How Teachers Can Talk About the Israel-Hamas Conflict

While the Israel-Palestine conflict has always been a difficult subject for educators, the recent adoption of policies in some states that limit conversations on topics such as race has added to teachers’ fears about discussing such contested issues, said Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between progressive nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Those concerns notwithstanding, her colleague Mimi Eisen, program manager at the Zinn Education Project, said teachers can seek to have substantive conversations that, for example, explain the differences between Judaism and Zionism, and between Palestinian people and groups like Hamas.