I'm writing to you today in support of maintaining SAUSD’s current Ethnic Studies: World Geography curriculum, including all content related to Palestine and Israel.

Unlike what opponents of the course claim, the course syllabus provides a balanced and factual overview of historical events. The syllabus’ brief discussion of the conflict rightfully frames the origins of the Palestinian dispossession in its proper historical context as the result of arbitrarily drawn colonial borders at the end of the Second World War.

The same section of the course that discusses the impact of colonial borders on Palestine also mentions similar struggles faced by Kurds and Rwandans. The syllabus also rightfully delves into the historical persecution of Jewish people in Europe, including the tragic history of the Holocaust and Russian pogroms that led to the displacement of millions of Eastern European Jews.

Israel is not being singled out here.

Those opposed to the course take issue with how an article listed in the syllabus describes Israel’s forced removal of Palestinians and the demolition of Palestinian homes as “ethnic cleansing.” They falsely equate this factual description of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to hate and antisemitism. This is simply not the case.

Time and time again, we see how any mention of the plight of the Palestinian people, or any discourse that humanizes Palestinians living under a brutal Israeli occupation for over seven decades, is met with false accusations of antisemitism.

Discussing the Israeli government’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians, from burning down villages in the West Bank to the years-long blockade of the Gaza Strip, does not constitute hate. Conflating legitimate criticism of Israel’s brutality against Palestinians with antisemitism has long been the main tool of Israel's apologists in the U.S. to stifle any such criticism.

Demands by anti-Palestinian groups to erase this information from the curriculum is part of an ongoing effort by Israel and its apologists, over the past 75 years, to deny the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) and erase the Palestinian people, their land, their history, and their existence.

I urge you to reject such unwarranted demands. We can't learn or teach history by politicizing and whitewashing historical facts and injustices. Santa Ana students and all students deserve to learn about the root causes of so many of the past and today's conflicts in order to help solve them and, more importantly, help prevent new injustices and conflicts from happening. We must raise a generation of informed, compassionate, humane, and justice-driven youth. Groups with narrow political agendas should stay out of our students' school curriculum.

I know this will be a fruitful educational experience for Santa Ana students and look forward to similar innovative social science courses being adopted in other Orange County school districts.