Co-Resisting Anti-Palestinian Racism in Toronto Schools

 

Over the span of two evenings in mid-February, Palestinian, Jewish, and allied community members fighting for equity and fairness within the Toronto school system came out in full force to a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) planning and priorities committee meeting. Their goal? To respond to a concerning agenda item: a flawed and misleading community consultation report on how to address antisemitism in schools, which included a number of recommendations conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, criticism of the state of Israel, and support for Palestinian human rights.

I was one of 44 community members who spoke out against the report during the meeting, and hundreds who wrote and called TDSB trustees and senior staff in advance and in the days after.

As a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors on both sides of my family, I will never be OK with concerns for Jewish community safety being used to justify the oppression of others. It was encouraging to be part of a groundswell of voices rising up to demand that anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia be addressed with the same urgency as antisemitism in Toronto schools.

A core concern that community members raised about the report presented to the TDSB planning and priorities committee in mid-February was its characterization of criticisms of Zionism, the political ideology behind the creation and maintenance of a Jewish national state in Palestine, in the following way: “The use of Settler-Colonial narratives about the State of Israel and the Jewish people as colonisers leads to significant harm and contributes to the systemic erasure of Jewish history and identity.”

This assertion is entirely detached from reality and obscures the ways that Zionism is used to justify and perpetrate anti-Palestinian racism and settler-colonial violence.  (more...)

Co-Resisting Anti-Palestinian Racism in Toronto Schools