As progressive educators who oppose racism and settler colonialism in all its forms, we write to express our unequivocal support for Palestinians as they struggle to overcome military occupation, displacement and apartheid. In just 21 days, Israeli airstrikes murdered 75 children, damaged 50 schools across the besieged Gaza Strip, injuring 550 children and leaving 41,897 young Gazans without an education. If, as Paulo Freire writes, "education is the practice of freedom," then there is no doubt that Palestinian freedom is under attack. As US-based teachers, we have a responsibility to oppose the $3.8 billion in military aid that Israel receives from our government, largely used to ethnically cleanse and colonize Palestinians and their children.

While the mainstream media continues to present the loss of Palestinian life, land, and infrastructure suffered over the last week as a conflict between two sides—we maintain that this is not a "conflict." There is no symmetry of power or military. This is apartheid and persecution. The recent reports by Human Rights Watch and the largest Israeli human rights organization B'tselem are only the latest to document this truth. As bell hooks reminds us, "teaching to transgress" forms of oppression means to be living examples of our commitment to resisting politics of domination, racism, sexism, and classism–all of which are practiced against Palestinians under Zionism. 

Our concern also extends to the suppression of support for Palestinian liberation in the US academy and K-12 schools, where scholarly criticism of Israeli human rights violations or calls to support Palestinians are increasingly equated with antisemitism and even forbidden by law. As critical and engaged pedagogues, we reject the toxic binary discourse that frames Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom as opposing causes. Jewish activists have long stood hand in hand with Palestinians and their allies in opposing Zionism and calling for an end to Israel's atrocities. Activists from numerous and intersecting communities, including Edward Said, Angela Davis, Sylvia Marcos, Noam Chomsky, Desmond Tutu, Amy Goodman, Cornel West, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Huey P. Newton, have denounced the brutal Israeli occupation and called for Palestinian liberation. 

We believe that teachers can play a significant role in the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. We must keep pushing past the limits of progressive pedagogies and help our students develop imaginations that can envision an end to the occupation and a future in which Palestinians, and all those in Palestine, live and thrive in freedom and dignity. 

As a first step, we commit to enacting the following in our classrooms and on our campus: 

• Highlighting Palestinian scholarship on Palestine in syllabi, course work, and in our scholarly and community collaborations. 
• Consulting with Palestinian scholars and community members when designing and implementing project-based learning for our students on questions of social justice, and particularly on the Palestinian struggle for liberation.  
• Restoring the history of Palestine in the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum as originally intended by the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Advisory Committee
• Centering Indigenous/Palestinian epistemologies in teaching and drawing links to intersectional oppression and transnational liberation movements.