East Studies Association pointed out in response to the Committee’s questioning of the university presidents, “the framing and content of these hearings make it clear that many committee members are less concerned with combatting invidious discrimination than with suppressing and punishing pro-Palestine speech” as well as using the opportunity to further their own agenda of cracking down on progressive education more broadly. Aaron Bean’s voting record, for instance, shows his support for empowering (conservative) parents to have more of a say in school curricula and the books school libraries contain.
This craven weaponization of antisemitism in the Congressional hearings and beyond peddles the idea of “Jewish safety,” despite the fact that many Jewish students and teachers are anti-Zionist and have been extremely active in and even spearheading the protests on college campuses and elsewhere that have swept the United States over the past months. It is in fact Palestinians and their allies who are on the whole facing doxing, harassment, and being made to feel – and be – unsafe. Mohammed Ahmad and Hajur El-Haggan can attest to that. As Chris Godshall-Bennett, Legal Director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says, “Jewish students deserve to be safe, but not at the expense of someone else.”
Such performative hand wringing about antisemitism serves to distract not only from actual antisemitism in the United States perpetuated by white supremacists and Christian nationalists but, crucially, what is occurring on the ground in Gaza, namely a genocide being live-streamed on our phones and funded by our tax dollars. K-12 education ended for Palestinian children on October 7 and, as of this writing, nearly 17,000 have been killed by Israeli bombs, starvation, and disease. The most unsafe place in the world is the Gaza Strip. This is what should concern us, and those who call attention to it should be heeded rather than punished.
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