Back to the books, NEA

I see that the National Education Association (NEA) had jumped into the Israel discussion.

Even though you weren’t prepared and hadn’t done your homework, I am still glad you are here to join us on the Israel/Jewish-Arab issue.

K-12 educators and school counselors, especially elementary school educators and counselors, have a lot of skills and insight that can be applied to these world affairs. Your files, Google drives, and Pinterest boards are filled with lessons on bullying, sharing, kindness, and respect for others. You teach introductory English, Math, Geography, and History. That is all anyone needs in order to understand the Israel/Jewish-Arab conflict’s context and current affairs. The situation, truly, is elementary.

Here is a professional development scenario to consider:

You are on recess duty and see a few students being picked on by a much larger group of students. It doesn’t matter where the smaller group of students go, they are followed, harassed, and hurt by this much larger group of bullies. Other students on the playground just stand and watch. A few brave kiddos join the smaller group and should be rewarded for that. The ones who aren’t as brave regularly join the bullies, because bullies are loud and scary and make everyone afraid and neurotic. Onlookers make excuses to defend the bullies because it feels safer than standing with the smaller group.

It is immediately and naturally known this bullying culture is a problem, and the small group deserves to be left alone. Even after the bullies are told repeatedly to stop, several restorative circles are held, and the larger group’s movements are restricted for everyone’s safety, the harassment and bullying continues in the forms of name-calling, lying, manipulating, and other menacing behaviors. In short, the harassment is all-cap and non-stop.

What’s worse, now sometimes someone from the smaller group has a bad reaction to this relentless trauma and abuse (and has a history of being severely, violently abused as well) and acts out aggressively. Their lid gets flipped.

Applying what you know from bystander training, the fight-flight response (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) trauma-informed education, and sharing strategies, what would you do? What would you do if you were a new administrator and this was the school culture?

Or, here’s a math/size comparison question:

There are 200 million Arabs living in the countries surrounding Israel. There are at most 15 million (a generous estimate but easier math) Jews worldwide, with about 7 million living in Israel.

Depending on grade level you could ask:
1. Which group is bigger, Jews or Arabs?
2. How many bubbles of 15 units (Jews) can fit into 200 units (Arabs)?
3. What is the ratio, percentage, and fraction of Jews worldwide compared to Arabs?
4. If the region was like a big pie, how big a slice of pie would Jews get based on their size, and how much would be left over for Arabs?
5. If all smaller groups in Arabia/Persia got their own slice of pie like the Kurdish, Yazidi, and Bahai people, how much would still be left over for Arabs/Iranians?

A Geography lesson would be the simplest:

1. Where is the country of Israel?
2. What river and what sea border Israel?
3. How much of the country of Israel fits under a pencil eraser on a classroom globe or map?
4. Color Israel yellow.
5. Color the surrounding Arab countries green.
6. How many pencil erasers fit into the green section?
7. Why do the green countries want to erase the yellow country?
8. Extra credit—How would you explain to a space alien why the green countries want to erase the yellow country?

The civilized way to educate our children and youth is with compassion and inclusiveness. That includes Jews and Israelis, NEA. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a primary, foundational organization in America for Jewish information, just like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a primary organization for African-Americans, as one example. Would you really cut ties with the NAACP, even if you didn’t like how they defended African-Americans? Even if 6000 delegates lined up and told you to?

The Israel/Jewish-Arab conflict is about (Arab) intolerance and (Arab) not sharing, with grossly disproportionate cultural sizes. You wouldn’t stand for that dynamic in your classroom, and for good reason. It’s not fair, it’s disrespectful and dangerous, and it disrupts and poisons the classroom learning environment for everyone.

Uneducated, uninformed, or straight-up racist people are primary fodder for anti-Israel propaganda machines, gone nuclear in the social media age. As the organization for educators, NEA, you have a responsibility to do your due diligence learning facts and protecting smaller marginalized groups trapped in reluctant and undesired culture wars with larger ones.

Consider the actions at the delegate assembly covered in red ink with major revisions necessary. The simple assignment of not being antisemitic is long overdue—thank you for turning that in immediately or risk losing all credit and credibility, not to mention a lot of membership dues.