FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) Community Calls for Solidarity with Palestine and End of Anti-Palestinian Repression
Contacts: Jasper Saah, Margot Bloch
mcps4palestine@gmail.com
Friday, January 26th 2024– In an open letter to the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) community that began circulating in December, 2023, over 1,000 former and current students, educators, parents, and residents from the MCPS community have come together to assert their solidarity with the Palestinian people and the people of Gaza. Signatories represent over 90% of all MCPS schools, including 128 elementary, 39 middle, and all 26 high schools as well as graduating classes from 1972 through 2026. The letter demands an end to all anti-Palestinian repression, intimidation, and retaliation within MCPS; specifically the practice of placing educators on administrative leave for voicing their support for Palestinian rights.
Since the beginning of the Israeli aggression against Gaza on October 7th, there have been repeated instances of MCPS punishing educators and students who have voiced their support for the Palestinian people. At least four current educators including middle school teachers Hajur El-Haggan, Sabrina Khan-Williams, and Angela Wolf have been unjustly placed on administrative leave and defamed for expressing solidarity with Palestine. Students organizing walkouts and teach-ins have been similarly smeared, intimidated, and retaliated against by administration. The open letter also demands a rejection of anti-Palestinian narratives within Montgomery County curriculum and teacher trainings, and the inclusion of accurate and unbiased lessons about the history of Palestine.
“I experienced countless instances of anti-Palestinian racism and outright aggression from other students and teachers while at MCPS,” says Jasper Saah, a Palestinian graduate of Montgomery Blair HS, 2015. “None of this is new,” she continues, “During the genocidal aggressions against Palestinians in Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014, blatant mis- and disinformation was spread by teachers and any pushback—even wearing my keffiyeh—was met with censorship and discipline. I hope this letter reaches current students so they don’t feel as alienated and alone in our supposedly ‘progressive’ school system as I did a decade ago.”
On November 1, 2022, the Montgomery County Council unanimously affirmed the harmful and anti-Palestinian IHRA definition through a resolution, amidst months of pushback from Palestinians and other county residents. The IHRA definition is anti-Palestinian and is a threat to academic freedoms. Margot Bloch, a Jewish graduate of Montgomery Blair High School, 2018, and a current Montgomery County resident explains that “creating a false choice between opposing anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism is harmful to our fight against antisemitism, and our collective struggle to live free of hatred and discrimination.” It is clear MCPS residents understand what county leadership refuses to acknowledge, that any efforts to protect one group of people at the expense of another must be wholeheartedly rejected.
Given the well-documented, rapidly escalating Israeli military campaign against Palestine, the actions of Montgomery County officials to systematically silence and punish those speaking out against the Israeli government’s atrocities are not only cowardly, but deeply complicit. At a bare minimum 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza—1% of the population—in addition to growing aggression in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and increased violence against Palestinians in the United States–– such as the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont in November and the murder of 6-year-old Palestinian-American child Wadea Al-Fayoume, and the concurrent attack of his mother in Chicago. The need to unequivocally protect the right to freedom of speech in our public school systems is urgent and the consequences for failing to do so are fatal.
The MCPS community has made its stance abundantly clear, that county officials that continue these punitive measures are not only acting out of step with their community, but pushing legislation and policy directly opposed to the desires of their constituents.