California's push for mandatory ethnic studies classes runs into the Israel-Palestine conflict in designing a curriculum

As a first note: I would like to avoid discussing the nitty gritty of the most modern part of the conflict itself here -- that's why I posted this outside of ~news and the megathread there. This article does not particularly focus on the modern part of the conflict, which is also why I edited the title.

I thought this was a really well done article -- it did a great job summarizing the complaints on both sides, while being clear that this is not quite the same as most of the culture-war opposition to teaching controversial topics. I'll present my own thoughts below a few paragraphs pulled out for anyone who wants a 'teaser' before jumping in to the full article (which is an unlocked link)

But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While the name “ethnic studies” might bring to mind a broad exploration of how ethnicity and race shape the human experience, the discipline, as taught in universities, is narrower — and more ideological.

Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and spur students to take action, often drawing analogies across disparate expanses of time and geography. The Palestinian experience of displacement is central to that exercise, and has been compared by some scholars to the Native American experience.

For early scholars and students of ethnic studies, pro-Palestinian activism was also crucial, said Keith Feldman, chair of comparative ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Israel had recently captured Gaza and the West Bank, after defeating Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.

And some ethnic studies scholars have argued that the 1948 founding of Israel, in the immediate wake of the Holocaust, was part of the same general pattern of settler colonialism that brought white Europeans to the Americas and led to the displacement and genocide of Native Americans.

Those frameworks are “central to the ethnic studies approach,” said Dylan Rodriguez, an ethnic studies scholar at the University of California, Riverside.

Ethnic studies is not “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences,” Professor Rodriguez said. “That is a bland form of multiculturalism.”

Instead, the discipline “is a critical analysis of the way power works in societies,” he said.

For those reasons, several ethnic studies scholars said in interviews, the Palestinian cause should be included in high school classes. It was important, they said, to stand in solidarity with Palestinian American students.

For critics, ethnic studies frameworks — such as categorizing Israeli Jews as European settlers — flatten the Jewish experience in ways that are inaccurate and, some argue, antisemitic.

About half of Israeli Jews identify as Mizrahi, meaning they have lived for hundreds or even thousands of years in the Middle East. And some Jews have always lived on the land that is now Israel, before 1948, among a Palestinian Arab majority.

There is a broad range of views in the Jewish community as to whether and when critique of Israel veers into antisemitism. Some draw a line at suggesting that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state.

“It’s not appropriate to teach students that Jews are colonizers and have engaged in, quote, ‘land-grabbing,’” said James Pasch, senior director for national litigation at the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group. “That course content will spread antisemitism throughout our high schools.”

It is genuinely difficult to teach these sort of topics well in a curriculum. It's quite easy to teach a single perspective in summary (the rest of the article goes into some of the early curriculum material that Jewish groups have objected to).

Honestly, the only way I could see to do this right would be to provide a wide array of primarily primary source documents and have students come to their own conclusions; the problem when doing that is, it takes a lot of time, and it means only a very limited number of topics could be covered, and that doesn't seem to be the goal of California's Ethnic Studies courses.

So, what are your thoughts? Is it possible to teach such a difficult topic in grade school in a fair and balanced way? Should it be avoided? Encouraged? Required? The article makes the claim that the Ethnic Studies as an academic field does not merely study ethnicity's effect on the human experience, but does so from an ideological understanding of race and definition of whiteness. Do you agree or disagree that that is the case? If you agree, is it possible or valuable for the field to exist (or be taught) without that prior definition?