I write this essay on the cusp of several holiday traditions. As always, the holiday season can be incredibly painful for many. Loss of loved ones, memories of painful past holidays, undealt with grief, and the yearning for comfort are palpable every holiday season. This year, the added confusion of record-breaking shopping while a genocide rages in Gaza will underscore, for thousands, destabilizing worry and grief. As I write this essay, Israel military forces are forging a new pathway through Northern Gaza, fortifying their structures and further enclosing the thousands of Palestinians who have fled their homes.
As an interdisciplinary scholar, December also brings it the close of several conferences that make November and early December crammed time of travel, presentations, and, at their best, educative experiences.
At one conference in November, a brilliant emerging scholar shared with me: “The room was packed and people were waiting outside. I was surprised and felt well supported. I was surprised [smiling]!” This scholar focuses on the lived experiences of Palestinian youth and shared these words with me Friday morning during a Cultivating New Voices poster session. Cultivating New Voices, funded by the National Council of Teachers of English, is approaching its 25-year old anniversary. This powerful mentoring program includes two-year mentorship for emerging scholars of color from some of the most accomplished literacy scholars in the field.
This moment of joy, of scholarly uplift, of many peoples’ clear desire to learn more was particularly important because that year, NCTE also had in attendance, the openly Zionist organization, Camera, displaying its merchandise in the exhibit hall. The exhibit hall is always a cacophony of tote bags, free gifts, book displays, almost exclusively aimed at NCTE’s prime audience: hundreds and hundreds of K-12 teachers.
Over the previous days, I heard several accounts of sessions that addressed Palestinians’ literacy presentations being recorded through audio, notes, and taking pictures of scholars’s slides. Without context, taking notes, snapping pictures of slides can seem to be a simple, apolitical act of keeping pace with exciting and innovative work. And it can also be surveillance and a pathway to doxing.
Context matters immensely.
The presence of Camera, an openly Zionist organization that promotes books about Israel and condemns any books that tell provide Palestinian stories, at a major literacy conference was happening in a time and place where similar acknowledgments and silences are being played out every day. More than one literacy scholar said to me, “this is not who we are.” I was immediately reminded of those same words the first time Donald Trump was elected to be President, then said in the context of a teacher education faculty meeting. I said then, and caution now: I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
The strong alliance between the United States and Israel is much longer and more deeply entrenched than the Congressional Research Service’s claim that Israel has been at war with Hamas, deemed a terrorist organization also linked to Iran. There is no mention of Palestinians lives ended by months of uninterrupted bombing of Palestine, nor any detail about U.S. financial ties to those weapons. Students have been arrested, expelled, physically attacked by law enforcement, and people who have openly identified themselves as neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and aligned with Zionism. And there are many people of the Jewish faith who do not espouse Zionism, who are open critics of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. There are also many everyday people and experts who know that many regions of the world are routinely destabilized by labels of terrorism.
If your news feed is primarily from mainstream media, you would know almost none of this network of violence over a settler nation and Palestine, what historian Robin D. G. Kelley has referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison.
If your K-12 education was based in the United States, you are highly likely to know about the Holocaust, the attempted elimination of Jewish peoples in Germany and some other European nations. You are unlikely to have learned of Germany’s explicit moves to deal with the death, grief, and national dedication to teaching this history in order to avoid its fomenting again. You are also unlikely to have learned anything about Palestine. You are also unlikely to know that anti-semitism and Islamaphobia have been on sharp rises, but are not interchangeable realities. University presidents have been called to Congress to account for the lack of attention to anti-Semitism while also calling on law enforce to destroy student encampments protesting the ongoing genocide in Palestine, as detailed by Kelley in an exhaustive essay entitled “An Unholy Alliance.” Kelley wrote, “Between April 25 and May 2, UCLA experienced the worst episode of both anti-Semitic and anti-Palestinian/Islamophobic/racist violence in the university’s century-long history.”
This social and political context of education is crucial to understanding what makes the presence of a Zionist organization whose clear education agenda is to forward zionism and condemn any text that recognizes Palestine overtly dangerous. Miseducation about the history of the Holy Land, back to its seizure by the British Empire in 1917 is already rampant. Condemning books and surveilling school curricula for the sole forwarding of zionism is rife with propaganda.
I visited Camera’s book in the exhibit hall, where bookmarks, catalogs of approved children’s and young adult books, and free books were on offer. I was, in essence, trying to reckon directly with the surveillance.
I had questions for the person representing Camera.
I asked about the purpose of Camera. I asked why books that mentioned Palestine were condemned . I was told that anyone can have a booth, and Palestinian organizations could do the same thing. But…I argued, there is a massive power difference, and resources to design, supply, and host such a booth is deeply different endeavor when fighting for life under bombings everyday. I also mentioned that there are no longer any schools, for young people or adults in Palestine.
Response: there is no power difference.
I blinked, and then continued: “There is a close bond, decades old between Israel and the United States. Did you read the two announcements that the Biden administration posted after October 7th and on November 20, 2023 after 105 civilian hostages were released, yet in neither case was any accounting of Palestinian lives, lack of access to food, potable water, and healthcare mentioned.”
Response: “Oh, no, I didn’t know that. I will read that. You are a professor at [takes a picture of my conference badge which does not identify me as a professor], so you much know much more than I do. I said “I know about some things, and you are representing this organization, so I am only asking questions to you because of your affiliation.” She asked me if, with my brown skin, I come from ‘someplace close to Arab countries.’ I refused to answer that. To my senses, it was a question about legitimacy and an attempt to annotate legitimacy.
I then asked, then, “on what basis do you ‘monitor’ classroom materials – what informs that?” She me told that Camera never actively looks for content; it is all referred to them by parents and teachers. I said/sighed: “that doesn’t answer my question of how the monitoring is conducted.” She repeated, but you are a professor, and you won’t even tell me about your lineage.”
This exchange was not a quid pro quo: I would not tell this person about what they termed my lineage in exchange for further detailing of the surveillance that Camera does of school-based curricula and how they curate their list of problematic books. In the most rudimentary definitions of transaction, the scale and spread here does not fall within the boundaries of transaction.
False Equivalencies
I said a few times, “thank you for your time. I am going to leave now,” and she asked several more questions about my personal life (collapsing structural violence into personal stories is also a tactic). When I again thanked her sand said more firmly, “I am leaving now,” She said, “well, we can agree to disagree, can we not?”
I replied: “No, I do not agree to disagree because that would mean that we simply have different opinions when the indisputable reality is that there are facts, facts of violence that is offered to the world to witness, from Palestinians experiencing violence first-hand as well celebrations from some members of the Israeli Defense Ministry. I will not pretend that skewing and erasing facts for the purpose of maintaining a settler state is simply a difference of opinion.” I affirmed that the history and legacy of Jewish peoples across many regions must taught through other frames than the Holocaust, but that is not equivalent to assembling pro-Zionist literature and functionally erasing long-standing Palestinian lives and ways of being.
I walked away from this interaction being reminded strongly that there are never simply two sides to any story. I also was reminded that globally and locally contradictory, purposefully confusing and confounding policies and practices are used to frustrate people so they tune out and turn to something easier. I walked away, knowing fully and gratefully that my attempt to match surveillance with surveillance was an utter failure.
Any educator, any organizer worth their mettle meets people where they are, but not unrelentingly nor without a grounded reason. Justice, even the embarrassingly low bar of ceasing daily bombings, requires many kinds of actions. As I was unwittingly creating the very structure of two-sided transaction, there were hundreds of teachers, researchers, and young people wearing keffiyehs and other clothing that shows solidarity with Palestinian peoples at NCTE that day. There are many ways of engaging with and intervening on normalized violence and erasure. We need all of them.
As a professional educator, I worry how Camera’s slogan, “Because what’s taught in the classroom shapes America” flirts so closely with facile narratives of this country that persist in this settler colony’s schools. It’s confounding to witness two settler colonies speak to each other and through each other, rhyming their shared agendas of manifest destiny.
I am troubled by the problematic surveillance of school curricula, the claim of being a passive recipient of materials while openly promoting Zionist propaganda. As my colleague and teacher, bri rodriguez reminded me, in El Salvador, to name just one example, surveillance of curriculum and pedagogy was documented to create a path for crimes against ‘the state,’ for criminalization, for exile, for the stripping of agency. The dozens of school district, state-level, and federal moves to make it illegal to be human and trans, to strip curricula of Black history, and to criminalize teachers’ pedagogical moves to teach freedom are not new, but they are dangerously bolstered by the rise of fascism globally.
For thousands of people, this holiday season, like any other, will not be soothed by purchasing more stuff. I remember what my friend, Thomas Nikundiwe, modeled for me and everyone in his life: work, love, and laugh every day. I think Thomas would be just fine with making room for sadness and disappointment this year. He would never want me to build a house and live in disappointment because we know all too well what happens when grief and sadness are ignored. They become something else, something much less honest and much more dangerous.
This holiday season, I will be checking in on many, as they have checked in on me. This season, one of my book choices will be “Code Name: Butterfly” by Ahlam Baharat, translated by Nancy Roberts. You will have to look hard to find this on amazon, but you can access it easily via Neem Tree Press’s website. This book made Camera’s list of problematic books. To me, Butterfly, as so many young adult protagonists do in YA fiction, narrates the confusion of hypocrisy, making sense of contradictions, and the ways that love, global violence, and dreaming are in the smallest moments of every day. It teaches us how to be with problems so that we do not embody problems.
Leigh Patel 