A year after the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s board of directors voted to develop resources for union members to learn and teach about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that information was quietly released on its members-only website.
“The MTA is making available to its members a variety of materials that introduce multiple perspectives and voices,” Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page and vice president Deb McCarthy said in a joint statement. “The MTA is aware that any recommended resources on this topic will be controversial. The union moved deliberately and with much reflection to assemble materials that members could consider to enrich their own understanding.”
Yet the contents of those materials, shared with me by a union member, make me wonder, again, why the MTA is dabbling in foreign policy.
I ran the list by Noam Weissman, host of the podcast “Unpacking Israeli History” and executive vice president of ConnectED, which creates educational resources on Israel-Palestine. “When I see this, I’m like, ‘Oh this is why we exist,’ ” Weissman told me.
Jany Finkielsztein, a retired MTA teacher who works for the CAMERA Education Institute, which combats anti-Israel bias in education, called the list “a slap in the face to Jewish families and students.”
To be fair, the list includes important links to legitimate organizations with tips about talking to kids about violence and addressing antisemitism and Islamophobia. There are attempts at balance — like offering three different definitions of Zionism. But the list is dominated by Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices, while voices humanizing Israeli experiences or representing a Zionist narrative are minimal.
“It creates a very simplistic history which puts Jews and Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed,” said Barak Sella, a Middle East Initiative fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
For example:
There’s a section on Palestinian art, with a link to 100 Palestinian revolutionary posters with messages like “Zionists F** off” and a Star of David dripping in blood. It links to Visualizing Palestine, a site of posters with messages like “Israel is starving Gaza.” There is no Israeli artwork. A list of documentaries and films is dominated by films from the Palestinian perspective, generally about suffering caused by Israel.
A section on recommended books includes one by a Zionist, Israeli historian Anita Shapira, and four by sharp critics of Israel — Norman Finkelstein, Edward Said, Ilan Pappé, and Rashid Khalidi. (Finkelstein is a particularly controversial figure who has compared Israeli actions to Nazi actions and argued that Jews employ the Holocaust to insulate Israel from criticism.)
There are few resources about Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and its victims but many links about the displacement of Palestinian people at Israel’s founding.
There is much to learn from respected scholars like Said and Khalidi. There is value in hearing Palestinian stories through art and film.
But as Rachel Fish, associate research professor at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, said, the problem is with a list that claims to be balanced but omits historians who have critiqued Said, or Zionist writers like Yossi Klein Halevi or Ilan Troen, or books cowritten by Israeli and Arab scholars.
The American Jewish Committee, in a December report, accused MTA leadership of “promoting measures to bring their own overtly political goals into K-12 classrooms” while encouraging teachers “to embrace a decidedly one-sided narrative concerning the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.”
AJC New England regional director Rob Leikind said these resources fit that rubric. “Much of this is in support of a one-sided narrative that presents Israel as the avatar of settler colonialism and all the crimes that are alleged to flow from it: genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid,” Leikind said.
Ricardo Rosa, MTA’s director of training and professional learning, led efforts to produce the resources. According to AJC’s report, Rosa, a former associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, posted a “free Palestine” image on social media two days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. The Daily Wire reported on other inflammatory statements Rosa has made regarding Israel.
In July, the Massachusetts House and Senate Republican caucuses criticized the union for appointing Rosa, arguing, “Mr. Rosa’s inflammatory statements and participation in anti-Israel activism … demonstrate a clear commitment to a political agenda rather than educational integrity.”
Rosa did not respond to requests for comment. In a letter, the MTA called the GOP lawmakers’ attack “unfounded and uninformed” and Rosa a “respected scholar.”
There is a trend of pro-Palestinian activism among some MTA leaders. In December 2023, the MTA board passed a resolution urging an end to US funding of “the Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
In March, a union webinar for members on anti-Palestinian racism focused on promoting a pro-Palestinian narrative of the conflict. According to a transcript obtained by the editorial board from a concerned parent of public school children, UMass Boston political science professor Leila Farsakh portrayed Zionism as a “colonial settler movement”; former MTA president Merrie Najimy framed the conflict as between Israel, an oppressor, and the Palestinians, the oppressed; and UMass Boston political science professor Heike Schotten referred to Israel’s establishment as “ethnic cleansing.”
Democratic state Senators Rebecca Rausch and Jason Lewis complained to the MTA that the webinar spent two hours “proffering anti-Israel and antisemitic political propaganda,” according to a copy of the letter given to the editorial board.
In December 2024, MTA members proposed requiring the union to divest pension funds from businesses that provide arms or military assistance to Israel. (After debate, the board of directors removed the mention of Israel and voted to divest from all military investments.)
While many MTA members agree with these stances, the efforts alienate some. Nurit Haspel, a UMass Boston computer science professor, told me she’s debated leaving the union. “Our union is just devoting too much time to politics and activism rather than fighting for our rights,” Haspel said.
The union is democratically run, and unions have a history of acting on social justice. But appropriately addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict means ensuring any materials provided to teachers are balanced and vetted.
Shira Schoenberg can be reached at shira.schoenberg@globe.com. Follow her @shiraschoenberg.