EXCLUSIVE: Bay Area district’s ethnic studies curriculum blames ‘settler colonialism’ for ‘Palestinian dispossession’

The Jefferson Union High School District, whose five public San Francisco Bay Area schools educate about 3,800 students, discusses the “dispossession” of Palestinian lands, identity and culture via “settler colonialism” in its ethnic studies curriculum, according to a report that the nonprofit Defending Education shared exclusively with JNS.

A unit on “social movements and solidarity,” which offers a “space to study social movements that resist oppressive systems from the past and present,” directs students to write an essay comparing and contrasting two social movements. One option is “self-determination of Palestine.”

Sponsored P09-II DLP Mini Projector: A Portable Android Entertainment Hub for Israelis AliExpress See the review →

The United States doesn’t recognize an independent Palestinian state. (JNS sought comment from the public school district.)

According to the Defending Education report, the district’s units referred in 2023 to “Zionist settler colonialism” as the culprit for “Palestinian dispossession” and to the “self-determination of Palestine and anti-Zionism.”

The following year, it removed the references to “Zionist” and “anti-Zionism,” per the nonprofit.

Rhyen Staley, director of research at Defending Education, told JNS that “this curriculum is another reminder that ethnic studies is a far-left political program meant to turn children into activists for left-wing causes.”

“Even more concerning is that highly divisive content is still present in the course, despite serious concerns previously raised by families in the community,” Staley said. “Students and parents deserve better from school district leaders.”

The “systems of oppression” unit also states that “students will be able to compare and contrast at least one indigenous worldview with a colonizing worldview.”

For a resource, the unit lists a lesson plan from the University of California, Berkeley history-social science project that asks students how the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the document in which the British government declared its support for a Jewish homeland, and the Mandate for Palestine created “tension,” per the Defending Education report.

The resource lists as “supporting evidence” that the Jewish National Fund was soliciting donations from Jews to purchase land in what was then known as “Palestine,” which it states “upset Arabs in the region, because they might lose their land.”

“Like much anti-Israel propaganda, the so-called ‘liberated’ ethnic studies curriculum taught at Jefferson Union presents students with a distorted, one-sided account of Israel’s establishment, filtered through the American left’s preferred narratives about race and power,” Jonathan Greenberg, director for combating antisemitism for Defending Education, told JNS.

“The curriculum largely ignores 3,000 years of Jewish history and recasts decades of Jewish efforts to return to, purchase land in, and build communities in the historic Jewish homeland as ‘settler colonialism,’” Greenberg said. “Schools should teach students the history and complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—not indoctrinate them into accepting a predetermined political view of Israel.”

Get the latest updates in our WhatsApp group.