San Francisco Unified School District provides resource to social studies and ethnic studies teachers that claims “Israeli terrorism has been significantly worse than that of the Palestinians”; resource defends terrorism against Israel

Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request to the San Francisco Unified School District seeking any emails from board members or statements provided to staff, students, or families regarding the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel. The school district provided PDE with two documents labeled as a memo for high school social studies teachers and a memo for ethnic studies teachers. Both memos are similar and offer resources for teachers to use in their classrooms. The supervisor of the “History-Social Studies/Ethnic Studies Department” appeared to send both memos to staff.

Both memos contain the same list of resources. One resource listed in each memo is to a page of resources on the website TeachMideast. A prominent resource on this page links to an article titled “Terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” from the Middle East Policy Council. This resource is explicitly biased against Israel and accuses Israel of terrorism: “My central argument is that, contrary to the standard mythology, especially in Israel, Israeli terrorism has been significantly worse than that of the Palestinians.” The resource then states that Israel should negotiate with terrorist organizations like Hamas:

In particular, the truth should make it clear that Israel has neither the moral legitimacy nor the national interest to refuse to negotiate with Palestinian organizations that have employed terrorism, particularly Hamas, without whose participation there is no chance for a compromise settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This resource then specifically defends terrorism against Israel:

When Palestinians plant bombs in Israeli cities, they are attacking the citizens of their enemy. This is bad enough. However, when Israel attacked Lebanese towns and cities, it was attacking the innocent citizens of a state that was to a great extent a helpless bystander or victim in an Israeli-Palestinian conflict over which it had no control.