What Should Seattle Schools Say About Israel/Gaza?

This is a very difficult topic because, as seen by the public testimony at the last Seattle School Board meeting, emotions are running high. 

The Seattle School Board made a commitment to Black Lives Matter in Schools via a resolution in 2017, after the first BLM in Schools day in 2016 started at John Muir Elementary.  Nearly every year since then - 2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2020-2021  - the Board has put out this same resolution.  They didn't in 2021-2022 probably because the schools were closed because of the pandemic. Why they didn't in 2022-2023, I don't know but it's not in their list of resolutions passed that year at the SPS website. 

Here's an educator guide to BLM in Schools week developed by several departments/groups in Seattle Public Schools. Here's a very complete guide/list including lessons and resources from the D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice.

But now we come to school year 2023-2024. Per the recent Board testimony, it appears that there is a problem with BLM in Schools week. According to some teachers, the district appears to moving towards not doing anything and the Board has not yet put out a resolution for this year. BLM in Schools is generally the first week of February with all of February being Black History Month. 

These teachers believe it is because of the stand of the national BLM in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. These teachers - mostly high school - say there have been arguments among students with some taking sides with loud voices and near fights. They are clearly concerned about their students.

What is interesting is if you go to the BLM National website, you do not see any stories on BLM and their stand on Gaza. I looked and I don't see it.

 I do see a statement from the Movement for Black Lives (bold theirs). 

Like Black freedom seekers before us, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) remains unequivocally committed to a decolonized and self-determined Palestine. We are unyielding in our demand for an immediate end to Israel’s lethal settler-colonial project and its enforced displacement, human-rights desecration, cultural erasure, and outright genocidal agenda against the Palestinian people and spirit. The fight for Palestinian sovereignty isn’t a choice; it’s a mandate for universal human rights.

 

There is a whole history to Jews supporting Black issues in this country. You have only to recall the murders in June 1964 of James Chaney (Black), Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (Jewish), who were slain for their activism in the South in trying to register Black voters in Mississippi. That's a history that I believe needs to be remember and told.

From an AP story - Black American solidarity with Palestinians is rising and testing longstanding ties to Jewish allies

Wallace, and a growing number of Black Americans, see the Palestinian struggle in the West Bank and Gaza reflected in their own fight for racial equality and civil rights. The recent rise of protest movements against police brutality in the U.S., where structural racism plagues nearly every facet of life, has connected Black and Palestinian activists under a common cause.

In 2016, when BLM activists formed the coalition known as the Movement for Black Lives, they included support for Palestinians in a platform called the “Vision for Black Lives.” A handful of Jewish groups, which had largely been supportive of the BLM movement, denounced the Black activists’ characterization of Israel as a purportedly “apartheid state” that engages in “discrimination against the Palestinian people.”

But that kinship sometimes strains the more than century-long alliance between Black and Jewish activists. From Black American groups that denounced the U.S. backing of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to Black protesters demonstrating for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, some Jewish Americans are concerned that support could escalate the threat of antisemitism and weaken Jewish-Black ties fortified during the Civil Rights Movement.

According to a poll earlier this month from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, Black adults were more likely than white and Hispanic adults to say the U.S. is too supportive of Israel — 44% compared to 30% and 28%, respectively. However, Black Americans weren’t any more likely than others to say the U.S. is not supportive enough of the Palestinians.

Also, an interesting survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Americans and their views of the conflict in Israel/Gaza. 

From a very good story from NPR,  The Complicated History Behind BLM's Solidarity With The Pro-Palestinian Movement that aired back in June 2021:

How The Movement for Black Lives, the coalition of Black-led advocacy organizations, expressed that solidarity in 2016 set off another controversy. Its political platform called Israel "an apartheid state" and argued that by providing military aid to Israel, the U.S. is "complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people."

"That type of rhetoric tends to ring the fight-or-flight bells of most but not all — but most Jewish Americans," says Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University professor of Jewish civilization. "They'll either run away from the conversation because they find that type of oratory so over-the-top or so offensive, or they want to contest it."

That last paragraph? Kids are VERY influenced by what they hear at home or what they are raised to believe. I think that is one challenge in a facilitated discussion is all that students may bring in from home. It's hard sometimes for kids to go against what their parents or elders believe. 

 

One SPS teacher stated:

SPS chooses to remain silent, offering no support for our students to help navigate confusion, myths, misinformation, and biased news sources." 

They want SPS (magically I guess) to come up with curriculum"with care, curiosity and respect for one another." I say that sarcastically because it is now the middle of the school year and, if this is to done, it must be done carefully. I'm not sure there is time to come up with that curriculum AND make sure teachers understand it AND find a place to fit it into the class. 

If SPS chose to do a facilitated discussion in high schools, I do think that could be could be done but with great, great care. After listening to these teachers speak, I would say none of them could be faciliators. When you lead with "genocide in Gaza," you are not a neutral person. A facilitator may have their own opinions but their opinions are NOT to be inserted in any part of the discussion. 

Also, what would be an unbiased media source? What experts should be cited? What historian should be cited because I can tell you there are people on Twitter who firmly believe Palestine exists and there are those who do not.

I think that one important part of any discussion would be the words we use and what events we use to illustrate our beliefs and yet we ignore other events. Two op-eds from the New York Times illustrate this.

The first is from Bret Stephens - The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity

In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.

But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.

It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?

Of course, Mr. Stephens has to trip himself up here:

It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: It speaks of acts whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have vowed Hamas’s elimination, not the elimination of Palestinians. And it uses the term as such — meaning the acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, heartbreakingly, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.

He is right about the definition but that last phrase in that last sentence? Yes, just heartbreaking that Israel might bomb and bomb an inhabited area and surprise! innocent people die. C'mon!

The op-ed I found the most compelling is this one - What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide - by Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University (bold mine):

As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place.

The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”So in order to prove that genocide is taking place, we need to show both that there is the intent to destroy and that destructive action is taking place against a particular group.

Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it.

On Oct. 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” a statement indicating dehumanization, which has genocidal echoes. The next day, the head of the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such,” he said, adding: “There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

And so, while we cannot say that the military is explicitly targeting Palestinian civilians, functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide, as has happened more than once in the past.

So readers, you know how I feel about words. But Professor Bartov is trying to make sure that we don't just throw words around for effect but ALSO, that actions are happening that could lead to what we say can't happen under any circumstance. 

I also want to throw in here that any discussion has got to start with the hard truth that politics is involved. There are no clean actors except civilians including the Israeli hostages and the huge number of Palestinian women and children who have been killed. All of these leaders have their own (sometimes private) goals. Students need to understand that everything is not black and white and that yes, horrifyingly, sometimes people in power can cast a cold eye on deaths of civilians if it is a means to an end for THEM.

I leave you with my own experience of trying to stand up against an action in a foreign land. I grew up in the time of the Vietnam War and this is when yes, they showed body bags on tv and dead soldiers.  There was a draft and many young men did not want to go. We saw friends' older brothers go off and not come back. I wore an MIA bracelet for over a year in junior high. After the war ended, I poured over the names in the newspaper - hundreds of them - looking for my solider whose name is Harry M. Ravenna. I never found it but years later, when I visited the Vietnam Memorial in D.C., I had to choke back tears when I was directed to a certain wall. Because I had been certain he had made it. 

You'd think after Vietnam our country would have learned that young people and their voices should not be silenced nor ignored. 

What are your thoughts about what Seattle Schools should do (or not do)?