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New Book on Palestine for Students!

Sahar Abbasi, deputy director of Madaa Creative Center in Silwan, talk about the current situation.

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.

If you’ve already read Determined to Stay, please take a minute to review it on Good Reads, Bookshop.org, and the MECA Shop Palestine site.

Do you know Free Minds, Free People? It’s an amazing bi-annual conference of radical educators, organizers and youth. This year it will be online throughout the month of July. The last weekend, July 31 and August 1 focus on Ethnic Studies/Transnational Solidarity, with a special concentration on including Palestine in ethnic studies curriculum. On Sunday, we’ll hold a People’s Assembly aimed at building a national organization of educators committed to authentic ethnic studies, with Palestine as a critical component. Sign up here for updates and to register for the conference. We hope to see you there!

Teaching Solidarity

We know you share our outrage at attacks by the Israeli military and settlers against the people of Palestine. And that you join us in expressing our solidarity in every way we can.

This is a particularly critical time to be teaching about Palestine. Don’t hesitate to contact us at the Teach Palestine Project if we can help with curriculum development, resources, or information.

One resource about Sheikh Jarrah is the video My Neighborhood, which is about resistance and solidarity in Sheikh Jarrah and is narrated by a Palestinian youth. For up-to-date information on sheikh Jarrah: #saveSheikhJarrah

Check out our Resources section for more teaching ideas. And check out these Instagrams—@theimeu and @adalahjusticeproject.

The village of Silwan, just south of Jerusalem’s Old City, is at the center of the struggles happening now. Teach Palestine’s co-coordinator, Jody Sokolower, has just published a book for youth about Silwan that should be immediately helpful, Determined to Stay: Palestinian Youth Fight for Their Village. Written with young people in mind, Determined to Stay draws deep connections between the lives of youth in the US and Palestine—from criminalization, forced relocation and buried histories to hip-hop as resistance. You can find out more about the book here.

You can hear Jody read from her book—and also hear Silwani community leader Sahar Abbasi speak about the current situation—on Sunday, May 23, 11 am PT / 2 pm ET. It’s FREE! Register Now! www.mecaforpeace.org/DeterminedToStay.

New Resources

As teachers and students settle into the spring semester, we hope that 2021 will bring more health, more justice, and more peace. This has been a difficult time to be an educator, and many of us are feeling the impact of so many months of trying to support our students, our families, and ourselves.

Despite everything, we’ve made some exciting changes to the Teach Palestine Project and to our website. We’re honored to add Dr. Samia Shoman to our staff as co-coordinator of the project. A Palestinian educator with many years of experience as a high school teacher, Samia co-led our delegation of teachers to Palestine last year.

Samia and I are working with a statewide campaign to ensure that Arab American studies—including Palestine—is in the California Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum. The campaign has faced strong resistance from Zionist forces, but it has helped us build strong relationships with teachers interested in teaching about Palestine throughout the state and beyond. Here’s a link to a thought-provoking and inspiring webinar on the fight for Ethnic Studies with guest speaker Angela Davis!

Samia led a workshop on teaching Arab American studies as part of the campaign. Here are links to the workshop and the resources. You can follow the campaign at the Save Arab American Studies website. Please sign on to the teacher letter!

We just posted new curriculum from San Francisco English teacher Kristia Castrillo. Kristia was part of the Teach Palestine Teacher Delegation in June 2019. She came home and taught an amazing unit focused on the graphic novel Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy Land. Check it out!

We’ve created a new Resources section: Webinars for Teachers. Be sure to check out “The Environmental Impact of Colonization: From Palestine to the US/Mexico Border.” This webinar was the first of three in a collaboration with the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing. It includes invaluable mini-lectures by Jamal Juma’, cofounder of Stop the Wall, the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, speaking from Jerusalem, Palestine; and Amy Juan of the Tohono O’odham Nation, International Indian Treaty Council, speaking from Tohono O’odham land in the US/Mexico border region.

The second webinar in the series, Organizing for Decolonial Ethnic Studies: From Palestine to the US/Mexico Border, will be posted soon. Let us know if you’d like to sign up for the third workshop on March 13.

Featured Curriculum

The Environmental Impact of Colonization:
From Palestine to the US/Mexico Border

October 1, 2020

This webinar for K-12 teachers and teacher educators uses environmental issues as an entry point for pedagogy that compares the ongoing impact of settler colonialism in Palestine to the US/Mexico border region. The emphasis in this first of three webinars is on content knowledge within a decolonial framework.

Copresented by Anita Fernandez and Curtis Acosta from the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing in Tucson, AZ, and Samia Shoman from the Teach Palestine Project at the Middle East Children’s Alliance in Berkeley, CA.

Featured speakers are Jamal Juma’, cofounder of Stop the Wall, the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, speaking from Jerusalem, Palestine; and Amy Juan of the Tohono O’odham Nation, International Indian Treaty Council, speaking from Tohono O’odham land in the US/Mexico border region.

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