At their “Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly” starting on Wednesday, America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, known for its leftist policies and its staunch support for Democrats, intends to consider two resolutions attacking Israel.
The resolutions accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” urge the United States to “stop arming and supporting Israel,” claim Israel has practiced “the detention and abuse of children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and laud the “Arab population of Palestine” which “has again risen up in a heroic struggle against military repression and ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Israeli state and extreme nationalist forces in Israeli society.”
One of the resolutions explicitly calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Uri Pilicowski opined in The Times of Israel in May 2020, “As it’s currently managed, a Palestinian Authority administered Palestinian State would pose a danger to Israel’s security. A government that promotes and turns a blind eye to terror can not be entrusted to run a state. A Palestinian government would have to include Hamas, a terrorist entity that vows to destroy Israel. This would make a Palestinian state a terror organization.”
New Business Item #29 states:
The NEA will publicize its support for the Palestinian struggle for justice and call on the United States government to stop arming and supporting Israel and Saudi Arabia. … The Arab population of Palestine has again risen up in a heroic struggle against military repression and “ethnic cleansing” by the Israeli state and extreme nationalist forces in Israeli society. The NEA’s support of this struggle will weaken reaction internationally.
New Business Item #51 adds:
The NEA must recognize the existence and sovereignty of Palestine” and urges the NEA to “use existing digital communication tools to educate members and the general public about the history, culture, and struggles of Palestinians, including the detention and abuse of children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Nicole Neily, the founder and president of Parents Defending Education, reacted: “Over the past 15 months, students across the country have been shut out of schools, creating learning deficits that will haunt our kids for a generation. The NEA’s inflammatory and divisive fixation on political issues is further proof that the education of America’s students isn’t a priority for the union. My heart goes out to the Jewish members of the NEA whose union dues are being used to promote anti-Semitic lies about Jews and Israel.”
“Teachers’ unions across the country have come out against Israel and Jews in recent months. Three local unions affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers’ union, passed statements in June condemning Israel as an apartheid state. Federation president Randi Weingarten criticized Jews as being ‘part of the ownership class’ dedicated to denying opportunities to others in an interview earlier this year,” The Washington Free Beacon noted.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in April, Weingarten ripped into Jews who criticized teachers’ unions for impeding the return of children to public schools. She snapped:
American Jews are now part of the ownership class. Jews were immigrants from somewhere else. And they needed the right to have public education. And they needed power to have enough income and wealth for their families that they could put their kids through college and their kids could do better than they have done. Both economic opportunity through the labor movement and an educational opportunity through public education were key for Jews to go from the working class to the ownership class. What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it.