Ivy League professor pushed anti-Israel messages into K-12 schools

Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reports one prominent professor’s role in anti-Israel propaganda in public schools.

In 2011, Brown University’s Choices Program, which develops curriculum on history and current issues for K-12 schools in all 50 states, taught high school students “of the historic Jewish ties to the land that is now Israel.” In 2015, anti-Israel academic Beshara Doumani, then a founding director of Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies, began advising the program—and the materials shifted in tone.

That year, the Choices Program released a revamped version of its unit titled, “The Middle East in Transition: Questions for U.S. Policy.” The unit, which included an acknowledgment  of Doumani’s “invaluable” contributions, provided students with new definitions of “colonialism” and “imperialism,” according to an Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) review of the curriculum materials obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. It also included a map that listed Tel Aviv—not Jerusalem—as Israel’s capital.

Two years later, an updated edition of the same unit went further. Included alongside the map of Middle Eastern capitals was a quiz calling on students to “fill in the missing countries and capitals below.” Students received credit for writing “Israel” next to the listed “Country Capital” of Tel Aviv. The unit also eliminated a section on Israel’s creation, according to the ISGAP review, “instead moving the discussion about Israel’s creation to a few brief paragraphs within the section titled ‘Israel and the Palestinian Territories.'” 

Around the same time, in December 2017, Brown’s Choices Program uploaded videos meant to supplement its Middle East materials. They referred to Israelis as “colonizing people,” argued Palestinians are not “fundamentally anti-Semitic,” and referred to Gazans as “occupied people” who “live for the most part as refugees.” By 2019, the program’s unit on Iran—which previously referred to Hezbollah as a “labelled terrorist organization” and noted Tehran’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map”—instead called Hezbollah a “militant group,” the ISGAP review found.