The trio of liberal education groups, able to conceal key information by exploiting nonprofit laws, has been working to seed pro-Palestinian lessons and materials into public school classrooms in red states and blue states alike through a collection of educational materials dubbed Teaching Palestine, according to documents obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner. Material distributed to teachers by the groups behind it, among other things, encouraged educators to put their students through “Israeli apartheid simulations,” accuse the United States and Israel of ethnic cleansing, and push their students to engage in pro-Palestinian protests.

Teaching Palestine is a combined project undertaken by Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project, a progressive group that is able to avoid filing tax disclosures by operating as a joint project of Teaching For Change and Rethinking Schools. Due to this arrangement, relatively little is known about the Zinn Education Project’s finances. Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project, however, do share senior staff.

The Zinn Education Project claims to have over 100,000 teachers across the country registered to access its curricular materials and has promoted Teaching Palestine to its followers.

“I mean, it’s downright terrifying,” one parent of a School District of Philadelphia student, where Rethinking School’s pro-Palestinian materials are being used by educators, told the Washington Examiner. “And it seems that their PR machine is either working so well, or the anti-Semitism runs so deep, that all of this is being permitted into schools, and that there is no amount of evil things that can be said about Jews, or Zionists, or Israel that is enough to keep it out of our children’s curriculum.” 

The Washington Examiner obtained a copy of a list of resources Rethinking Schools distributed to educators following a seminar it held promoting Teaching Palestine. One such resource Rethinking Schools referred teachers to was materials produced by the Teach Palestine Project, which collaborated with Rethinking Schools in promoting its Palestinian learning materials.

The Teach Palestine Project, which also evades financial disclosure by operating out of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, holds professional development training for teachers. In a video of one such training obtained by the Washington Examiner, activists with the organization discuss how they instruct educators in Arizona to teach children about Israel’s purportedly brutal border enforcement operations to guide students into opposing conservative border policies in the United States.

Another resource teachers were pointed to was a framework instructing teachers on how to insert pro-Palestinian messages into their classrooms without alerting school district officials or outside interest groups. 

“If you’ve taught controversial curriculum — LGBTQ history and rights, sex-positive sex ed, prison abolition, US imperialism/militarism, anti-racist resistance, reproductive justice — the issues around planning aren’t very different,” the guide reads. “You want to be a courageous educator, but you also want to be strategic and think long-term.”

The guide encourages teachers to employ a variety of strategies to either evade detection or to pressure their school district into allowing them to teach a pro-Palestinian curriculum.

“Is the administration likely to be supportive if you tell them about your plans,” one tip reads. “Or are you better off trying to fly under the radar or growing strong enough as a group to pressure them?”

Additionally, the framework instructs teachers to work with other teachers and even student activists to combat pro-Jewish groups, should the need arise. Students, according to the guide, should be seen by teachers as potential activists who can be inducted into the pro-Palestinian cause if fed the proper information.

“We fear for the future of our children living among these students as their peers as they grow,” another parent in a school district where Teaching Palestine’s materials are being used told the Washington Examiner. “The fact that this is being formally taught within a school is really nothing short of horrifying … We’re having conversations with our kids that not one of us could have anticipated having with our children in 2024 and 2025 about not making it known, making your religion known in certain settings, and having to hide any symbol that would affiliate you to Judaism in situations where things go unsafe in school. It’s really been nothing short of devastating.” 

During the Rethinking Schools webinar where pro-Palestinian education was promoted, panelists accused the United States of funding “genocide” in Israel and shared approaches to teaching students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

“I think it’s crucial that when we teach Palestine, we teach the connection to indigenous people here on our own continent, to the black freedom struggle, and all these different struggles for justice,” said Philadelphia teacher Keziah Ridgeway, one of the panelists. “It’s a great way to connect it and make it understandable for our youth.” Multiple resources promoted by Rethinking Schools encourage educators to link Palestine’s resistance to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ridgeway, who has promoted the use of Teaching Palestine’s materials, was suspended from her job teaching for the School District of Philadelphia after allegedly posting threatening messages directed at Jewish people and has a history of making anti-Israel social media posts. She is also listed as an author of a text called “Teaching Solidarity: The Black Freedom Struggle and Palestine-Israel,” which appears among Teaching Palestine’s list of educational materials.

Teaching Palestine’s classroom media collection contains a number of materials authored by questionable figures as well as those that instruct teachers to put their students through unorthodox lessons.

Palestinian activist and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd is the author of Born on Nakba Day, a poem included in the materials that reflects violence in the region. El-Kurd has faced criticism from a wide array of groups over his alleged glorification of Palestinian terrorism.

“I dare you to look into the eyes of a Gazan child and tell him you tried your best,” El-Kurd said at a pro-Palestinian rally in London during early 2024. “Our day will come. But we must not be complacent. Our day will come, but we must normalize massacres as a status quo.”

While he later claimed that he misspoke when urging the crowd to “normalize massacres,” El-Kurd seemed to endorse going beyond peaceful protest at another point in his speech, calling on his listeners to “engage in tangible actions” as “language alone no longer suffices.”

El-Kurd also praised terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, including Hamas’s Oct. 7 slaughter of 1,200 people, compared Zionists to Nazis, and has expressed support for leaders of various terrorist organizations. 

Other potentially controversial authors included in the Teaching Palestine educational media list included academic terrorism apologist Noura Erakat, Maha Nassar, a professor who has praised U.S.-designated terrorist groups, and Nora Murad, a professor who argued that the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks were justified and filmed herself tearing down posters of Israeli civilians who had been kidnapped by Hamas. 

One lesson included in Teaching Palestine was an activity titled “Israeli Apartheid: A Simulation.” To conduct the exercise, teachers are instructed to divide their students into groups of Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli students are to be given pieces of candy and a degree of authority over their fellow students who have been designated as Palestinians. The children designated as Palestinians, meanwhile, are subject to having their drawings torn up, relegated to small corners of the classroom, and are to have their candy confiscated by the teacher.

The simulation is intended to portray racism in contemporary Israel.

“So you have teachers who are supposed to be educated properly in terms of truth and facts and history, and they are abandoning that for the sake of some kind of activism and invented morality just to teach people what they think and follow that as opposed to anything that’s really grounded in reality or actual living lived history,” one of the parents told the Washington Examiner. “So there’s an irony there, right? Because their whole push is that they’re trying to teach the truth and prevent censorship.”

Much of the money flowing into Teaching For Change and Rethinking Schools to disseminate materials like these is anonymously sourced. A significant chunk of it, according to tax records, comes from community foundations, such as the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, operating donor-advised funds. Donor-advised funds allow wealthy individuals to park assets in accounts held by a charity to, at a later date, be donated at their direction in the name of the charity, effectively concealing the original source of funding. 

Some clues, however, are available as to who is funding these lessons. 

The New Venture Fund and the Tides Foundation, each an arm of a massive Democrat-aligned dark money network, collectively poured more than $230,000 into Teaching For Change and the Rethink Teaching group in 2023, according to tax disclosures. This represented roughly 10% of the two groups’ revenue for that year. 

PHILADELPHIA STUDENTS EXPOSED TO WIDESPREAD ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS

New Venture Fund is one nonprofit in a network of nonprofits managed by the consulting firm Arabella Advisors. Arabella Advisors’ network pours hundreds of millions of dollars every year into both directly supporting Democratic politicians and indirectly supporting them through issue advocacy and grantmaking. The Tides network, meanwhile, played a major role in funding the pro-Palestinian protests that spread across the United States following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. 

Teaching For Change and the Rethink Teaching did not respond to requests for comment.