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This is a guest essay written by Hana Raviyt Schank, a writer and fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Writer’s Note: Two weeks ago, my daughter came home with an assignment for her AP Research class that was, to use the parlance of the moment, highly problematic.
Class assignments often involve analyzing a social issue or news headlines. The class has my daughter’s favorite classes in an otherwise lackluster New York City public school semester, often leading to dinner table conversations.
When she received an assignment to analyze an article about Gaza from The Washington Post, we read the article together, and discussed possible courses of action. It’s been two years of morality questions no teenager should have to ask.
Below, she lays out for her teacher why she’s chosen not to complete the assignment.
As you read, try to imagine a kid from any other ethnic group being asked to analyze hateful reporting directed at them. For example: an article showing that White Supremacists have a good point and the South should rise again. Discuss!
Also: I did not advise, edit, or even know about this until after my daughter sent it to her teacher.
Ms. [TEACHER NAME],
Hello. I didn’t really know any other way to begin this, so I thought an open-letter type format would be the best way to go about it. I thought that if there was any time for vulnerability and informality, now was probably the time.
I have no idea how this system works, who chooses the articles, who writes the instructions. In the case of this Article of the Week, I’m really, really hoping you don’t make the assignments.
At the moment, I don’t really care to talk about the extremely hot-button issue this article dives into, because my stance is what many would consider to be unpopular at the moment. Here is what I will say.
On October 7th, my 18-year-old brother was taking a gap year in Israel. I don’t know your life experiences. I don’t know what you’ve gone through. But I have to say that trying to evacuate my brother from a war zone was probably one of the scariest experiences of my life.1 He was stranded there for a week before we managed to get him out.
But somehow, evacuating him from Israel was not the most terrifying part of that week. The worst part was turning from our text messages with him while he hid in a bomb shelter to Instagram, to see people I’ve called my friends for years celebrate the massacre of thousands of Jews, ignore the hundreds of people (many of them not even Israeli or Jewish!) who were shoved into dark tunnels under Gaza, and glorify a terrorist organization whose charter directly states their desire to destroy all Jews and any idea of a Jewish state.
I thought antisemitism was a thing that belonged mostly in the past. Something we as a human race have pushed aside in favor of equality and making a better world.
Clearly, I was wrong.
As the war raged hundreds of miles away, I began to fight my own battles. Friends I’ve come to trust and love turned against me because I was shocked and horrified by the events of October 7th. Because I did not want to free Palestine, but free it from Hamas. Because every time I watched another protest walk through my neighborhood, calling for the demise of the only Jewish state in the entire world, something would break inside of me.
It has gotten to the point where I have actively been kicked out of a friend group because of my “radical Zionism,” despite the fact that I barely talk about politics in social settings, watched prejudice unfold in front of me, and have gotten in multiple fights with lifelong friends, whom I eventually lost because of this issue.
My story is not exceptional. Jewish people across the country, around the world, face the same exact thing. The examples of globally rising antisemitism can be told for weeks.
It’s been a hard 500 days.
Now you know my whole sob story. Let’s move on to the actual point of this whole letter. Why I refuse to analyze this article.
It’s simple, really. My objection is that this article is full of bias, misinformation, and misleading facts that give people a narrow view of an issue that cannot be neatly stated in one article. To prove my point, I’ll go over every place in this article that I believe is written directly to give people a reason to form anti-Israel bias:
The article cites UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian “refugees”) as a reliable source many times; however, UNRWA has been proven to be an extremely biased source against Israel, even currently employing people who helped slaughter Jews in the October 7th attack on Israel and are part of Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.
The article paints Israel’s blockade of Gaza after giving up control in 2005 as extremely damaging. But the article is ignoring one major factor here: Israel allowed Gaza to choose between democracy and terrorism by holding their own elections. Hamas was elected and instantly began trying its hardest to make Gaza a terrorist state. It was very clear that Hamas was a terrorist organization at the time, so Israel imposed a blockade to try and stop the literal terrorist organization next door from bombing the sh*t out of their millions of Israeli civilians.
Nevertheless, Israel still did and continues to provide aid to Palestinians in Gaza. You want to know what happens to that aid? That’s right, Hamas takes it away from their own civilians.
Israel is an easy scapegoat for many people, so they turn to it automatically when they want to blame someone for all of the horrors that are occurring in the Middle East. However, in doing so, they clearly ignore the organization that is literally starving and killing their own civilians. Instead of trying to defeat terrorism, citizens in places like America actually encourage it by villainizing Israel.
And what do you think Hamas was doing between 2007 and 2023? They weren’t just sitting there doing nothing. No, they were taking whatever money they had away from their citizens and using it to make bombs, tunnels, weapons, and whatever they could manufacture to destroy Israel. So, contrary to popular belief, Israel’s blockade was not the thing most damaging to Gaza. It was Hamas’s need for militarization and their deep desire to massacre Israelis and destroy the one Jewish state.
The article cites Gaza’s local Health Ministry as a reliable source for data regarding civilian deaths in Gaza. However, Hamas directly runs the Health Ministry and has been exposed multiple times to be inflating their death toll numbers from Israeli attacks to garner more sympathy from Western nations. It’s truly sickening.
The article makes it sound like Israel’s targeted counterstrikes on Gaza are purposefully hitting civilians, but that is only because Hamas puts their supplies and whatever they use to attack Israel with in locations like schools, hospitals, and civilian-heavy areas. They do this not only because they don’t care about the lives of Palestinians, but because they know that once a certain amount of civilians are killed thanks to Hamas’ strategizing, they are given another reason to blame Israel and gain public support from other countries.
Finally, this article was published by The Washington Post. The newspaper has long been considered one of the best news sources out there, but in regard to the Middle East conflict, their journalism is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. This is the same news source that, when interviewing Israeli hostages in the summer of 2024, asked why they didn’t care enough about Palestinian lives. Just let that sink in for a second.
In short, I cannot in good conscience bring myself to do this assignment. It hits too close to home. It’s full of deceit and misinformation. To be honest, I don’t really know why this article was even considered in the first place, out of all the hot-button issues.
Now seems like the worst-possible time to be asking a bunch of high schoolers who know nothing about the world what their thoughts are on the most controversial conflict at this moment in time.
I don’t blame you. I’m not angry at you. I’m sorry if it seems like I am. This is just an outburst of all my frustration, all my anger, all my pain over the last year. It just makes me feel things I think I shouldn’t have to deal with right now, not this early in my life.
I don’t get to cherry-pick what I do and do not get to experience, what pain I do and do not get to have.
But this seems like a lot.
Note that she also survived being hit by a wrong-way driver at 70 mph, plus two weeks in the hospital recovering from reconstruction of her lower intestine and spinal fractures, while her father underwent multiple surgeries and her mother worked to regain full brain function.
Seems to me that she did the homework assignment perfectly. She engaged critically with the source material, explored its biases, and explained its relevance to her life. Looks like an A+ to me.
Thank you for republishing this! I think I read it somewhere else. What an impressive young woman the author's daughter is! I see a lot of similar problems in my work and my heart goes out to the young people trying to see their way through it. I hope to someday be in a position to change something... anything! Lots of love to you and this brave young woman!