Marianne Dhenin: Educators Worry Palestine Censorship Could Reshape Public Education Entirely

New efforts to shut down honest discussion of Palestine could restrict everything from literature to science classes

A wave of bills introduced this year in state legislatures across the country sought to censor Palestine-related education in public schools. Several passed with the support of pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers, a trend that educators and First Amendment advocates told Truthout reflects the alignment of pro-Israel groups with MAGA forces. As these efforts continue, many said they fear public education could be reshaped far beyond social studies classrooms and the topics of Israel and Palestine.

“The censorship of Palestinians is the same as the ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ and the anti-critical race theory attacks on Black history,” Nora Lester-Murad, an organizer with the #DropTheADLfromSchools effort, told Truthout. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is one of a number of pro-Israel groups supporting regressive public education legislation across the country. “Yes, it’s Zionist, and yes, it’s promoting Israel, but it’s also part of this right-wing effort to take public education in a direction that’s away from critical thinking and that’s anti-liberatory.”

This year, legislators in at least eight states — including Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Tennessee — introduced bills that would directly adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in public schools. That definition equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Dozens of civil society and rights groups, as well as unions of educators, have warned against its adoption because of its power to chill or suppress speech critical of Israel or Zionism.

Michael Berg, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in Missouri, said lawmakers who sponsored House Bill (HB) 937 seemed more committed to preventing teachers and pupils from criticizing Israel than preventing discrimination against Jewish students. “They were attached to the IHRA definition, so it shows that it’s very specifically about speech about Israel,” he said. Organizers succeeded in stopping HB 937 in Missouri this year, but Berg told Truthout they are already preparing to fight a new iteration of the bill in the upcoming legislative session.

Other states have made similar efforts, including California, where Democrats hold a supermajority in the state assembly. There, this year’s Assembly Bill (AB) 715 was the latest in a series introduced under the guise of curbing antisemitism, but whose critics argue are censorship bills that undermine the implementation of earlier legislation mandating ethnic studies courses in public schools. AB 715 does not define antisemitism, but calls for using the Biden-era United States National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism as “a basis to inform schools on how to identify, respond to, prevent, and counter antisemitism.” That white paper claims that “the United States has embraced” IHRA’s definition as a “valuable tool” in countering antisemitism. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 715 into law in October; the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) filed a suit challenging the law in federal court in November.

 Meanwhile, this August in Massachusetts, another Democratic stronghold, the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism approved recommendations meant to curb antisemitism in schools. The recommendations call on districts to teach IHRA’s definition of antisemitism in anti-bias trainings for teachers and school administrators. A statewide coalition of labor unions, civil rights groups, and progressive Jewish organizations warned that rather than countering antisemitism, the recommendations “pit some Jewish students against other marginalized populations” and will likely “undermine safe learning and working environments for students and teachers.”

These moves dovetail with a federal agenda to remake the nation’s public schools and historical programming at other public institutions, such as museums and national parks. Since his return to office, President Donald Trump has signed executive orders demanding an end to “radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling” and “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” The administration advocates teaching a whitewashed and aggrandizing version of the nation’s past that Trump, in one executive order, called “patriotic education.” 

The fact that pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers and groups that have traditionally enjoyed reputations as liberal organizations, such as the ADL, have been driving forces behind the recent spate of public education censorship bills comes as no surprise to Lara Kiswani, executive director of AROC Action and an organizer with the California Coalition to Defend Public Education (CCDPE), which mobilized against AB 715. “It’s a right-wing agenda to support genocide [and] it’s a right-wing agenda to support segregation and apartheid, so it’s not a surprise that pro-Israel interest groups, who are inherently right-wing, are aligning themselves with the MAGA interest groups across the country,” she told Truthout.

Theresa Montaño, a former public school teacher who now teaches Chicano/a Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, told Truthoutthe harms of this regressive legislation are already being felt. “There have been a number of incidents where teachers and educators are reported for being antisemitic, and [the IHRA] definition is the reason why,” she said. “It has already impacted the lives, reputations, and livelihoods of so many.”

Montaño was herself a named defendant in a lawsuit filed in 2022 by the Deborah Project, a pro-Israel firm, on behalf of teachers and parents who accused her and other defendants of using antisemitic content in their classrooms. That case was dismissed in November 2024, with the judge criticizing the plaintiff’s lack of evidence and unpersuasive arguments. Montaño told Truthout: “Today, it’s Palestine. Tomorrow, is it the rainbow flag on my door, the fact that I talk about settler colonialism in the southwest, [or] my Black Lives Matter poster?”

When Arizona passed a bill in May 2025 that would have adopted IHRA’s definition of antisemitism for identifying antisemitic conduct in schools, Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed it, recognizing in the wake of cases like Montaño’s that the bill was about “attacking our teachers.”

The recent wave of bills limiting Palestine-related speech in public schools also harms students. “We believe that antisemitism is being used to censor education on Palestine, and we believe that our students have a right to understand both sides of an issue,” Seth Morrison, spokesperson for JVP’s Bay Area chapter and an organizer with CCDPE, told Truthout. “We’re not saying don’t talk about Israel or don’t talk about the Holocaust. What we’re saying is that there are many open issues here and that Arab and Muslim students especially are being intimidated and censored because of IHRA and related activities.”

In California, efforts to censor Palestine in the classroom are disrupting the rollout of ethnic studies courses, meaning students are being left with fewer opportunities to learn about the communities of color that comprise almost three-quarters of the state’s student population. Since its case against Montaño, the Deborah Project has also sued the Mountain View–Los Altos High School District and the Hayward Unified School District for release of records related to ethnic studies instruction; both districts settled and agreed to cover the firm’s legal fees. This February, a suit brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center succeeded in stopping ethnic studies instruction in the Santa Ana Unified School District.

ADC’s case against AB 715 argues the new law violates the First Amendment right of students to receive information in the classroom. “Courts have held that the right to be exposed to different viewpoints [and] to have frank and open discussions and debates … is protected in public schools under the First Amendment,” Jenin Younes, ADC’s national legal director, explained to Truthout.

Plaintiffs’ stories in that case show how Palestine-related speech arises even in unexpected places, and how censoring it could limit learning experiences. Jonah Olson, a plaintiff and middle school science teacher in Adelanto, California, told Truthout, “I don’t initiate a whole lot of political discussion in my science class, but I do try to foster, as per the NGSS framework, connections to real-world experiences, connecting those things to science and engineering practices.” California adopted its Next Generation Science Standards, or NGSS, in 2015.

Recently, students in Olson’s classes have chosen to research and experiment with water desalination and food preservation after learning, Olson suspects from social media, that people in Gaza have not had adequate potable water or food while living under Israeli bombardment for the past two years. “They’re engaging in the world and seeing science and engineering questions and problems to be solved and then exercising that inquiry in the way they’re supposed to [according to NGSS],” he said. “They’re citing in their projects the real-world connection to the genocide in Gaza.”

Kiswani told Truthout stories like these reflect students’ hunger to learn and engage with real world injustices: “It’s a time now where we really have to ensure that our students are able to have a dignified experience in the classroom, but also that we don’t allow our public education system to completely be taken over by political interest groups, which would result in a very destructive and unfortunate outcome of erasure, invisibility, and lack of agency given to students who need [those things] more now than ever.”

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First published in Truthout. This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

MARIANNE DHENIN is an award-winning journalist and historian. Find their portfolio or contact them at mariannedhenin.com.