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Vows to My Homeland

10 min.
Shoruq and MECA
Arabic with English subtitles.
Shoruq, a cultural and community center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem, took Palestinian youth to visit their ancestral villages. Sarah Faraj was one such youth, and her livestream of her visit is seen by Aya, a teenager living in Gaza. Aya asks Sarah to visit her ancestral village, Al Jura, located a few miles north of the Gaza Strip. Ayat surprises her grandmother, Um Nabeel, with a video call with Sarah, who takes them on a live virtual tour of Al Jura, the village Um Nabeel calls home and refuses to forget.

Would you like a class set of a book about Palestine?

As attacks on anti-racist education escalate across the country, we’re happy to be able to share a couple of pieces of good news: We’re excited to be able to offer you a free resource for teaching about Palestine! We’ve received funding to provide at least 15 teachers with class sets of Determined to Stay: Palestinian Youth Fight for Their Village, by Teach Palestine Project Co-Coordinator Jody Sokolower. Grounded in an Ethnic Studies framework, Determined to Stay centers the voices of Palestinian youth and their families, and makes connections between Palestine and issues critical to youth in the US, including losing their homes, forced separation of families and hip-hop as resistance. It was…

New Tools for Teaching Palestine

Dear Teach Palestine Project family, Although this has been a rough fall to be a teacher—all the pedagogical, emotional, and physical stresses of teaching while still in the midst of a pandemic—we hope you’re finding joy in being back in the classroom with students and that you’re staying healthy. The right-wing attacks on teaching Palestine, Ethnic Studies, Black Lives Matter, and Critical Race Theory have been horrifying. We’re working with educator activists across the country to organize a more united approach, and we’ll keep you posted as that develops. Let us know what’s happening in your area! We’d love to talk and connect you with organizing efforts in your area if that…

Israeli Troops Destroy Palestinian Schools in the Jordan Valley

October 25, 2021, Israeli occupation forces raided Al-Maleh school in the northern Jordan Valley and demolished a new building under construction. The Al-Maleh school was built at the end of 2020 as part of the Right to Education Campaign. The small school has only four classrooms, filled with kindergarten and elementary students from Khirbet Al-Maleh and the neighboring communities. To increase the capacity of the school MECA partnered with Stop the Wall Campaign to construct one more classroom and a school clinic that Israeli occupation forces demolished and confiscated. Last week, we visited Al-Maleh and the school children brought their books and signs to a protest demanding their right to education. Please stand with…

Defend CRT and Ethnic Studies! Join our People’s Assembly!

The current attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) are a terrifying indication of the rabid racism of the right wing. CRT isn’t an abstract idea for graduate students. Authentic Ethnic Studies, all anti-racist education, is based in CRT. When elementary school teachers have their students write counter-narratives about the strengths of their communities, they’re teaching CRT. When middle school teachers compare “Manifest Destiny” in the US to the “Promised Land” in Israel as ideologies of settler colonialism, they’re teaching CRT.

So we have to fight for ethnic studies, including Palestine, and CRT in the same breath. And we need a united strategy and organizing to do that!

In coalition with Save Arab American Studies and the Free Minds, Free People conference, we're launching a National Liberated Ethnic Studies Coalition, and we hope you will join us in the fight against rightwing, Zionist attacks on education!

New Book on Palestine for Students!

We hope that you are about to have a chance to relax and recuperate from an immensely challenging school year.

The past couple of months have been intense. We’ve seen the escalation in both resistance and repression in Palestine, and an explosion of solidarity across the United States and the rest of the world.

The current round of demonstrations throughout Palestine was spurred by mounting Israeli efforts to expel long-time Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan in Jerusalem. There’s never been a more important time to understand and teach about what’s happening in East Jerusalem. Determined to Stay: Palestinian Youth Fight for Their Village is the story of Silwan, and it’s written with middle and high school students in mind.

If you missed the book launch for Determined to Stay, check out the recording here. In addition to Jody talking about the book and reading a few excerpts, you’ll hear from Sahar Abbasi, deputy director of Madaa Creative Center in Silwan, talk about the current situation.