Andrew Saltz

Among Palestinians and anti-Israel activists, the term “resistance” is a euphemism for nationalistic terror and is used to glorify and encourage anti-Israel and antisemitic violence.

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, approximately 2,900 heavily armed Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s border with Gaza. They executed numerous war crimes on civilians, including mass murder, beheadings of children, rape of men and women, torture, kidnappings and mutilation.

Hamas broadcast videos of their butchery on social media, often to victims’ accounts for families to see. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.” As of November 10, 2023, approximately 1,200 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians, were murdered during the attacks. Hamas kidnapped 242 Israelis, including at least 30 children. At least 3,500 people were wounded, many severely.

A terrorist detained by Israel admitted he raped an Israeli woman when he broke into a kibbutz house during the October 7, 2023 attack. In March 2024, a former hostage of Hamas publicly stated she was sexually abused and tortured while in captivity.

For more information on the October 7, 2023 terror attacks, see the Canary Mission page on Hamas.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” is a chant used [00:02:47] to call for the elimination of the State of Israel. It has also been employed by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal to call for the replacement of Israel with an Islamic state. In April 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the chant as antisemitic.

Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture. Zionism is a core part of the identity of most Jews.

In November 2023, after Hamas terrorists murdered nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, SDP offered teachers an anti-Israel professional development course. The curriculum claimed that Israel was carrying out the “colonization of Palestine” and that Israel’s war against Hamas was a “genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.”

The course was titled: “Decolonizing the Curriculum: Brief History of Palestine and the Creation of Israel: Contextualizing the Current Conflict and Genocide.” A summary on the SDP portal said teachers would be “better equipped to have conversations and facilitate lessons with their students” about Israel. The course was listed as "Subject(s): Social Studies/History." After local news sites publicized the course, SDP removed it from the portal.

SDP continued to come under pressure from activist groups to teach anti-Israel material in K-12 classrooms, including groups representing teachers and parents. Two such groups were the Racial Justice Organizing Committee (RJOC) and the Philadelphia Educators for Palestine (PEFP), led by SDP high school teacher Keziah Ridgeway.

RJOC organized anti-Israel “teach-ins” in late 2023 and throughout 2024. RJOC also provided “Educator Lesson Plans” for teachers, listing as a resource the Teach Palestine Project, a pro-terror and anti-Israel teaching resource. In May 2024, PEFP called on SDP to meet six demands. Among them were: “to unequivocally condemn the ongoing genocide waged on the Palestinian people” and “to release a ceasefire resolution [with regard to Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists].”

SDP had been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights since April 2024. In May 2024, a group of over 200 parents filed a complaint against the district. The complaint alleged there was “persistent harassment and bullying of Jewish students” and “inflammatory anti-Jewish and anti-Israel messages on social media and even in the classroom” by teachers and administrators at schools across Philadelphia.