Whose stories do we tell? Israeli-Palestinian tensions polarize a California school district
LOS ANGELES — Robin Gurien was a lone voice at the start of the discord.
Gurien, a communications professor at Cal State Fullerton, stood before Santa Ana Unified school board members last April to share concerns about the district's plans to adopt two new ethnic study courses for high school students. One, under the rubric of world geography, featured lessons on the decades-long struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over land and autonomy.
A proposed outline for the course encouraged students to critically assess the United Nations' 1947 resolution to create a Jewish state in Arab territories then under British control. The board had already approved another ethnic studies class, this one part of the English literature curriculum, that includes lessons on the 1985 assassination of Alex Odeh, a Palestinian American activist killed when a bomb exploded in the Santa Ana office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where Odeh worked as regional director. The FBI labeled the bombing a terrorist attack carried out by "Jewish extremist elements," though no suspects were ever charged.
Gurien worried that students exposed to the lessons would come away with a warped impression of Jews. "The Jewish experience," Gurien said, "is being characterized as violent and extreme."
Santa Ana trustees
