The Power of Critical Teacher: About Palestine & Israel

Jeff Edmundson

Teaching Palestine:
Lessons, Stories, Voices
Edited by Bill Bigelow, Jesse Hagopian, Suzanna Kassouf, Adam Sanchez and Samia Shoman
Rethinking Schools, 2025, 229 pages. $34.95 paperback.

TEACHERS ARE AT the forefront of the struggle over Palestine. Daily, many risk their jobs by helping students see beyond the distortions pushed by the dominant narrative about Israel — and those teachers do important political work by teaching students to think critically about both their own world and Palestine.

Both a great example of, and a tool set for, this work is the new book Teaching Palestine, edited by a group of educators from the teacher collective Rethinking Schools, which has published groundbreaking work on teaching by teachers for several decades now.

The book originated with a 2024 issue of Rethinking Schools, which sold out so quickly that it showed a real demand among teachers for help in teaching the topic.

Teaching Palestine is nominally a curriculum book, but it’s much more: it’s a guide to critical teaching, a model of thinking with empathy, a resource book. And, while it is primarily for use with middle and high school students, there are several pieces that offer suggestions for books and approaches for teaching elementary students.

Teaching Palestine is a collage, not a simple narrative or a sequence of lessons. Each chapter is composed of articles written by different authors, ranging from essays to poems to specific lesson plans. As such, it respects teachers as decision makers, who can choose what will fit into their particular teaching situation.

The book opens with a chapter inviting teachers to consider why it is important to teach about Palestine. Next, it offers a variety of ways to teach the history of Palestine and Israel, emphasizing the importance of extending that history to well before 1948 — to the control of the region by the Ottomans and the British occupation, including a lesson that offers multiple perspectives on the complex history of Zionism from pogroms to Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and forward.

This is followed by a chapter on Gaza, focusing on the experiences of Palestinians in Gaza, both before and since the events of October 7, 2023. This segues well into a chapter investigating the argument that Israel is an example of settler colonialism and of apartheid, with some particularly powerful lessons that invite students to experience, explore and evaluate the concepts rather than simply lecturing.

Chapter 5, “Challenging Zionism and Anti-Semitism” is in fact primarily about Zionism, with only a little to say about anti-Semitism.

Chapter 6 looks at the multi-faceted history of solidarity between Palestinians and Black liberation in the US. A final chapter offers still more resources for teaching, including an excellent “Poetry Teaching Guide” by Linda Christensen for many of the poems in the book.

Critical Pedagogy

What’s essential about the book — and vastly different from other “curriculum books” — is that it is shaped by critical pedagogy, the approach pioneered by Brazilian radical educator Paulo Freire. Freire understood that how you teach is just as important as what you teach. That is, pedagogy is political.

Freire criticized conventional education as “banking education” — the teacher deposits information and then withdraws it. Banking education teaches students to be passive, obedient and silent, and thus reinforces hierarchy — even if the content of the teaching is progressive.

In contrast, critical pedagogy, or critical teaching, encourages students to think, to question, to envision a more just society.

Freire often referred to his approach as problem-posing education. That is, through dialogue, open-ended questions and invitations to examine students’ own experience, critical pedagogy encourages students to see the world anew.

Teaching Palestine does this in a myriad of compelling ways. One teaching idea offers the poem “The Prison Cell” by Mahmoud Darwish, then invites students to list some things that imprison them. As students share their writing with each other, there is potential to learn about their own world, as well as to connect their lives to those living much different lives.

Or consider a lesson idea that investigates the laws of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by first presenting some actual laws, then providing some situations of Israeli forces confronting Palestinians, with students being asked to decide whether the actions are legal under Israeli law.

The lesson hits its punchline by then asking students to decide if the totality of the laws constitutes apartheid, as defined by the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

This is key to critical pedagogy — when there is not a right answer, but a question posed that students can reason out for themselves, they learn empowerment rather than obedience.

Independence or Catastrophe?

Another lesson idea, “Independence or Catastrophe? Teaching 1948 through Multiple Perspectives,” by Samia Shoman, provides students with contrasting narratives of the 1948 war and the establishment of Israel.

She asks them to not only contrast the narratives, but to ask questions, work with other students, and eventually come up with their current understanding of what actually happened.

From my experience, it is remarkable how engaged students become when they are offered multiple points of view on a topic and invited to construct an answer. And this is Shoman’s experience as well; she notes that “Students stayed after class, came in after class, and hung out after school to discuss the situation.” (45)

Critical teaching is also modeled in the forms of assessment. You won’t find any quizzes or simple essays requiring students to disgorge what they have memorized; students are asked to show what they have learned through story, poetry, art and personal writing.

I must emphasize another attraction of the book — its use of poems, stories and pictures, Teaching Palestine is determined to treat Palestinians as more than victims, but as people like any other.

They have hopes, rich lives and small moments of beauty, as in a lovely prose poem (by Naomi Shihab Nye) about sharing sugar cookies and kindness with a woman waiting for a delayed flight or a photo of Gazan children setting a world record for kite-flying.

Suppression

Of course, teaching with any sympathy for Palestinians is subject to enormous pushback, and the more sympathetic the greater the reaction. When the Portland, Oregon teachers’ union made some critical lessons available, it was pushed to modify the posting after the local pro-Israel forces got hysterical.

One lesson from the book (“Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel,” by Bill Bigelow, which focuses on the history of Zionism) was specifically banned in one Portland high school.

The President of the Portland-area Jewish Federation recently wrote a column for The Times of Israel (5/16/2025) noting its success at “keeping this propaganda out of our schools.”

He complained, regarding a local workshop with Teaching Palestine, that it contained “outright falsehoods about the history of the conflict and misleading ‘half-truths.’” Consistent with much pro-Israel commentary, he failed to note a single specific falsehood or half-truth.

Teachers around the country have been forced to take down Palestinian flags or other shows of support for the beleaguered people of Gaza, or even fired for wearing a “Free Palestine” pin. Nonetheless, teachers are taking the risk of teaching to balance the relentless apologia for Israel that dominates the national media.

Despite the book’s many merits, there are some points to question. One is the emphasis on Zionism, though more in the essays for teachers than in the lessons.

While the book necessarily and accurately looks at the history of Zionism as it leads up to the founding of Israel (Chapter 2), it prefers to explain Israeli behavior in the present through Zionism rather than the actions of a rogue apartheid state.

For example, one piece quotes a teacher saying that supporting Palestine means “rejecting Zionism’s attempt to say that the only way Jewish people can be safe is through militarized violence.” Is it Zionism or Israel that is saying that? I would think that it’s Israel dropping bombs on Gaza.

Yes, Zionism is the originating political ideology, but what is gained by targeting a belief system that is easily conflated with antisemitism by supporters of Israel? While much of that conflation is done in bad faith, a great deal of the honest mainstream — especially Jewish — resistance to justice for Palestine is the belief that it encourages anti-semitism at home and a threat to erase Jews in Israel. Perhaps a greater focus on the actions of the state of Israel would defuse some of that opposition.

Certainly, there is room for a discussion of anti-Zionism as opposition to a Jewish state, but doesn’t that relate more to the question of solutions — as in whether one supports a one-state vs. two-state solution?

In a lesson on what political structure should exist in the region, it would be appropriate to question Zionism as part of a debate over whether there should be a multi- or non-religious entity vs. a Jewish state, or whether to accept a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one.

But simply to start with anti-Zionism is to presume that the only answer is a non-religious state. Indeed, it is interesting that there are no lessons or essays focused on the question of solutions, other than a brief mention.

In a similar vein, the book — again, primarily in the essays — includes repeated assertions that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.

There is one brief teaching idea (100) that suggests students be asked to evaluate whether events in Gaza meet the UN definition of genocide, but otherwise it is simply asserted. For a book intended to draw in a wide range of teachers, it seems like more unnecessary rhetoric that may put off otherwise sympathetic educators.

Overall, though, as a (now-retired) teacher and teacher educator whose practice was deeply influenced by critical pedagogy, I am impressed by the rich and humane way that the authors and editors have created this book. That very richness makes it also a book of value to those outside of schools.

After all, thoughtful activism, like good teaching, is at least partly about helping people reach more complex understandings — by posing questions, going beyond simple answers, and connecting people’s own lives to the issues in the larger world.

Thus, while Teaching Palestine is a valuable book for educators, it should be an inspiration as well for those who want to know more about Palestine and Israel — and about good teaching. Most readers will learn nuances of history they didn’t know, pedagogy they probably never experienced, and literature they haven’t read. They will find insights every time they dip into the pages of this brave and pathbreaking book.

September-October 2025, ATC 238