Anti-Israel curriculum is becoming mandatory in Canadian schools.

The trainings are billed as "anti-Palestinian racism" — even though Palestinians are not a race, and the curriculum is far more anti-Israel and antisemitic than it is "pro-Palestinian."

photo generated by AI for illustration purposes

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a lawyer in Toronto.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

---

In April 2022, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association published a report called “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations.“ It was the first formal attempt to define so-called “anti-Palestinian racism” as a distinct category of discrimination. The report was allegedly produced in consultation with Palestinian community organizations, so-called “anti-racism” academics, and activists across Canada.

Within two years, the concept had been adopted by the Toronto District School Board, mandated in training for over 8,000 teachers in Hamilton, a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario, and embedded in equity frameworks across Ontario.

That is remarkable institutional velocity for a concept that didn’t really exist before 2022. It is worth understanding how that happened, because the speed of adoption tells you something important about the machinery that was already in place.

But first, let’s read it.

The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association’s description of “anti-Palestinian racism” is “a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” On its face, that sounds like something most decent people could get behind. Nobody should be silenced for who they are. Nobody should be dehumanized.

But the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association report lists specific forms that “anti-Palestinian racism” apparently takes. These are the categories that matter, because these are the categories that get operationalized in school board policies, equity training, and complaint mechanisms. These are the categories that determine what a teacher in Hamilton or Toronto can and cannot say in a classroom. So let’s walk through them carefully.

First is “Nakba denial.” This includes “claims that there are no such people called Palestinians,” “denial of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to establish the state of Israel,” and “rejecting the inalienable rights of Palestinian refugees including the Palestinian right of return.”

Notice what’s packed into that last reference. The Palestinian “right of return” is one of the most contested political demands in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It refers to the claim that descendants of Palestinians who left or were expelled in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (which the Arabs started) have the right to return to their ancestors’ homes inside what is now the State of Israel.

If implemented, it would fundamentally alter the demographic composition of the Jewish state. This is obviously a non-starter for Israelis. Entire peace processes have collapsed over it. But under this framework, if you even question the right of return as a practical policy matter (which it is very much not), you are apparently engaging in “Nakba denial.” You are an anti-Palestinian racist.

Next is failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people. This includes “denying the settler-colonization of Palestine” and “erasing Palestinian ancestral and present-day ties to their land.”

Here the framework does something clever: It adopts the settler-colonial analytical lens not as one way of understanding the conflict, but as the correct or only way. If you believe the conflict is better understood as a clash between two peoples with legitimate historical claims to the same land, you are wrong, and you can just stand there in your wrongness and be racist. If you believe that Jews are indigenous to Israel, which is the mainstream position of Jewish theology, history, archaeology, identity, and reality, and you believe this complicates the claim that Israel is a “settler-colonial” project, you are “failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people.” You are an anti-Palestinian racist.

Then there is erasing human dignity of Palestinians. This includes “excluding or smearing those who support or participate in Palestinian movements” including “boycott movements.” If you oppose the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel on principled grounds, believing it to be a movement aimed at delegitimizing Israel rather than achieving Palestinian rights, or as a movement with antisemitic roots, you are potentially erasing Palestinian human dignity. You are an anti-Palestinian racist.

There is also defaming Palestinians and their allies. This includes “claiming Palestinian movements are motivated by hate or antisemitism.” In other words, if you look at a chant, a rally, a political movement, and you conclude in good faith that it has crossed the line from legitimate advocacy into antisemitism, saying so is itself a form of anti-Palestinian racism. The framework preemptively delegitimizes the very accusation it is most likely to provoke. “From the River to the Sea”? It is racist to suggest that this actually means pushing the Jews out of the entire land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “Globalize the Intifada”? Not the blow-up-buses-and-nightclubs Intifada of course! The more peaceful, civic, let’s-sit-around-and-debate-the-ideas Intifada.

Read those categories again.

What you are looking at is not an “anti-racism” framework. It is a political platform dressed in the language of “anti-racism.” And the dressing is the point, because it’s hard to argue against something that calls itself “anti-racism” without looking like you are arguing for racism. Otherwise, you’re a racist. See?

The “anti-Palestinian racism” framework wasn’t developed in a vacuum. It was developed as a direct response to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which Canada adopted in 2019. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association report discusses the Alliance explicitly and argues that it is being used to suppress Palestinian voices. The entire architecture of “anti-Palestinian racism” is designed to be effectively deployed against the Alliance’s definition in institutional settings.

The two frameworks do not coexist; they cancel each other out. Where the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance says that denying Jewish self-determination can be antisemitic, “anti-Palestinian racism” says that affirming Israeli sovereignty while questioning Palestinian claims is “anti-Palestinian racism.” Where IHRA tries to draw a line between criticism and bigotry, “anti-Palestinian racism” erases that line by classifying the very accusation of antisemitism as itself a form of racism.

That isn’t an accident, but the design.

There is an even more fundamental issue with the “anti-Palestinian racism” framework that gets remarkably little attention: It treats “Palestinian” as a racial category.

Palestinians are a national group. They now have a cultural identity, a historical narrative, political aspirations, and a diaspora. But a national group is not a race. Canadians are not a race. Ukrainians are not a race. Israelis are not a race. When we say “anti-Black racism” or “anti-Indigenous racism,” we are talking about discrimination rooted in perceived racial characteristics and centuries of racialized oppression. We are talking about something that can’t be separated from the person who experiences it.

Palestinian identity, however, is inseparable from a political context. To be Palestinian — like the Lebanese-born founder of Palestinian nationalism, Ahmad Shukeiri, or the Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat — is, among other things, to hold a set of claims about land, sovereignty, refuge, and justice. Those claims can be heard and debated. But when you racialize a political identity, you do something specific: You make it impossible to disagree with the political claims without being accused of racism against the people who hold them.

This isn’t a small thing, but the whole ballgame.

If “Palestinian” is a racial category, then disagreeing with the complicated Palestinian narrative of 1948 is not a historical argument. It is racism. Supporting Israel’s right to exist as a democratic Jewish state is not a political position. It is racism. Questioning the characterization of Israel as a “settler-colonial” project isn’t an intellectual disagreement. It is racism.

A teacher who mentions that Israel has Arab members of parliament isn’t providing context, but giving cover for apartheid. A student who writes a book report on Exodus isn’t completing an English assignment. He is platforming a colonial narrative. A principal who schedules a Holocaust remembrance assembly without equal time for a Nakba commemoration is not exercising academic judgment, but perpetuating erasure. At a certain point you have to ask whether a framework that turns every expression of Jewish life into an act of racial aggression is really about protecting Palestinians, or about something else entirely.

The racialization of Palestinian identity is what allows a political framework to now be laundered through equity offices, human rights commissions, and school board training modules. Because once something is racism in 2026, it’s no longer up for debate. It is something to be trained out of people (unless it’s antisemitism, but I digress).

The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association published its report in April 2022. By June 2024, the Toronto District School Board had voted 15 to 7 to include “anti-Palestinian racism” in its Combating Hate and Racism strategy.

How did a concept go from a single advocacy report to mandatory teacher training in two and a half years?

It is worth noting what did not happen during that period. The Ontario Human Rights Commission, the body that would ordinarily validate a new category of discrimination in the province, declined to recognize “anti-Palestinian racism.” A federal parliamentary study on the concept produced what was described as “heavily divided” opinions. The definition itself remains contested at every level of government that has examined it seriously. Jewish organizations like the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs correctly argue that the framework describes Israel as a racist endeavour and effectively classifies mainstream Jewish identity as bigotry.

In other words, the concept was adopted by school boards faster than it could be validated by the institutions responsible for defining discrimination in Ontario. The school boards leapfrogged the province’s own human rights apparatus.

How? Infrastructure.

Canadian public institutions, particularly school boards, had already built the machinery for this kind of adoption. They had equity offices. They had “anti-racism” frameworks. They had mandatory training pipelines. They had complaint mechanisms. They have teachers who are required to attend professional development meetings. They had the bureaucratic architecture to receive a new category of discrimination and plug it directly into existing systems. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association didn’t need to build anything; it just needed to provide a concept. The conveyor belt was already running.

This is important, because it means the fight over “anti-Palestinian racism” isn’t really a fight about one definition or report. It’s a fight about the institutional infrastructure that allows any sufficiently well-packaged concept to become mandatory ideology for public employees. Today it’s “anti-Palestinian racism.” Tomorrow it could be something else entirely. The machine doesn’t care about the content, just the format. And “anti-Palestinian racism” arrived in exactly the right format.

I have tried to read the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association report charitably, looking for the version of it that is simply about protecting Palestinian students from bullying and discrimination in schools. Giving the benefit of the doubt, maybe some part of that version exists, in fragments, buried under layers of obscene political assertion presented as factual description.

But the dominant thrust of the document is unmistakable: It defines mainstream Zionist positions as racist. It treats the existence of Israel as a Jewish state as an ongoing act of “colonial” violence. It preemptively classifies any accusation of antisemitism directed at Palestinian advocacy as itself a form of “anti-Palestinian racism.” And it presents all of this not as a political argument to be debated in the public square, but as an “anti-racism” framework to be implemented by institutions and enforced through training, policy, and complaint mechanisms.

With respect, when a school board adopts this framework, it isn’t “adding anti-Palestinian racism to its anti-racism strategy.” It is adopting a political position on one of the most contested conflicts in the world and encoding it as institutional orthodoxy. It’s also telling every Jewish teacher, every Jewish student, every Jewish parent who holds mainstream Zionist views that, because of their identity, they are inherently racist.

In November 2024, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board delivered mandatory “anti-Palestinian racism” training to 8,613 teachers. The training cost taxpayers $70,229.50, paid to an equity consulting firm called KR Consulting. It was created in response to a motion brought by Trustee Sabreina Dahab in December 2023, who described the initiative as part of the board’s effort to “resist Zionism, and the ongoing erasure of Palestinian identity, culture and solidarity.” Those are her words, published openly.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Someone filed a freedom of information request to see the training. A reasonable ask. After all, the training was mandatory and publicly funded. It was delivered to the people who teach other people’s children. A parent, a taxpayer, a journalist, a concerned citizen, anyone with a pulse and a curiosity about what ideas are being piped into their kids’ schools might want to have a look.

The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board said no. Well, not just no. Hell no.

The board invoked one of the most dramatic exemptions available under Ontario’s Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, Section 13: the “danger to safety or health” exemption. This is the provision designed for situations where disclosing a record could reasonably be expected to seriously threaten the safety or health of an individual. It is meant for things like confidential informant identities, addresses of people fleeing domestic violence, sensitive security infrastructure. Things where disclosure could get someone hurt.

But the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board used it to hide a training video about racism. And they went further. Staff were told multiple times not to share the training material. Questions and comments were not allowed during the video presentation. Teachers were told to direct their feedback to equity staff privately “rather than their colleagues.” Superintendent Gerry Smith described this approach as “reducing tension and fostering a culture of inclusivity.” And after the training was delivered, copies of the video were deleted as what the board called a “safety measure.”

This is not how you handle a routine professional development session, but it is how you handle something you know will not survive scrutiny.

The requester appealed to Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, as the law allows. The appeal is currently in adjudication. According to documents obtained by Melanie Bennet, an investigative journalist for Juno News who has been covering this story, the board submitted affidavits arguing that the volume of complaints it has already received (based on a small number of leaked images from the training) constitutes “harassment” and is “unmanageable.” The board’s position, in essence, is that public reaction to the partial leak proves that full disclosure would be harmful.

Meanwhile, Bennet obtained 15 photographs from the training video from an anonymous source, along with affidavits, exhibits, invoices, and letters from the appeal. Teacher testimony in the appeal documents describes a training video that displayed a map of Israel covered in the Palestinian flag, linked “anti-Palestinian racism” to “anti-colonialism,” described Jews as “colonizers of Israel,” and defined Jihad as a “peaceful struggle.” Under the board’s framework, teaching students that “Israel is a free democratic state” would render teachers “racist” in the eyes of the board.

And it gets worse.

When teachers who watched the training raised concerns about its content, their complaints were directed to the board’s human rights and equity officer, Yohana Otite, the person responsible for fielding the antisemitism complaints that followed the training. Her response, according to testimony in the appeal documents, was boilerplate: “Interpretation of materials can vary.”

But Otite herself was subsequently the subject of multiple complaints after teachers discovered she had shared antisemitic content on her own social media. The person the board appointed to address concerns about antisemitism in the training was sharing arguably antisemitic material herself. And the board’s position is that this situation is too dangerous for the public to know about.

In other words, a Canadian school board is fighting to keep the public from seeing what it taught its teachers to teach its students. You don’t need to know anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to understand why that’s a problem. You don’t need to be Jewish, Israeli, or Palestinian, or sympathetic to either, or politically engaged at all. You just need to believe, at a basic level, that when public institutions spend public money to shape how public employees think and teach our children, the public gets to know what they said.

There are words for institutions that treat public scrutiny as a danger. Those words are not “transparent,” “accountable,” or “democratic.”

---