Events overseas rarely impact education in America. The war in Gaza is an exception. Its social significance and the extent to which social media shape students’ views about it provide a glimpse of education’s future. For America’s teachers, 10/7 and its aftermath are much more than “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” and the struggle over how best to talk about them with students presents a huge challenge. But there are steps educators can take.
A year has passed since Hamas commandos invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 citizens, tourists and foreign workers, and taking more than 250 hostages. Eyewitness testimony, physical evidence, and GoPro video shared live on social media by the perpetrators show that the brutal attack included execution of civilians, sexual violence, mutilation of corpses, and hostages paraded to cheering crowds in Gaza.
Israel’s military response was swift and ferocious. According to United Nations estimates, a year of fighting has left more than 41,000 Gazans dead, 95,000 injured, 1.9 million displaced, and 60 percent of Gaza’s buildings destroyed. Neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government in Israel nor Yahya Sinwar’s militant Islamist regime in Gaza seems interested in a ceasefire. With Iran now targeting Israeli civilians directly rather than via her proxies in the “Axis of Resistance”—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Houthis in Yemen—and Israel responding accordingly, the prospect of peace seems even further away. As of this writing, 97 of the hostages abducted on 10/7 remain captive in Gaza, including 4 American citizens.
Even before Israel responded, pro-Palestinian academics and student activists in the United States mobilized to justify Hamas’ actions and recruit campus opinion to their cause. Although media attention has focused on the turmoil in higher education, K-12, too, has been affected. At American public schools, student activists have organized walkouts, teach-ins, and marches in support of Palestinian liberation and against U.S. military support for Israel. At Hillcrest High School in New York City, rioting students stormed hallways, heading for a teacher’s classroom, after she posted a picture of herself on Facebook holding an “I stand with Israel” sign. Arab students at Jackson-Reed High School in Washington filed a lawsuit against their school’s prohibition of pro-Palestinian events, claiming they were being treated differently from Black and Asian students.
Curriculum has been affected, too. Two social studies teachers at Fort Lee High School in New Jersey were investigated after parents complained that their one-sided presentation to 11th graders referred to the 10/7 massacres as “clashes” in which Hamas was able to “break out” of Gaza. In Berkeley, Calif., a parent sued the school district to turn over a 9th grade curriculum that included lesson plans criticizing Israel and disproportionately relying on fringe views of Jewish anti-Zionists. Local teachers’ union president Matt Meyer attributed the controversy to interfering parents trying to “micromanage our educators.”
So, as we acknowledge the first anniversary of a day in which more Jews were killed than on any single day since the Holocaust, a war in which roughly a third of Palestinian fatalities have been school-age children, and a year in which attacks outside of Israel and Gaza on Jewish Americans increased by 360 percent and on Muslim Americans by 180 percent in just a few months, what should public schools teach young Americans about the war or about the broader context of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples’ respective struggles for self-determination on land to which both consider themselves indigenous?
For many teachers, the answer is: Nothing. In these polarized times, why risk the wrath of litigious parents, conflict-avoidant administrators, and activist board members by broaching the topic? And fear is not the only motive for avoiding it. Teachers can plead ignorance, arguing that Israeli-Palestinian history is so complex, they’re unqualified to teach it. Or they can recuse themselves for almost the opposite reason, namely, that they identify so much with one side in the conflict that they cannot teach anything about it without bias.
But in education, as in law, ignorance is no defense. And if you can’t teach something that matters to you without bias, then perhaps you should consider a different profession. When young Americans get their news from unreliable sources on social media, it’s teachers’ job to engage them in informed, civil discussion of what is happening and why.
Silence isn’t an option. What is?
I’ve no magic bullet. But I can suggest two guardrails to help teachers step up, stay true to their vocation, and respect the sensitivities of students and parents: Humanity and humility.
To teach the Israel-Hamas war with humanity is to ensure those murdered and abducted on 10/7 are neither erased from history nor discounted as fair game in a noble battle of oppressed versus oppressor. It is also to acknowledge the horror suffered by Gazans in the ensuing war. It is to resist glib statements about suffering “on both sides,” which lump together victims of different kinds of violence, undertaken with different kinds of intent, and resulting in different scales of impact. As Americans know all too well, loose talk about equivalence can be used to justify the indefensible.
It is also to teach with due care and consideration for students and teachers who have personal ties to the conflict, whether ethnic, religious, or familial. To check whether you pass the humanity test, ask yourself whether what you’re planning to teach can comfortably accommodate the facts I listed in my second and third paragraphs. If it can accommodate only some but not others, try again.
By humility, I mean with due recognition of how complex Middle East history and geopolitics are and the unreliability of the accounts of both that most students encounter. Humility does not mean granting equal airtime to all opinions or to those shouted loudest. It means, on the contrary, modeling critical thinking, distinguishing fact from opinion, and sensitizing students. It also means being open to learning something new and being surprised rather than confirming bias.
These guardrails are not a curriculum. They are an educational stance. Some teachers might express humanity through thoughtful commemorations of individual school-age Israelis and Palestinians who lost their lives this year. Some might focus their efforts on humility by fact-checking contested accounts of the events of 10/7 and the ensuing war in Gaza, or by inviting students to share what they know and feel about them, giving space to lesser heard voices and perspectives.
What matters is that teachers hold themselves accountable to their educational mission and not be cowed into silence. The moment requires it. And America’s students need it.
