Activists Aim to Hijack Teachers Union with Antisemitism
As July becomes August and the new school year approaches, Americans shouldn’t miss what transpired in Philadelphia earlier this month at the of the country’s largest teachers’ union. Radical members of the National Education Association (NEA), revealing their likely strategy for the fall, introduced several “” designed to teach and promulgate hatred toward Jews and Israel.
The NEA is the and in the United States, representing approximately education professionals nationwide. Members elect nearly 9,000 delegates most of whom attend a four-day convention each year to debate and vote on goals and priorities, including “new business items”, or NBIs.
At least 50 delegates present at the convention must sponsor an item for it to be on the floor. If passed, NBIs require the NEA to take a specified action for one year.
For the 2024 convention, activists successfully submitted for debate that seek to attack Israel’s economic foundation, deprive it of the means of self-defense, and suggest Israel is an illegitimate state that should be isolated and eliminated.
One resolution (NBI 8) the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, a global antisemitic movement that aims to weaken Israel economically, and Hamas for its actions on October 7. The resolution encourages the propagation of pro-BDS materials to the NEA’s membership and aspires to align these efforts with “labor movement organizing” and “student activism” in the United States. The co-founder of the BDS campaign, Omar Barghouti, that if the BDS mission succeeds, there will be no state of Israel.
Several resolutions also promote efforts to deprive the only liberal democracy in the Middle East of what it needs to defend its people. That’s particularly concerning for a country roughly the confronting enemies on its doorstep. One measure (NBI 9) aims to cut off Israel’s defensive lifelines, urging the NEA and other trade unions to “pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the US, to stop funding it.”
, an avowed affiliate of the Equal Opportunity Now/ () Caucus and , sponsored a similar resolution (NBI 50). A 2023 election flyer associated with her caucus its candidates “are committed to building integrated, militant, mass action.” Kappner history and English to 8th graders in the Oakland Unified School District.
Another measure, (NBI 74) sought to stigmatize support for Israel by having the NEA publish a list of government officials who have accepted donations from groups supporting Israel. Sobia Sheikh, the item’s sponsor, shared material on social media including memes declaring that Israel harvests Palestinian organs and a link to a Palestinian event led by an Islamic cleric who claimed October 7 never happened.
Finally, the activists sought to protect themselves from accusations of antisemitism, even if their bigotry was plain to see. NBI 80 that the union legitimize anti-Zionism by recognizing it as distinct from antisemitism. Yet the proposal’s definition of anti-Zionism, which entails “opposition to any Jewish state in the Middle East," means denying Jews the same right of self-determination that the activists demand for Palestinians and other Arabs.
Opposing Israel’s existence means supporting the destruction of the only majority Jewish country on the planet and home of approximately Jews, depriving them of the sanctuary established in the wake of the Holocaust. “In a world with 56 Muslim nations and 103 Christian ones, there is only one Jewish state, Israel, which constitutes one-quarter of one percent of the land mass of the Middle East,” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks in a 2016 keynote address in the European Parliament, “And yet, Israel is the only one of the 193 member states of the United Nations that has its right to exist regularly challenged with one state, Iran, and many, many other groups committed to its destruction.”
While the efforts of these antisemitic activists to co-opt the NEA are deeply concerning, the convention wound up and ended abruptly due to an internal staff which delayed most formal debate and left most NBIs in procedural limbo. But dismissing the convention as a sideshow would be a mistake, regardless of how members end up voting on the NBIs.
The measures these delegates pursued are remarkably aligned with the anti-Israel and antisemitic agendas of the Islamic Republic of Iran and terror groups such as Hamas. Yet the developments in Philadelphia are not some nation-state or terrorist threat far away. The NBIs introduced at the NEA convention offer a disturbing preview of the political and cultural warfare campaign that extremists plan to deploy in our neighborhood classrooms this fall. Parents who want to ensure a fact-based education for their children should speak up if their schools become targets for this kind of propaganda.
