by Sarah DeBolt Badawi, teacher

Teachers know how to teach hard history. And we know why it’s important to teach it.

Educators in the United States have faced threats, firing and state legal restrictions for teaching ugly chapters from history, for centering the voices of marginalized peoples and for challenging dominant narratives. We have responded by teaching hard history anyway, joining with other educators under banners like #TeachHardHistory and #TeachTruth.

We must do the same for the history of Palestine and Israel. We owe it to our students to help them navigate the past, the present and the future that we will all share.

Since the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel that killed around 1,200 people and took over 200 hostages, Israeli forces, using weapons and other support from the U.S. government, have killed more than 11,000 people in the Gaza Strip, including at least 4,600 children. They have also carried out a lethal military crackdown and supported deadly rampages by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Against a barrage of mis- and disinformation on social media, we have a responsibility to help our students learn the history that brought Israel, Palestine and the world to this moment.

As a teacher, I understand hesitations to discuss the crisis in Israel-Palestine out of fear of complicated questions, raw emotions as well as the fear of being accused of antisemitism. Antisemitism, prejudice and dehumanization of any kind have no place in our schools or our classrooms.

Here are four places in the middle and high school curriculum where we can naturally teach the history of Palestine and Israel — with links to resources that will allow us and our students to provide context, interrupt distortions and hear voices that may have been missing.

World War I and World War II

The “Great War” had massive ramifications for the Middle East that reverberate today.

For an accessible but deep dive into this history, I recommend Al Jazeera’s documentary, World War One Through Arab Eyes. Episode three addresses the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which Britain and France decided how they would divvy up the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, and the Balfour Declaration, a letter to a prominent British Zionist pledging government support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

This resource covers the time before the Mandate for Palestine, which gave Britain administrative control over Palestine between 1923 and 1947. Here are viewing guides for episodes one and three that I have used with my students.

I also recommend The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, by Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University. In this podcast, Khalidi distills key lessons from the book about the many factors that converged in this period with devastating consequences. These include the rise of the Nazis and the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as racist immigration policies in the United States and Great Britain and subsequent postwar guilt and political wrangling among the Allies.

The Choices Program at Brown University has an excellent lesson on the creation of Israel in 1948 based on a compelling mix of primary sources featured here.

This video from Vox tells the story of the violence against and forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians that occurred at that time, an episode which is known in Arabic as the “Nakba” (catastrophe). The video includes first-hand testimony from a survivor of the 1948 massacre in the village of Deir Yassin, where about 110 Palestinian civilians were killed by Zionist paramilitary forces.

Civil Rights Movements — Past and Present

There is a rich history of solidarity between Palestinian and African American civil rights activists based on shared experiences of oppression. In this recent Washington Post piece, Karen Attiah illustrates historic moments when prominent Black Americans, including Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and James Baldwin spoke out for Palestinians.

The Zinn Education Project features two documents produced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1967 after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza.

For another paired-text activity, consider this side-by-side reading of “The New Jim Crow” author Michelle Alexander’s 2019 op-ed “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine” with the 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speech that inspired it, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”

The First Amendment

We can also include teaching about Israel, Palestine and U.S. policy in lessons on the First Amendment.

Thirty-eight states in the U.S. have passed legislation restricting Americans’ right to boycott Israel. The documentary film “Boycott,” produced by Just Vision, tells the story of three “accidental plaintiffs” who ran afoul of such laws in Arizona, Arkansas and Texas and challenged them in court, with varying results.

In this lesson based on primary and secondary sources, students examine the right to boycott as constitutionally-protected free speech in the United States, how it was used against apartheid South Africa, and how it’s been used and challenged in campaigns for Palestinian rights.

In sum, we can and must teach the hard history of Israel and Palestine, including our own country’s role in it. This moment demands nothing less of us.

Sarah DeBolt Badawi is a member of PBS NewsHour Classroom’s National Teacher Advisory Board. She has been an educator for 21 years. Sarah became a teacher because she wanted her students to have a chance to learn the history she hadn’t. She has taught history and social studies at the middle and high school levels, including AP and IB, at schools in the United States, Colombia, and Jordan. She has also been a school administrator and special education teacher. She is the author, for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, of two of the lessons included in this piece, Continuing to Break the Silence: Learning and Reflection on Vietnam, Palestine, and Beyond and Boycotts: Goals, Methods, and Challenges from the U.S. to South Africa to Israel-Palestine. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter/X.

For more on the Israel-Hamas War, see NewsHour Classroom resources here. You may wish to read Student Reporting Labs' Encouraging Empathy and Curiosity in Class Discussion or watch NewsHour's A child psychologist’s advice for talking with kids about the Israel-Hamas war. 

If you'd like to contribute an Educator Voice piece, write to education@newshour.org with your idea.