Special thanks to G. Laster for research and design on these visuals.
Last month, a year into an unending genocide against our loved ones in Palestine, my daughter, a senior in a public high school in the U.S., told me that she, along with a group of students, were planning a humanitarian walkout in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon.
I felt a sense of conflicting emotions at this proclamation: I was proud of my daughter and her friends for speaking up against injustice, something we should all be doing all the time until we see an end to the genocide and colonial oppression of Palestinians. At the same time, for the entire week before the walkout, I felt a pit in my stomach, fearing and knowing what was about to unfold (based on the repression experienced by students a year ago when they planned a similar walkout at the school): intimidation, discrimination, and silencing of students by school administrators.
Indeed, I was not surprised when the night before the walkout, student organizers received an email from the school principal, with directives prohibiting the use of certain phrases and actions at the walkout. The banned phrases and actions, which the school system had classified as de facto “hateful,” included: chants for freedom, such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” actions such as “red hands,” and signs with maps that recognize Palestine.
These directives sent panic across the body of student organizers. Students felt afraid, discriminated against, undermined, and silenced. Instead of providing children with support and a safe space to practice free speech at school, and to process the trauma of watching their friends and families being killed in Palestine and Lebanon, students were met with bigoted and discriminatory restrictions. School systems across the U.S. are responding to pressure from Zionist parents, administrators, and organizations, resulting in schools prioritizing the comfort of some students over the rights, well-being and humanity of students like my daughter, who are calling for an end to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
On the day of the walkout, the principal and school administrators falsely accused students chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” of using “antisemitic language,” dangerously slandering the intention of students protesting genocide and exposing them to further harassment and harm from the school community.
Indeed, instead of focusing on calling for an end to a genocide, students like my daughter now had to turn their energies towards defending their right to express their opinions and to assert who they are. Even though the school system continuously claims to value the rights of every student “to feel safe and affirmed in our schools,” as proclaimed in the message that the school principal sent to the school community following the walkout, it is clear that these values do not extend to Palestinians or students who express solidarity with Palestinians.
According to a new study released by the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism, students and educators’ surveyed indicated that “74% of students and 75% of educators experienced silencing, exclusion, harassment, physical threat or harm, and defamation while advocating for Gaza and/or Palestinian human rights.”
Anti-Palestinian racism is one of many tools that is enabling a broader trend of right-wing attacks on public education. When school administrators submit to pressure to silence Palestinian narratives, they not only actively engage in the erasure of Palestinian experiences and history, but they also embolden further attacks aimed at preventing students from learning about racism and oppression.
In her brilliant piece, Anti-Palestinian Racism in Canadian Schools and What We Can Do About It, Nassim Elbardouh says: “These types of inconsistent applications of policy and procedures indicate that the problem isn’t the action itself (wearing a keffiyeh or critiquing the actions of the Israeli government), it’s the fear of how the action will be perceived. In doing this, we are modelling that we will break where and when people apply pressure. This is profoundly destabilizing and scary for young people who require consistency to feel safe enough to ask critical questions and meaningfully engage in the world around them.”
Schools are supposed to provide students with safe spaces to be themselves, express their views, and to engage with the world they live in critically. Instead, schools are one of many actors across the United States and other countries that are perpetuating anti-Palestinian racism and harm. The least we can do is to expose this systemic racism (from schools, to universities, to mainstream media, to government officials) that is playing a role in enabling the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian and Lebanese communities.
Anti-Palestinian Racism in Schools is the first in a series of visuals that will explore manifestations of this distinct form of racism in various settings.