The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMC) has an ambitious mission. It calls for “anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy” in which students study imperialism and oppression, resistance movements and the struggles of peoples to reclaim their identity and agency.

By those standards, one extraordinary case study should sit near the center of the curriculum: The Jews.

Israel may be one of history’s greatest examples of successful decolonization.

Indigenous

Jewish civilization did not originate in Europe. It arose in the Land of Israel.

Israel, Judah, Judea, Jerusalem and Zion are not modern colonial names. They are ancient names embedded in Jewish history. Judaism developed there. The Hebrew Bible is centered there. Jewish holidays follow its seasons and agricultural cycles. Jerusalem became the religious and national center of the Jewish people.

Even the people’s name—Israel—is ancient.

Colonized

Then came conquest. Jewish kingdoms were conquered by successive imperial powers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans.

The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and carried many Jews into exile. Rome later destroyed the Second Temple, crushed Jewish revolts and accelerated the dispersion that would define Jewish existence for centuries.

The Jewish people lost sovereignty in its own homeland but never its connection.

Dispossessed—but Not Disconnected

Dispersion scattered the Jews without eliminating Jewish peoplehood. Jews in Poland did not simply become Poles. Jews in Morocco did not simply become Moroccans. Jews in Iraq did not simply become Iraqis.

Across continents, they retained a common religion, history, calendar and connection to the same ancestral land. They prayed toward Jerusalem. They ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Hebrew survived as the language of scripture, prayer and scholarship.

And Jews never disappeared from the land itself. Jewish communities remained through centuries of foreign rule.

Resistance

Jewish history is also a story of resistance. The Maccabees resisted Seleucid repression and restored Jewish sovereignty. Jews later rebelled against Rome.

After military resistance became impossible, survival itself became resistance. A small, scattered minority endured expulsions, forced conversions, discriminatory laws and massacres without surrendering its identity.

Eventually came Zionism: the modern movement to restore Jewish national self-determination where Jewish national history began.

A stateless people sought to cease being stateless.

Decolonization

And then something extraordinary happened. The dispersed people returned in large numbers.

There was no Jewish Britain or France directing an overseas colony. Jews came from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere to the land at the center of their collective history.

They restored sovereignty.

And they accomplished perhaps their most astonishing act of cultural decolonization: they revived Hebrew.

Not Polish, Russian, German or Arabic. Their ancestral language became the everyday language of children, schools, newspapers, commerce and government.

They made Jerusalem their capital. They called their national movement Zionism, after Zion.

So apply LESMC’s vocabulary consistently: Indigenous. Conquered. Dispossessed. Resistance. Return. Cultural restoration. Self-determination.

The Jewish story fits remarkably well.

So What Happened?

Why does this seemingly perfect LESMC case study become almost its opposite when the curriculum reaches Israel?

Some of the people shaping the curriculum help explain the disconnect.

Samia Shoman, a Palestinian-American member of LESMC’s leadership, co-coordinates the Teach Palestine Project, which develops curricula for American schools. Her materials describe Israel as an “institutionalized system of oppression and apartheid.” After California rewrote its original ethnic-studies curriculum, Shoman blamed “Zionist and other rightwing lobbyists” for what she said was the destruction of its “anti-racist, decolonial and liberatory” approach.

Jody Sokolower, who is Jewish, co-coordinates Teach Palestine. Her student history says Britain promised Palestine to Zionists and describes Zionists as subsequently carrying out plans to push Palestinian Arabs and Britain out. The larger Teach Palestine curriculum explicitly seeks to put these perspectives into American classrooms.

Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, a founding member of Liberated Ethnic Studies, has spent her career developing what LESMC itself describes as “critical curriculum” and helped build the Liberated alternative after the original California curriculum was substantially changed.

This isn’t a peripheral connection. LESMC lists Shoman, Cardona and Theresa Montaño among its leadership, while Teach Palestine produces lessons connecting the conflict to forced relocation, criminalization and a “culture of resistance.”

“Zionism is a nationalist, colonial ideology that, from the late 19th century on, has called for the creation and expansion of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine by any means necessary. As support for Palestine and criticism of Israel’s apartheid policies have grown in the US and internationally, Zionist organizations have stepped up their efforts to silence
discussion of Palestine/Israel in movement circles, on college campuses, and now in K–12 education.” – Teach Palestine’s Understanding Zionist Backlash

Now the inversion makes more sense.

A framework supposedly built to recognize indigeneity, dispossession, resistance and decolonization encounters a people whose history contains all four—but influential architects approach Jewish national restoration through an anti-Zionist and settler-colonial lens.

So:

The indigenous become settlers.
The dispossessed become colonizers.
Return becomes colonialism.
National liberation becomes oppression.

The Jews should be a textbook LESMC case study: an ancient people conquered and dispersed, preserving its identity and ancestral language for centuries, returning home, reviving that language and restoring sovereignty.

Instead, one of history’s most remarkable decolonization stories is recast as colonization.

The history didn’t change. The ideological lens did.

ACTION ITEM

Be involved in your local school board and investigate the materials used in the classroom.