“I cannot imagine teaching … in 2025 without being able to discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza”
When I taught high school English, one of my go-to books for class study every year was the Holocaust memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel. An account of the author’s experiences as a teenager who barely survived the Nazi concentration camps, the book was a powerful way for students to learn not only about the Holocaust but also about our duty to each other to speak out and fight against injustice and persecution when we see it. Unfortunately, Elie Wiesel himself disregarded this duty when it came to speaking out against the oppression of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state, which he supported unconditionally.
Despite that, I still think that Wiesel’s work has value. As they read “Night,” my students learned about the overlapping and escalating stages of genocide, the different roles people take on as it unfolds, and how bigotry, scapegoating, and antisemitism contributed to what happened to Jews and other victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Their final project was to apply what they had learned by researching, analyzing, and teaching their peers about another example of genocide from history or the contemporary world.
I cannot imagine teaching that memoir in 2025 without being able to discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza or allowing students to research it. But making that topic taboo in public schools (and everywhere else) is a high priority for those who stand by Israel’s right to exist as an ethnonationalist, Jewish supremacist state in all of historic Palestine, and who also believe Israel has the right to commit genocide against the Palestinians as a means to that end.
For many years, an effective method for making the topic of Israel’s long-standing human rights violations against the Palestinian people taboo has been to label all criticism and negative portrayals of the state of Israel or the political ideology of Zionism as “antisemitic.” This accusation, shored up by the West’s collective guilt about the Holocaust and enforced through public shaming and doxxing, has created the “Palestine Exception” to calling out Israel’s gross human rights violations. But the past two years of Israel’s relentless assault on the civilian population in Gaza have made this tactic much less effective.
As Israel pushes Palestinians undergoing an engineered famine into concentration camps and destroys what little remains there, we are witnessing the ninth stage of genocide—extermination—in real time. A growing chorus of genocide scholars and international and human rights organizations have concluded that Israel is indeed committing the crime of genocide. This has resulted in more and more people speaking out against Israel, boycotting it, and calling for divestment, and some countries are finally starting to impose sanctions.
Under all this pressure, Israel’s supporters are now engaging fully in the 10th and final stage of genocide—denial. One way this stage is unfolding in Massachusetts is via the legislature’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism.
The SCCA recently released a set of problematic recommendations for K-12 education. Several of the recommendations include using the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates Zionism and the state of Israel with Judaism and Jewish people. Under this definition, almost any criticism of what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people, or any teaching about Palestinian history, can be classified as antisemitic. The K-12 recommendations also include creating two statewide anonymous reporting databases: 1) a statewide “bias reporting system” connected to the state police Hate Crimes Task Force; and 2) a database for reporting “problematic curriculum” to the state department of education. Although they are called “recommendations,” they have the strong support of the Governor, the new Massachusetts Commissioner of education, and many more people in powerful positions.
If I were still teaching high school English and these recommendations were implemented, teaching a book like “Night” would become fraught with danger. What if one of my students were Palestinian and brought up the hundreds of relatives they lost during during the Gaza genocide? Would that student be reported to the state’s bias reporting system by another student and tracked by the state police? What if I allowed students to research whether Israel has committed genocide in Palestine? Would I be reported for “problematic curriculum”?
Members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association Rank and File for Palestine, aware that these censorship efforts around Palestine were coming on top of other efforts to censor curriculum and free speech, helped our union to prepare for this moment. During the past year the MTA Board of Directors has voted twice to oppose the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and this summer it voted to approve a comprehensive set of actions to support and protect members whose academic freedom and protected speech are being targeted in this repressive environment.
As union educators, we cannot be complicit in genocide denial, the rewriting of history, and the erasure of our students’ humanity. We have a moral and ethical duty to students, to each other, and to our communities to speak out against injustice and persecution and to help safeguard protected speech and academic freedom, the cornerstones of our democracy. The MTA’s union educators had the foresight to prepare for this moment, and we are ready!
