In yet another example of American public schools politicizing Middle East-related education, Illinois’s Niles Township High School District 219 is offering its teachers a blatantly anti-Israel course titled “Teaching Palestine.” Along with employing loaded language, such as “the Israeli occupation of Palestine” and “settler colonialism,” the course includes “strategies for how to respond to Zionist professional developments and curricula or when parents/staff/others object to anti-Zionist curriculum.” As reported by JNS, it also relies upon information from the rabidly anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace.
SPME’s Asaf Romirowsky cited the course as an example of the “Palestinianization of the academy . . . steadily spreading into high-schools and teacher trainings,” while the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper stated, “It is beyond belief that at a time when the United States government has stopped funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because the organization’s educational division does not adequately acknowledge the State of Israel and holds up terrorists as role models for young students, that a school district in Illinois would model similar curriculum.”
