The difficulty of talking with students about Gaza
“You better not be teaching any of that Jewish stuff,” a student said to Scott, a veteran teacher in Chicago. The school, with a large Palestinian-American population had yet to offer a statement on Gaza, now weeks in the making. “Whose side are you on?” other students asked–not just at this Chicago school but at schools all across the country. A New York City teacher wrote that students were asking each other and their teachers if they were “Team Israeli” or “Team Palestinian.” Teachers are replying with some iteration of, “I am on the side of peace.” A trope with truth in it that also conveniently gives teachers an “out” — but also leaves teenagers deeply unsatisfied.
The war in Gaza–and how teachers talk about it with students–highlights the impossible balancing act of teaching social studies in 2023. It is wrapped up in identity politics and polarization; well-intentioned conversations can quickly become vitriolic or just lead to performative posturing. And, like many of the current culture wars our schools are embroiled in, teachers are scared about talking about Gaza. Similarly, the conflict is a prime example of the influence of social media on the current education landscape. Many of our students have already been exposed to what is happening in Gaza on Instagram and TikTok–videos depicting lifeless arms reaching out of rubble or of parents mourning their children–that have a deep emotional impact that we would be remiss not to address with our students. And the war gets at the very heart of misinformation in the 21st century: what is true, to what extent is it possible to remain impartial, and is it even possible to have a shared understanding of what is going on?
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
I started off wanting to write a piece about how social studies teachers are talking with students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As I talked to more and more teachers, though, I found that…many just aren’t talking with students about it. Educators are afraid to talk about it for fear of reprisal; others are afraid that it will take time away from the curriculum. Scott says, “I felt kind of guilty, myself, because I am not taking a stand….I’ve got too much to lose if I have big opinions about it. Anything you say you are the bad guy.” And it’s no wonder that teachers are afraid to talk about it. Educators across the country are facing retaliation for discussing controversial issues. An educator in Cobb County, Georgia, for instance, was fired after a monthslong public dispute over her reading of the book My Shadow Is Purple.
At the same time, there is a cost to not engaging with students about the bombardment of Gaza. Students want to understand what is going on in the world, and conflict with others is where learning occurs. While schools shy away from talking about Gaza, not engaging with conflicting opinions in our own communities doesn’t cause them to go away. Holocaust educator Steve Goldberg–who has spent years documenting and telling the story of the life of Holocaust survivor Abe Piaseck–discussed with me a similarly difficult situation early in his career when he didn’t talk with students about the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “I had a girl who was from Israel. This was 1995 — my first year of teaching. She glared at me the whole class. At the end of class, she came up to me and said, ‘My president was just assassinated and you didn’t mention it. I’m so mad at you.’ And she was right to be mad at me,” Steve says. “If you’re going to teach about this, it is going to be really, really hard.”
In the absence of some kind of shared understanding of what is happening, students turn to family members and social media, which only reinforce existing opinions, present limited context, and shut down people’s ability to empathize with others. In the absence of ways of having dialogue and dealing with intellectual and emotional conflict, people turn to violence. Reports of antisemitic and Islamaphobic hate crimes are on the rise in the US, including the murder of a six year old Muslim boy in Chicago.
If we hope to produce citizens who are capable of dealing with intense disagreement without violence, it is incumbent upon schools to teach students how to do it.
I. The difficulty of establishing a shared set of facts
For the educators who do dare to talk about Gaza with their students, they may fall into the trap of “bothsidesism,” or false equivalence. Social studies teachers want to present an issue as legitimately complex, and they want to appear unbiased; at the same time, we don’t want to give undue gravity to a side that is not credible or not backed up by evidence. As education historians and theorists Emily Robertson and Jon Zimmerman write in their book The Case for Contention (2017), not all issues have two legitimate sides; for instance, we would not present whether or not climate change exists as having “two sides,” although we may debate how it is addressed; we should not debate the “pros and cons” of women’s suffrage or of Jim Crow. “Agreement on a set of verified facts is actually the sine qua non of democracy,” Zimmerman and Robertson write.
As Judith Butler recently argued, not being able to establish a set of facts makes violence inevitable. If, for example, you cannot label the violence Israel has committed against Palestinians, you also cannot then talk about other nonviolent ways that other people have thrown off the yoke of oppression; if you cannot propose a nonviolent alternative to the Palestinians because we cannot even start the conversation, how can we blame them for pursuing violence?
If, however, we are forbidden to refer to ‘the occupation’ (which is part of contemporary German Denkverbot), if we cannot even stage the debate over whether Israeli military rule of the region is racial apartheid or colonialism, then we have no hope of understanding the past, the present or the future.
In other words, acknowledging the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine also gives us a framework for acknowledging and understanding Hamas’s reprehensible violence against Israeli civilians. Creating a set of relevant facts that does not seek to absolve either side or justify the murder of civilians but helps students to understand why things are happening.
What do we as educators, though, present as fact to students versus “debatable”? Ought we present the views of the Israeli government with the same weight as the consensus opinion of virtually every single human rights organization? Or does this create ambiguity where, in reality, there is consensus among experts. According to historian Dr. Zachary Foster, for example, the West Bank is, in fact, an apartheid state. “For Palestinians, you are the subject of a military government,” he says. “There was a plausible argument in the 80s and 90s [that it wasn’t an apartheid government] because there was a belief that eventually we are going to grant Palestinians sovereignty. But it’s been more than a decade and a half since any real conversation about a two state solution, to such an extent that I don’t think that any serious person thinks that the West Bank” isn’t an apartheid government. He adds that the the United Nations as well as 16 separate human rights organizations have called Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal. Similarly, Dr. Foster believes that the Israeli government has, unequivocally, committed war crimes in Gaza over the last 15 years. “The consensus of every major human rights organization is that the blockade is illegal because 1) it imposes collective punishment; it is illegal under international law to punish a civilian population for actions by its government. And…multiple Israeli officials say the point is to punish Palestinian people. 2) It is imposing tremendous hardship. 80% of people in Gaza are dependent on aid. 50% of people are living in conditions of extreme poverty.”
More information creates a more nuanced understanding of the conflict that helps students to build empathy with both sides while understanding people’s motivations. For instance, Dr. Ben Radd of UCLA notes that while many on social media declare Israel to be founded on “white colonialism,” in fact, its founding and current racial makeup are much more nuanced: “An equal number of Jews were displaced in the Middle East and Africa in the 1940s as there were people in the West Bank. And those Jews did face discrimination in their home countries. As a result, more than half of Israel’s population is nonwhite.” Dr. Radd adds, though, that “The political class in Israel is largely white.” Similarly, the failure of a two-state solution in the Middle East is complex; while it may be easy to blame the current Israeli political establishment for the ongoing occupation, it is important to contextualize them with events like the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his support of the Oslo Accords.
So, as educators, when the United Nations and other human rights organizations declare that 9,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza and the Israeli and American government draw doubt on the numbers, should we treat both claims as equally true? Or is this tantamount to giving credence to election conspiracy theorists or climate change deniers? While ultimately it will require educators to make a judgment call about the credibility of each, I believe that we ought to present the former as the “expert consensus.”
II. Grieving Death and Acknowledging Uncertainty Before Talking With Students
Once a shared set of facts has been established, how do you talk about the immense violence that is taking place in the Levant right now? In an effort to understand what is happening in Gaza, and in an effort to push students to consider legitimate opposing viewpoints, we also risk over-intellectualizing the cruel reality of the loss of life. Many students have seen videos going around social media of, for example, a child crying over her dead mother’s body, or of a woman being kidnapped at the Nova music festival in Israel.
H, a graduate student in anthropology who wished to remain anonymous out of a fear of retaliation, says, “Perhaps right now, instead, is the time to call for grief and lament. And I don’t mean empty ‘thoughts and prayers’ — I mean sit and grieve and witness. From a place where we can learn as well in communion and trust; to understand one another.” It is from this grief and mutual vulnerability that we can start to understand each side.
He also suggested that being honest with students about your own position is important. Given the complexity of the issue, teachers may be afraid to talk about it with their students–they may not be able to control an environment that is emotionally charged, or they may not be able to address students’ questions, or they themselves may not have a firm stance on what is happening. “One place to start is to have a meta discussion about it,” H says. “Be honest about the difficulty of talking about such complex dynamics. Be honest with students about having a hard time making sense of it yourself and seeking to process it with students.” And while many educators pride themselves on being able to hide their true political beliefs from students, objectivity should not necessarily be the goal. “I am not sure trying to be objective is possible or ought to be the goal,” H says. “To be honest is to admit we can’t fully understand and comprehend what is happening.”
Goldberg agrees, saying, “You have to come from A perspective. You can try to be balanced and fair — but you can’t be objective. We have to get away from the bias in the US media for bothsidesism. You have to be coming from somewhere. There’s some value in that. I know some teachers who take pride in students knowing my views. Telling them what they think. You can’t punish someone for not thinking what you think,” Goldberg says.
The issue is made even more complex by students’ personal attachments to what is going on. Students who are Arab or Jewish may have family affected directly by the conflict. Goldberg recalls a similarly difficult situation early in his career. “In 1998, I wanted to talk about Matthew Shephard, who had recently been killed. As we started talking about him, this one student started tearing up and left the room. Later on when I talked with her, I found out that she went to high school with Matthew Shephard in Saudi Arabia. What I learned from that is that you have to ask ‘Does anyone have a personal connection to this before we discuss it.’” Goldberg suggests informing students a few days before a discussion that you plan to talk about it and asks students to let him know if they have some kind of personal connection to the situation. But this doesn’t mean that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. Some students may want to participate in the conversation or share their experience; others may choose not to attend at all.
III. Setting Boundaries and Cultivating Empathy
Just as we try to create a shared set of facts with students and try to limit what is and isn’t up for debate, educators can also set boundaries for what, morally, is okay to talk about. H says, “You have to approach it from a strong moral claim: that all life lost is lamentable and grievable. You have to refuse to shake from a position that ‘all life lost is lamentable.’” Students already face casual cruelty and a cavalier regard for violence on social media, and starting from a standpoint that death is lamentable–while maybe an artificial constraint–can help students develop empathy. Acknowledging the inherent worth of all human life forces students to consider solutions that don’t necessitate violence and that force us to try to understand others’ actions–even if we don’t agree with them.
Steve says that one of the most important reasons for teaching about the Holocaust is to understand how a group of people–how a country–could go about commiting a genocide. We are watching this play out before our eyes; the dehumanizing of people on both sides of the military conflict. It is especially important that we empathize when the stakes are so high, and that we show our young people how to take a firm moral stance while trying to seek solutions and understand others. We can both express that we believe that violence ought to be avoided–but that it also has deep historical contexts and causes. Indeed, understanding the context of the violence is an important part of the empathizing process–to not assume that people are doing things because they are bad people but because there is deep historical pain.
In order to have sincere conversations, there must be mutual vulnerability and trust. Establishing norms, being vulnerable yourself, and providing space to grief for both sides can help with this. “Without mutual vulnerability, without trust, you cannot have an honest conversation. You have people who are skeptical of each other’s stances, people who are defensive, or people who are merely taking a position as a way to signal,” H says. And it is this kind of signaling–the kind of signaling that is defensive, that is insincere and skeptical, that is the domain of social media–that we hope to break in classrooms in order to build better understanding with each other.
Scott recalls how his school taught about Jon Birge, the police officer who spent years torturing accused civilians and about whom the city of Chicago later required schools to teach. “We spent the first two days setting up norms for discussing it. Peace circle. It worked pretty well.” Scott said it was particularly difficult with a class where many students had family who were police officers, and many students had family who had been harassed by police. Scott approached it from the perspective of trying to build empathy. “You have to figure out ways to open up people. Everyone is so guarded. Everyone’s identities are so wrapped up in it. So, I tell the kids whose parents aren’t cops: You have to admit that their parents [police officers] are in danger every moment. But you have to admit to the non-cops kids: People feel anger and resentment towards the police. And people like Jon Birge put your dads in danger. You don’t have to defend John Birge — he’s making your parents look bad.”
Students are figuring out their political views, and they need a space where they can legitimately grapple with sincere, difficult opinions, even if they are unpopular–so long as they are based in fact. As teachers, our students are looking to us for moral guidance–and we ought to be unwavering with a commitment to truth and empathy. In order to pursue truth and empathy, teachers need to be deliberate about setting boundaries about what is up for debate. We have to teach students how to process what they are feeling and how to discern. Our students are being exposed to violence and cruelty all around them. What do students learn from our silence?
