Extracurricular Activities
Sally Olds speaks with school students and teachers about striking for Palestine
At the School Strike for Palestine rally a few weeks ago, I felt my age. The crowd was agile in a way the giant, snaking Sunday rallies can’t be, and energetic in a way that I read as particular to its age bracket. Primary school kids lead the chants. High schoolers emoted into their phone cameras. The rally moved with incredible speed down Swanston Street and swelled outside the State Library. A few seconds later, it poured into Melbourne Central. If you’ve never seen a few hundred teenagers waving Palestinian flags outside a Sephora, you’re really missing out. On the second floor, supporters had already gathered to cheer on the bloc downstairs. In the food court, a trio of boys, who had their faces obscured by keffiyehs, swarmed the McDonalds. One jumped on to the counter and yelled into the store. The Maccas staff—themselves very young—stood back and did that thing teenagers do where they giggle and seal themselves behind a wall of disdainful confusion. Back downstairs, a decision was made, seemingly invisibly. Marshalls sprang into action, skilfully conducting the ragged edges of the crowd into an elongating column, which they led back outside. They paused for ten, twenty minutes to chant. Then they shot off again, this time up to Parliament House to join the daily sit-in—dubbed the Sit-Intifada by its participants—that occupies the steps out front of the building. It was a hot, sunny day. The students huddled together under large umbrellas, skinny legs sticking out.
In the lead-up to the Strike, organisers and participating students faced intense scrutiny. “Just what we need—a ‘school strike for Palestine,’” wrote Andrew Bolt in The Herald Sun, before referring to the strikers as “the young and foolish, ignorant of history.” An advocacy group called Project A, which aims, according to SBS Hebrew, “to preserve the community’s Jewish way of life in Australia and to strengthen Israel,” penned and circulated an open letter addressed to Premier Jacinta Allan and the Education Minister Ben Carroll. It argued that kids would be exposed to “vandalism, violence and graffiti” and questioned whether the organisers were “truly concerned with hearing the voices of school children or is it about the mass exploitation of children to advance their cause?” In response, Allan defended the right to rally and register dissent in public, but also remarked that she expected students to stay in school. Carroll went harder: “You want to change the world? You attend school and get educated.”
Given all the fuss, you might think these were the first students to ever walk out of a classroom. In fact, just the week prior, the annual School Strike 4 Climate went off with much less media furore. And over the last 100 years, kids and teens in Australia have struck over many causes—climate change, yes, but also uniform policy, racial discrimination, subpar facilities, hair length, the use of corporal punishment, nuclear testing, staff conditions, lack of funding, make-up, piercings, Pauline Hanson, Safe Schools, queer rights, and more. In each instance, striking kids have heard similar arguments: that they’re political pawns, that they’re too young to understand the issues at hand, and, most of all, that they should stay in school. In 2003, when 3,000 high school and uni students marched on Melbourne’s Parliament House to protest the impending invasion of Iraq, John Howard said it was inappropriate for students to skip school to protest. In 2007, a student walk-out was timed to coincide with George Bush’s visit to Australia. (That rally also stopped to protest in front of the embattled Swanston Street McDonalds, a perennial symbol of American Imperialism in our distant outpost.) Then-opposition leader Kevin Rudd advised: “I would strongly suggest that kids stick to their books…this is not a time for kids to get mixed up in protest activity.”
Unfortunately, this rhetoric doesn’t end when a person graduates high school—it continues into one’s political life as an adult. There’s a pattern here. Striking students are told to get back to school, stop disrupting their education, and wait until they’re older. Striking adults are told to get back to work, stop disrupting business, and pursue more reasonable strategies for change. The message is: “Yes, you can protest, but not now and not like this.” The deferral of protest to a perfect time, place, or subjectivity (a time, place, and state of being that never arrives) is exactly the point of such rhetoric. Even if it could or did arrive, it would defeat the whole purpose of a strike—disrupting an unjust system.
In any case, other, supposedly more acceptable, forms of protest are often suppressed, too. During the Vietnam War, staff and students in schools around Australia were punished for wearing anti-war badges and distributing leaflets. In the last couple of weeks, Victorian school staff have likewise been disciplined for wearing keffiyehs and badges as part of a teacher’s Week of Action in solidarity with Palestine. In response, the Department of Education has urged school principals to ensure their teachers remain impartial in the classroom and school yard. By all accounts, this has been unevenly applied. At an Islamic school in Melbourne, staff and students recently held a day of solidarity with Palestine. Students elsewhere have been making and putting up Palestinian flags without facing any opposition. Other schools have cracked down. “I understand the classroom’s complex because of our position of authority,” one high school teacher told me, “but I had a friend sent home for handing out a Teachers for Palestine leaflet to other staff in the staff room. This happened away from students.” In some cases, it’s not just staff being called into line. A student from an inner north school was recently made to remove their keffiyeh—the staff member responsible found out later that this student was Palestinian.
At a Teacher’s Vigil for Palestine, held in front of the State Library a week after the School Strike, Victorian educators debunked the myth of classroom impartiality. The idea that educational spaces are neutral, the speakers argued, is an excuse to silence dissent and advance alternative political agendas. (Certainly, as a kid at public school, I was subject to some very partial moments—for instance, the yearly compulsory march in our town’s ANZAC Day Parade, for which we missed half a day of school.) The mood at the Vigil was staunch and sombre. Where the students had run and yelled and climbed, the teachers sat and chatted and held candles to mark the deaths of over 6,000 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in the last two months alone. School teachers spoke about the duty of care they have towards students who are asking them questions, seeking to understand why kids like them are being killed. A primary school teacher told me about how, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she wore a blue-and-yellow ribbon, made explanatory slides for her classes, and that the school community had held a fundraiser. And now? “Suddenly we’re not allowed to talk about Israel and Palestine.”
The question of airing one’s politics in school—for teachers—and the question of taking one’s views to the streets—for students—has become hugely divisive. It’s also a microcosm for many of the most incendiary and important questions flying around at this moment. How should educational leaders (teachers, principals, faculty, and chancellery) respond to political events? What should unions be doing to support their workers who support Palestine? When and where is the right time and place to talk about politics, and who gets to decide this?
At the School Strike, Teacher’s Vigil, the recurring Sunday rallies, and over the phone, I spoke with several school students and staff to hear what it’s been like to learn in, teach in, or walk out of Melbourne schools over the last two months. Four of these interviews are reproduced in condensed form here: with a group of striking children and teens; with Ivy, a sixteen-year-old high schooler and Strike organiser; with a secondary school teacher who has been talking openly with his classes about Palestine, and who was reprimanded at school for wearing a keffiyeh; and with a teacher who has been organising with a group called Teachers and School Staff for Palestine. Except for Ivy, who chose to speak under her real name, identifying details have been altered or removed altogether.
Parliament steps, Thursday November 23, 3:15pm
Group of six students, ages 12-16, from schools in the northern suburbs
Sally Olds: What brings you out today?
Student 1: I wanted to support Palestine, especially as a student ‘cause I think it’s important when schools rally for issues.
SO: Why is that?
1: Well, it’s because of school children being bombed in Gaza.
2: And people are more likely to recognise it if lots of children are going. It brings more attention to it. If it’s lots of adults it’s like, oh, just another rally.
SO: Have you learned anything about Palestine at school?
1: No.
2: Nothing.
3: Nothing.
4: Nope.
5: I feel like occasionally they’ve mentioned a few things.
6: I didn’t even know where it was until I heard about the rallies.
SO: How have you learned about it?
2: My dad was constantly talking about it. I asked him some questions and looked it up.
4: I know people that have family there. My parents are very upset by it.
1: I’ve heard partially through social media, but a lot of my friends have been educating me about what’s happening.
5: Social media. And my parents—all they ever do is watch the news. I mostly get my information from them.
6: Mostly my mum. She’s been going to these rallies the whole time. I don’t have much social media so I mostly learn from the news.
SO: What was it like at school today, walking out?
4: We had a school meeting thing, unrelated to this, and towards the end of the meeting, it was almost 12:30 when the walk-out started, and the teachers just didn’t know what was happening at all. It was quite bizarre because there were posters everywhere and students talking to them about it. There were so many news people outside our school when we walked out—so many cameras. A lot of people walked out. I was really glad, because I wasn’t sure how many people were going to come. But the students from my school filled up a whole tram. All of my friends are here.
2: I walked out in the middle of a seminar about the dangers of vaping.
3: I didn’t actually know about anyone else at my school leaving. Some people wanted to go, but couldn’t—and I haven’t seen anyone from my school so far.
4: Similar. I haven’t really seen anyone.
3: Still, there was a lot of excitement and energy. Lots of adrenalin.
2: I felt really happy every time I saw someone walking around with one of the signs. Like, you’re going too!
SO: You would have seen how the Premier was under lots of pressure to condemn the rally today. What do you say to those who think you’re being used as political pawns?
[Laughter]
5: I think that’s kind of stupid. We’re old enough to have our own opinions. Like, I dunno. We’re not really being used. No one’s forcing us to do it.
4: I think it’s quite bizarre. Being in VCE at the moment, they expect us to make decisions about our future and entire career, but not to make basic political decisions.
3: They teach us about politics, but when we show an interest, they freak out.
6: They’re teaching us to be independent, and leaders of whatever, but they don’t want us to go to rallies?
1: I would say that most of my teachers would be supportive of the Strike, and I know they support Palestine, but they just haven’t really been talking about it.
2: I think more people need to know about what’s happening between Palestine and Israel and school is a really good way to do that.
5: Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that we don’t care about education. It’s that we care more about genocide.
*
State Library, Sunday 3rd December, 11:30am
Ivy, 16, high school student and School Strike organiser
SO: Can you tell me about the activism you’ve been doing around Palestine—specifically, the school strikes?
Ivy: So, um, right now we're organising round two of the School Strike for Palestine. It's a lot easier than organising the first one, because we have momentum going. We're just really focusing on social media at the moment, trying to spread it like wildfire, basically, especially since Year 11 and 12 are on holidays. We really want people to still be interested. I think during the ceasefire [from November 24th to December 1st], we lost a bit of momentum and mobilisation. But I think now we're coming back much stronger.
SO: When was the very first moment it became like, “Okay, we're gonna have a strike”?
I: So, originally, we were just a group of high school students. There were a couple of kids we knew from the inner north. We were like, “wouldn't it be crazy if we did one walk-out in the inner north for just, like, two schools? That would be insane.” And then The Age got hold of it and we thought, since we have media attention, we might as well go all out. Why not?
I didn't realise how many, like, spreadsheets go into a protest. I basically wagged the whole week of school, and just helped out, you know, ringing people up, leafleting, doing some stalls, doing media stuff, emailing people, and focusing on a zine that we're making.
SO: The media is often unsympathetic towards young activists. How have you been navigating this sometimes open hostility?
I: Yeah. I mean, I was surprised. I thought they would be easy on me considering I'm in high school, but that certainly wasn't the case. Channel 7 and Channel 9 wanted a couple of sound bites from me. The first question they asked is whether or not I care about Israeli deaths. And it's just like, “God, why would you ask that? Of course all deaths are bad. This is why we're an anti-war movement.” You learn how to respond to things like that. You have to be assertive and remain logical. But yeah, it's interesting just how quickly it spread. After a couple of articles, everyone wanted to write about it.
SO: Yeah, why is that? Why do you think school students going on strike get so much attention?
I: I guess because right-wing or even mainstream media can point a finger at the crazy left, or something. It’s like, “these are children and they're still in school, blah blah blah.” I think Sky News blamed the Greens indoctrinating us, which was so funny. People have called us political pawns. It's condescending, and it really plays down how much I've researched about this. I’ve been reading into politics since I was thirteen. Every second I have a free moment, I'm reading something. If I was eighteen, they wouldn't bat an eye. Anyway, nobody talks about the Young Liberals. They’re apparently fine.
SO: I’ve also heard it said that you’re being used by the socialists.
I: Yeah, probably because I'm part of Socialist Alternative. I guess it would look bad if these right-wing weirdos blamed me, myself, as a child, for doing this. So of course they’d point to some adults that I'm associated with that they don't like. But in this group, I'm not treated like I'm sixteen, I'm treated like a political person. The only thing stopping me is not knowing more, rather than my age. I don't know why people have such a problem with me being political. It’s the same thing as doing an extracurricular activity as well as school. It makes me go out and socialise and get educated.
SO: What was it like being at school after October 7th? How was the mood? And how did teachers respond or not respond?
I: Well, I've always been open about my views on Palestine. I go to an alternative school. The worst I got was some dirty looks from some teachers, but there were lots of others who were supportive of me taking the initiative to research [Palestine] and organise the Strike. But that wasn't the case for, like, literally anyone else I know. Even at the more liberal schools—small L liberal—in the inner north, teachers have been tearing down Strike posters.
SO: Could you paint me a picture of the day of the walk-out?
I: I think a lot of [people I knew] just thought this was some weird little thing I was doing. Even though they heard about it on the news, they didn't think it would be as big as it was. It wasn't until the day after, the same day I was on The Project, where they're like, “Oh my God, can I come to the next one?” I'm like, “Dude, yes!”
I was worried it was just going to be inner north kids, but there were a lot of people from the West, and even regional Victoria. It was probably the craziest protest I've ever been to. I guess at the Sunday ones it's very organised, and it's quite slow. But this one was unlike anything else. You have all these kids full of enthusiasm because they're like, “finally, a place I can use my voice. I can't do it at school. I can't do it anywhere else.” So we basically ran from Flinders Street to Melbourne Central. And then we occupied Melbourne Central, which was quite impromptu. We were all just running and running and running. And it was peaceful or whatever, but more importantly, it was like muscle memory. Everyone did it so well. It was quick. It was loud. And then we sort of just gathered at the State Library lawn. Students were climbing that monument over there [Ivy points at a statue on the State Library lawn], hanging Palestinian flags. I'm scared of heights, so I would never do that, but you know, good on them.
And then around three o'clock, I got a call from somebody from The Project. They were like, “Can you be at our studio at five o'clock?” And I'm like, “Oh, okay. It would be nice if you told me yesterday, but alright.” We made it just in time. It was probably the most hectic experience of my life, to be honest. We were in the green room and people were doing my hair and makeup, and I was like “Ugh, this is weird.” I don't know if you've ever seen The Project, how they have the person being interviewed against a green screen? Yeah, so I was in the green screen room with one other guy. I couldn't see the people's faces and could only rely on the earpiece. It was pre-recorded, which was good, but still, it was pretty scary.
Then, after it aired, I made the biggest mistake of my life and searched my name on the internet. People weren’t even targeting my political views, they were just saying things like, “Oh, she’s probably getting married off to Hamas.” But I was really scared because they also doxxed my school. In the end, it was all fine. And sure, I got some hateful comments, but at least we got out there and made our voices heard. Now I’m ready for round two.
*
Phone call, Monday 4th December, 4:00pm
K, high school English teacher, public school in the northern suburbs
SO: Can you tell me about what happened last week at your school?
K: So, I went to the Teacher’s Vigil last week, and felt emboldened by all the speakers that I should be doing more in the school grounds. I was like, okay, I’ll go in and wear my keffiyeh. And then I got to school last Friday and though a few others had gone with me to the Vigil, I was the only one wearing it. Like the canary in the coal mine… And sure enough, the headmaster walked past me in the corridor and minutes later called me in for a meeting. The substance of the meeting was that we [teachers] need to be impartial, and that includes not sloganeering. My argument was that I wasn't even wearing a slogan tee or anything like that. I thought it was a much subtler sign of solidarity. As I said to the principal, it's a slippery slope in terms of telling teachers what to wear when it's a cultural artefact. I also made the crucial distinction that I’m not wearing a flag that represents a state or a political group, I’m wearing a cultural artefact that represents a people who are currently being slaughtered.
But at that point, I didn’t know my rights and wanted to contact the Union before I continued to disobey, so I took it off for the rest of the day. Basically, for context, two sub-branches in our union [the Australian Education Union] had voted for a Week of Action on Palestine, but overall, our Union had not endorsed it. The Union told me, “it’s not really protected action, but also, if you do get disciplined for it, we'll support you.” I also got the feeling that the headmaster didn’t really know what to do, and that he was acting on this general directive from the Department. He directed me to the Code of Conduct and to the Department of Education's messaging. Both are somewhat vague. The thing about the Code is that it emphasises impartiality, but it also talks a lot about human rights and equity. So there's a tension there between those two goals.
That was on Friday. Today [Monday], about five people wore keffiyehs to the staff briefing in the morning. Then a bunch of them were called in and asked to remove it. And one of them was like, “I'm not going to.”
Then the headmaster said, “Okay, well I need to call Employment Conduct for advice on how to escalate it.” But, I mean…he himself isn't particularly critically engaged on the issues, he’s just parroting the talking points of the mainstream media. I thought it was rather remiss of him to be disciplining us when he hadn’t done the requisite reading.
On top of this, it was all being done under the guise of impartiality. But I would argue that telling people to remove items of clothing is somewhat partial, like, it's definitely a political manoeuvre. And then also remaining silent in the face of genocide is partial. It seems to me that there has to be a moral red line. The mass killing of children should surely enjoy bipartisan condemnation. At some point, the schools in this country have to coalesce around some central values seeing as we are, indeed, in the business of raising children.
SO: There’s this fear that's emerged in the last three weeks or so that teachers are indoctrinating kids in the classroom. But, from what I understand, it seems that you’ve already been covering Palestine at school. Why is there such fear around this given that it’s already a topic of discussion in many classrooms?
K: Yes, so every school makes their own decisions about the curriculum. And in a lot of cases, I had already done work with the students on Palestine. Across nearly all my English subjects this year, term four just happens to be Media Analysis. For that, we choose an issue in the media and analyse it. It has to be done somewhat impartially, which, of course, you would do anyway if you have any sort of critical pedagogy. You have to get the kids to weigh up all sides. For instance, I’ll bring in a piece from The Herald Sun and one from The Guardian, and then you ask the critical questions. That's just standard practice. Usually the students have a lot of moral clarity. You don't have to stand on a pulpit and preach.
And look, we've got a lot of Arab students at our school who are really concerned. I don't think the school has done much for them. Certainly in all my units across all the years I teach, the war has come up numerous times. And upon wearing the keffiyeh, the students were like, “oh, I feel so much better seeing that.” The headmaster’s argument was, “well, what about our Jewish kids?” I told him that I think it's a false equivalence to make that conflation. If anything, I think [wearing it] is an invitation to talk critically. Because the students are often less literate on this, sometimes they’re a bit black-and-white and they’ll say things that could be construed as anti-semitic. If that happens, I just immediately raise it with them—that I think they need to make a separation between Jewish people and the Zionist State. But equally, when we've talked about it, prior to handing out articles, I’ve given a history of pogroms and expulsions, and all sorts of things in the Jewish community that have motivated this quest for statehood. And then we've even gone into bigger questions like, what is statism? What is nationalism? Are those valid goals?
It also just seems really odd that we’re meant to remain impartial when everything about the text list [the list of novels and films students study] from the last few years has been explicitly political in terms of promoting revisionist histories that highlight the struggle and survival of First Nations people, women, and people of colour. You’re not allowed to leaflet or encourage kids to go to the Strike, because that would be political persuasion. But everything that happens every day in school is political. Personally, I would never discourage them from going [on strike]. I think it's a far greater education for them.
SO: Why do you think that's such a pervasive talking point, when it's so absurd to worry about kids missing half a day of school?
K: Yeah, especially with the rate of school refusal at the moment. I truly believe it's just a masked quashing of protest, that they don't want the kids to be active citizens.
SO: How did the teachers at your school respond to the Strike?
K: It's been a minor topic of conversation. Our school was largely silent on the whole issue. There’s been no messaging from the top. It’s just been on a teacher by teacher basis. And schools are just so busy that you only get these passing moments in the hallway. In terms of the Strike, we had about five or six kids from our school attending.
SO: Other teachers I’ve spoken to have concerns about students consuming misinformation on social media and also being vicariously traumatised. Have you observed anything like that happening? Do you know how your students use social media?
K: Well, yeah, but not on this matter. I've heard them get misinformation plenty of times with regards to, for instance, the Referendum. Otherwise, for a lot of the boys, it's really common for them to go down an Andrew Tate kind of rabbit hole. Essentially, the problem is that kids need some form of moral guidance. In the current state of affairs, the state system uses its secularity to eschew the role of moral guide. Therefore, [state schools] are sort of valueless. And into that vacuum step these, like, shock jock, demagogue date rapists. They speak to young men, especially young men who are feeling emasculated by feminism and gender non-conformity and all these things, and haven't had modelled to them a masculinity that can hold space for all that while still assuring them it's absolutely fine to be a man.
At the start of the year, there were so many slurs: “fatty,” “fag,” all sorts of things. They were just being little edgelords. I've had to do a lot of work around values in my classroom. But what’s been heartening, with regards to Palestine, is that I haven’t heard anything like that. The students have real moral clarity on this issue.
*
Phone call, Tuesday 5th December, 5:00pm
N, secondary school teacher at a public school in Melbourne, member of Teachers and School Staff For Palestine
SO: First, I wanted to ask about the public school system, and what it’s been like teaching at your school, before and during the last couple of months.
N: I’m a humanities teacher at a secondary public school. It sounds corny, but since I started teaching, I feel more connected to a purpose in life, or my own purpose in life. I really love working with young people and helping them figure out who they are, what they’re passionate about—connect to their worth, their skills. In that respect, I love teaching.
But I think the school system is really broken, particularly the public-private school divide, which I could rail against forever. There are teacher shortages, and no good plan on how to address that beyond trying to get more people to train. But teachers are leaving because the workloads are too high, among many other reasons. As for the students, the way schools are structured doesn’t suit a lot of [them]. The kids who are most disenfranchised in our schools are also the ones, often, for whom the system doesn't meet their needs. Schools are just one part of society, one part of the health and wellbeing of students. When we have so little resourcing for mental health, for instance, school is the place where all those issues show up. Schools are left to be a band-aid over these really serious problems in young people’s lives. That part of teaching is disheartening—feeling your own limits, or when you want to support a student and you come up against these systemic barriers.
SO: Given that context, I imagine it’s been hard to support kids who have been affected by the war. How are students responding to the genocide in Palestine? What have you observed over the last few weeks?
N: Everything I’ve seen in the media in the last week was about teachers traumatising kids—even bullying them—by talking about this issue. Actually, what I've seen in my school is kids being really distressed at the silence of their teachers, and at being silenced. For instance, a student had put up posters saying “Free Palestine,” and some other teachers had taken those posters down, and the student was extremely upset by that.
SO: How have you personally been navigating classroom discussions on this topic?
N: I think when students ask questions of a teacher, they have a duty to answer to the best of their ability. After October 7th, some of my students were like, “we don't understand, like, who's the good guy? Who's the bad guy?” They were still thinking about it in those terms, which I think is proof that we need to be talking about this. So when my students have asked me questions—or say, they’ve asked me what I did on the weekend, I’ll tell them I went to the rally for Palestine, and I’ll explain why. But so far, I haven't created any classroom activities. I work with younger students, so I haven’t spoken too much about Palestine in the classroom because I want to be really careful with how I talk to students who I don’t know extremely well. I was on leave recently, and I don’t know them as well as I usually would by the end of the year.
That being said, I think there’s ways to acknowledge what’s happening without going into graphic details. And that’s part of the scare campaign we’ve seen from the media and from the Minister for Education. There’s no trust in the expertise of educators to determine what’s going to be appropriate for their students in their contexts. There’s an assumption that if we're talking about Palestine, it means we're going to be anti-semitic, or that we will say something really upsetting, as if we’re not going to have concern for our students’ well-being at the forefront of our minds. That’s our job, regardless of what it is we're teaching.
SO: Can you tell me a little more about Teachers for Palestine? How did you come up with the Week of Action?
N: We’re a group of mostly rank-and-file members of the Australian Education Union, with some Independent Education Union members, and then some non-union members in there as well. The majority are AEU members.
I was already involved in some actions outside of school, and I was going to the rallies. I sent out some information to our Union sub-branch, saying, “here’s this Unionists for Palestine meeting, let me know if anyone wants to come.” Then I got an email from a colleague who was really distressed by me posting that in the group. He explained that he knew people who had family in Israel affected by October 7th. But we met up in person, and talked it over, and found common ground. Through that, we had conversations in our sub-branch, and I worked with lots of different people to put forward a motion for the Week of Action.
So, leading up to it, we had about two weeks of really rich conversation among staff about why this is something we should be talking about. And then, day one of that week, we get the email from our principal passing on the [Department’s] message to staff. We went from a place where we were talking about it, to suddenly, everyone was much more nervous. The latest advice I received from the Union is that the Department has clarified that teachers are able to talk about it in classrooms as they would any other issue. But that’s not at all clear in the way that the Minister communicated it to the media. It really inflamed the issue.
SO: Have you heard of any students at your school feeling uncomfortable about the Week of Action or the School Strike?
N: No, I haven’t—the opposite. It’s ridiculous to consider that a student sitting in a classroom, with a teacher who they trust, would somehow be made unsafe by being exposed to what our government is supporting. Particularly when you consider that young people are under rubble right now in Gaza instead of in school.
SO: How did your school respond to the first Strike? Do you know if it had much traction among your students?
N: Our principal sent communications to students and to parents saying, “we're aware there's a strike happening. Just so you know, attendance requirements are the same,” which is probably what most principals are doing. I’m not sure if my students went—they’re younger, and less likely to be involved. But in general, it's so awesome to see students take to the streets. I think organising like that is an incredible, educational experience. You're coordinating with a large group of people, articulating your aims, doing critical and creative thinking, fielding questions from the media. It’s incredibly inspiring. When I’m at the Sunday rallies, I always keep an eye out for students. I want them to see me there, too. I want them to know we show up.
SO: What are you working towards next with Teachers for Palestine?
N: Right now, we’re trying to get the Union to take a stronger position on Palestine, and to name what’s happening more explicitly: name apartheid, name genocide, and name the active occupation. These aims really came about in response to the Palestinian Trade Unions’ request for unions worldwide to call for an end to apartheid, genocide, and occupation, and to call for a ceasefire—you know, in so much as it matters that teachers advocate for that.
But actually, I do think it’s about leveraging the position and respect teachers have in society. People listen to teachers, and trust them to know what they’re talking about. I also think it's through people power, and union power, that public opinion and government policy shifts. The State and Federal Governments, which fund both the government and non-government education sectors, are both openly backing Israel. So we are calling out our employers for supporting genocide, and demanding they cut diplomatic and military ties with Israel. I feel a responsibility to stand up for Palestine in my capacity as a teacher for those reasons. The attempt at silencing teachers is also part of the larger wave of reprisals we’re seeing in people’s workplaces as they speak out about Palestine. Resisting that attempt—defending teachers’ rights to free association, free speech, to speak the truth, to have meaningful conversations with our students—that’s also what it’s about. We want to do our jobs well.