West Ed and The Israel Lobby
CA Gov. Newsom on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025,releasing findings of West Ed’s report on Holocaust and Genocide Education.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and the Israel lobby have enlisted another partner in the frenzy to promote Holocaust education during nationwide protests over Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In San Francisco’s industrial-chic south of Market neighborhood, a data research and education policy firm named West Ed has released a report lamenting that county offices of education are not offering adequate Holocaust and genocide education (HGE) programs.
West Ed acknowledges that since 1985 California has required HGE as part of the school curriculum. Eighth grade English students read and discuss Anne Frank’s, “The Diary of a Young Girl. Tenth grade history standards require students to analyze the “Nazi policy of racial purity, its evolution into the ‘Final Solution,’ and the resulting murder of six million Jewish civilians.” Forty years after the state mandated HGE, West Ed argues there’s a problem – not the failure to teach Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine but the uneven presentation across the state of the Holocaust and other genocides.
Timing
West Ed published its report on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a few months before the California Senate’s first hearing in April, 2025, on SB 472 (D-Stern-Calabasas), a bill to provide the infrastructure for direct state funding to school districts for additional HGE curriculum and teacher training. The bill –opposed by Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP-Action), CAIR, the Arab Resource Organizing Committee and Liberated Ethnic Studies–would also require county offices of education to submit annual reports on school district implementation of HGE.
In opposing SB 472, JVP Action charges, “The bill’s supporters are determined never to allow teachers to talk about the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since 1948) and the genocide in Gaza, and they want stronger policing tools.”
According to West Ed, the state has spent $34 million since 2019 to fund Holocaust-centered organizations promoting more HGE in K-12.
Overview
West Ed’s 195-page report entitled, “Holocaust and Genocide Education in California: A Study of Statewide Context and Local Implementation” bases its conclusion on responses from less than a third of local education agencies (LEA’s) who completed West Ed’s questionnaire about HGE implementation in local school districts. West Ed reports that of the 29% who responded only 26% “have systematic HGE in place, signaling a need for greater systemic support to teach these sensitive topics in more school districts statewide.” The Anti-Defamation League, the subject of a nationwide Drop the ADL from Schools campaign, was listed among the top three curriculum resources used by survey respondents. The topics most widely taught were the Holocaust and the Native American and Armenian genocides.
To correct inconsistencies in professional development, curriculum and resources, West Ed recommended additional HGE standards, more state-recommended HGE books, articles, lesson plans, and HGE teacher training to “help develop a more empathetic and morally courageous next generation and a more unified, socially responsible society.”
West Ed report fails to mention Gaza
Despite the emphasis on developing an “empathic society,” school policy researchers at West Ed fail to include a survey question or resource on the current US-backed Israel genocide in Gaza or the crackdown on anti-genocide activists chaining themselves to universities invested in contractors sending Israel 2,000 pound bombs to blow up hospitals in Gaza. What’s the point of genocide education that ignores the horror streaming live on cell phones? Why teach about resistance to the Nazi’s “final solution” if it’s off-limits to examine the Palestine solidarity movement’s resistance to genocide?
West Ed describes itself as “a joint-powers agency governed by multiple states.” Operating in California, Colorado, Arizona and Utah, West Ed says it is committed to partnering with “policymakers, district leaders, school leaders, communities, and others” to provide “a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation …” West Ed publishes documents on analyzing outcomes for English learners and students in foster care, and hosts webinars on child development and behavioral interventions for students with special needs.
In a departure from its focus on improving student outcomes, West Ed has produced research the Israel lobby can employ to justify more Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism lessons from the Anti-Defamation League, during what the ADL describes as a record high number of 9,934 antisemitic incidents nationwide last year. In its latest audit, however, the ADL says that 58% of the incidents were related to speeches, signs and chants criticizing Israel during its war on Gaza. Pro-Palestine activists describe the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” as liberatory. The ADL considers the slogan antisemitic and counts its utterance as an antisemitic incident.
The Governor’s Council led by Zionists
West Ed prepared its HGE report for the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education and collaborated with the Council to construct surveys and teacher interviews.
The Council is co-chaired by Israel loyalists such as State Senator Henry Stern, a member of the Legislative Jewish Caucus and the author of SB 472; State Attorney General Rob Bonta, who expressed solidarity with the Jewish Public Affairs Committee (JPAC) at its 2024 conference; State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, head of the California Department of Education, which ordered anti-bias training for a northern California school district in which a student delivered a presentation on the Gaza genocide; and Dr. Anita Friedman, Jewish Family and Children’s Services Northern California-Holocaust Center, chairperson of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) and former board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
While the West Ed report references a list of genocides–the Holocaust, Cambodian, Rwandan, Native American, Bosnian, Armenian–not a single word is written about Gaza, where Israel has obliterated the educational system, destroyed 90% of its schools and leveled every university in a crime called “scholasticide.” A student reading the West Ed report would never know that prominent human rights organizations–Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch–have labeled Gaza a genocide, nor that the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest judicial body of the United Nations, issued a preliminary ruling (1/26/24) concluding Israel had committed a “plausible genocide” under the UN Convention on Genocide.
West Ed’s recommendations
What the West Ed report recommends, however, is the need to further support the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education, which has received 4.5 million in seed money since 2021, with part of the money earmarked for the West Ed report that supports the Collaborative.
The Collaborative –the brainchild of the 18-member Legislative Jewish Caucus–includes organizations representing Armenians, Bosnians, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Native Americans and Uyghurs, though a majority of the partners are Holocaust-centered, and five are explicitly Zionist: ADL, Shoah, YadVashem, Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles); Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center.
There are no organizations representing Palestinians in the Collaborative.
In partnering with the ADL, the Collaborative platforms an organization lobbying for adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples that conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism to, in other words, equate criticism of Israel as a racist state with discrimination and persecution of Jews. Seven of the 11 IHRA examples of antisemitism revolve around Israel, further cementing the conflation of Israel and Judaism, even though one of the IHRA examples of antisemitism is “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” The Israel lobby wants it both ways—to define Judaism as Israel-centered but not to blame Jews for Israel’ s conduct.
It’s worth noting that Robert J. Williams, a representative of the IHRA, is an advisor to the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education, which commissioned the West Ed report and promotes the Collaborative. The Council also includes member Seth Brysk, the ADL’s chief officer of external affairs and partnerships.
West Ed recommends the State of California continue to build the Collaborative’s digital library, which includes Echoes & Reflections, a Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism curriculum co-constructed by the Anti-Defamation League, Shoah Foundation and YadVashem.
A closer look at Echoes & Reflections
Although this curriculum is largely focused on video testimonials, podcasts, timelines and vocabulary related to the Holocaust, it also includes a unit on Contemporary Antisemitism sure to win a standing ovation from JPAC and AIPAC for its devotion to Israel.
For starters, the unit features a slick video, “What Does it Mean to be Jewish?” in which a young woman explains 4,000 years of history in four minutes to celebrate the return of Jews to their biblical homeland in Israel. Of Jews the world over, the narrator tells us,“No matter where they live or how religious they are, a strong aspect of their identity is their connection to the State of Israel, the only Jewish state in the whole world.”
A student viewing this video would never know that Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians also trace their ancestry to historic Palestine or that Palestinains must now live as second-class citizens within Israel’s ‘67 borders and as targets of the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Moreover, a student would never learn of the anti-Zionist Jews who have long opposed the establishment of a Jewish state that rests on the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.
“Zionism is an ideology of Jewish supremacy that has resulted in a genocidal settler-colonial state,” says David Klein, a Jewish member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.” Klein adds, “It is deeply antisemitic to conflate Zionism with Judaism because that conflation associates apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide with Judaism.”
The Contemporary Antisemitism unit also includes a hand-out “A Brief History of Israel” that presents a skewed version of events that conveniently leaves out the ‘47-48 Zionist massacres and erasure of Palestinian villages burned to the ground to make way for the state of Israel. In still another student handout, “The New Antisemitism and the Three D’s,” students are taught not to question Israel’s establishment as a state that privileges one ethnicity over another and to remember to dodge the three D’s-Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization–if students want to prove to the world they are not antisemites but loyal supporters of Israel.
This conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism misrepresents the Jewish people, who hardly constitute a monolith in their thinking. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), with a million followers on social media, occupies state capitols and subway stations to disrupt what West Ed, the Legislative Jewish Caucus, and the Governor’s Council refuse to acknowledge:
People of conscience across the country are organizing in unprecedented numbers to demand divestment from Israeli apartheid and genocide. Our elected officials and the U.S. media, desperate to maintain unquestioning support for the Israeli war machine in service of their own interests, have responded by exploiting fears of rising antisemitism and smearing peaceful, anti-war protests as dangerous, anti-semitic mobs. (JVP-”We’re fighting to stop a genocide.”)
Holocaust education as Israel indoctrination
The West Ed reports allots 30 pages, considerable real estate, to analysis of HGE across the US to “identify patterns, trends and notable practices that can inform California’s approach.”
West Ed reports that 25 states, including California, have legislative mandates requiring Holocaust and genocide education, while a total of 38 states provide some level of state support for such curriculum.
The report’s support for increased state implementation of Holocaust education raises concerns among anti-Zionists who suspect a political agenda. “The Israel lobby exploits the pain and trauma of the Holocaust to shield Israel from criticism during its ongoing genocide,” says Seth Morrison, board member, Jewish Voice for Peace-Action. Morrison adds, “In some cases, proponents of Holocaust education even use it to justify Israel’s slaughter in Gaza by arguing that unless Israel bombs Gaza to rubble another Jewish holocaust will ensue. This kind of thinking normalizes state-sponsored genocide.”
On weaponization of the Holocaust, Peter Beinart, editor of Jewish Currents and author of the book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” says, “How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this “crime of crimes”?
If West Ed’s voluminous report served to highlight the importance of trials to prosecute accused war criminals like Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu –or uplift Columbia university students demanding an end to university complicity in Israel’s genocide, then surely a convincing argument could be made for increased genocide education (GE), albeit one that recognizes the horror of the Holocaust but does not exceptionalize it to place the Holocaust at the top of a genocide hierarchy, as in the term Holocaust and Genocide Education.
This, however, is not the case.
To shield Israel from accountability, an HGE political ecosystem necessitates multiple partners: an opportunistic Governor with naked political ambitions, Zionist lawmakers who misrepresent Judaism as Zionism, researchers for hire to make the Israel lobby’s case for more HGE instruction, and professional development partners to train teachers to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
There is hope for change, though.
The West Ed HGE report also recommends updating the state’s 2003 Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide. The curriculum, which discusses the Holocaust, Bosnian, Cambodia, and Rwandan genocides, could be updated to include Israel’s bombardment and forced starvation of Gaza, where rescue workers have coined a new acronym-WCNSF: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. To ensure this happens, educators and those outraged at US-Israel genocide in Gaza must demand a seat at the table in Sacramento.
The Myth of Conquest: Why Gaza Will Never
Be Subdued by Israel
Image by Ash Hayes.
To conquer a place is to fundamentally subdue its population. This must be clearly differentiated from ‘occupation’, a specific legal term that governs the relationship between a foreign “occupying power” and the occupied nation under international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.
When Israeli forces were ultimately compelled to redeploy from the Gaza Strip in 2005, a direct consequence of the persistent resistance of the Palestinian population there, the United Nations resolutely insisted that the Gaza Strip remained an occupied territory under international law.
This position stood in stark contradiction to that of Israel, which conveniently produced its own legal texts that designated Gaza a ‘hostile entity‘ – thus, not an occupied territory.
Let us try to understand what appears to be a confusing logic:
Israel proved incapable of sustaining its military occupation of Gaza, which began in June 1967. The paramount reason for Israel’s eventual redeployment was the enduring Palestinian Resistance, which rendered it impossible for Israel to normalize its military occupation and, crucially, to make it profitable – unlike the illegal settlements of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Between 1967 and the early 1970s, when Israel began investing in building illegal settlement blocks in the Strip, the Israeli military under the command of Ariel Sharon relentlessly strove to suppress Palestinians. He employed extreme violence, mass destruction, and ethnic cleansing tactics to subdue the Strip.
Yet, at no juncture did he achieve his ultimate and comprehensive objectives of complete subjugation.
Subsequently, he invested in his infamous, but failed ‘Five Fingers‘ plan. At the time the head of the Israeli army Southern Command – which included Gaza – Sharon stubbornly believed that the only way to defeat the Gazans was by severing the contiguity of the Strip, thus hindering organized resistance.
In pursuing this aim, he sought to divide Gaza into so-called security zones where the main Israeli Jewish settlements would be built, fortified by massive military build up. This would be joined by Israeli military control of key routes and the blocking of most coastal access.
However, this plan never fully actualized, as creating these ‘fingers’ required that Palestinians on both sides of the ‘security zones’ would have to be pacified to some extent – a condition that reality on the ground never delivered.
What did actualize was the building of isolated settlement blocks: the largest was in the southwest of the Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt, known as the Gush Katif, followed by the northern settlements, and finally the central settlement of Netzarim.
Housing a few thousand settlers, and often requiring the presence of a far greater number of soldiers assigned to protect them, these so-called settlements were essentially fortified military towns. Due to the limited geography of Gaza (181 square miles or 365 square kilometers) and the stiff resistance, the settlements had limited space for expansion, thus remaining a costly colonial endeavor.
When the Israeli army emptied the last illegal settlement in Gaza in 2005, the soldiers snuck out of the Strip in the middle of the night. At their heels were thousands of Gazans who chased the soldiers until the last of them fled the dramatic scene.
That singular and powerful episode alone is more than sufficient to allow one to assert with unwavering certainty that Gaza was at no point truly conquered by Israel.
Though Israel withdrew its permanent military presence from the main population centers of the Strip, it continued to operate within so-called buffer zones, which were often significant incursions into Palestinian territory, far beyond the armistice line. It also imposed a hermetic siege against Gaza, which starkly explains why the majority of Gazans have never stepped a foot outside the Strip.
Israel’s control over airspace, territorial water, natural resources (mostly Mediterranean gas fields), and much more readily led the UN to its immediate conclusion: Gaza remains an occupied territory.
Unsurprisingly, Israel vehemently opposed this reality. Tel Aviv’s true desire is absolute control over Gaza, coupled with the convenient and self-serving designation of the territory as perpetually hostile. This twisted logic would grant the Israeli military an endlessly exploitable pretext to initiate devastating wars against the already besieged and impoverished Strip whenever it deemed convenient.
This brutal and cynical practice is chillingly known within Israel’s military lexicon as ‘mowing the grass‘ – a dehumanizing euphemism for the periodic and deliberate degradation of the military capabilities of the Palestinian Resistance in an attempt to ensure that Gaza can never effectively challenge its Israeli jailors or break free from its open-air prison.
October 7, 2023, ended that myth, where Al-Aqsa Flood Operation challenged Israel’s long-standing military doctrine. The so-called Gaza Envelope region, where the late Sharon’s Southern Command is based, was entirely seized by the youth of Gaza, who organized under the harshest of economic and military circumstances, to, in a shocking turn of events, defeat Israel.
While acknowledging the UN designation of Gaza as occupied territory, Palestinians understandably speak of and commemorate its ‘liberation’ in 2005. Their logic is clear: the Israeli military’s redeployment to the border region was a direct consequence of their resistance.
Israel’s current attempts to defeat the Palestinians in Gaza are failing for a fundamental reason rooted in history. When Israeli forces stealthily withdrew from the Strip two decades ago under the cover of night, Palestinian resistance fighters possessed rudimentary weaponry, closer to fireworks than effective military instruments. The landscape of resistance has fundamentally shifted since then.
This long-standing reality has been upended in recent months. All Israeli estimates suggest that tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed, wounded, or psychologically impaired since the start of the Gaza war. Since Israel failed to subdue the Gazans over the course of two relentless decades, it is not merely improbable, but an outright absurdity to expect that Israel will now succeed in subduing and conquering Gaza.
Israel itself is acutely aware of this inherent paradox, hence its immediate and brutal choice: the perpetration of a genocide, a horrific act intended to pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of the remaining survivors. The former has been executed with devastating efficiency, a stain on the conscience of a world that largely stood by in silence. The latter, however, remains an unachievable fantasy, predicated on the delusional notion that Gazans would willingly choose to abandon their ancestral homeland.
Gaza has never been conquered and never will be. Under the unyielding tenets of international law, it remains an occupied territory, regardless of any eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces to the border – a withdrawal that Netanyahu’s destructive and futile war cannot indefinitely postpone. When this inevitable redeployment occurs, the relationship between Gaza and Israel will be irrevocably transformed, a powerful testament to the enduring resilience and indomitable spirit of the Palestinian people.
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