The Evil of Ethnic Studies: Hostility to Israel Is Tip of the Iceberg

California’s public schools have been implementing a plan to require all students to take a course in ethnic studies in order to graduate. These efforts have faced controversy in significant part because of anti-Israel content in some versions of these courses, including the initial 2019 draft of the state’s model curriculum. Was the anti-Israel content an easily rectified fluke, or is it just one manifestation of destructive ideas that are more deeply ingrained in academia?

The objectionable anti-Israel content in the 2019 draft included lessons that refer to the “dispossession and dispersal” of Palestinians due to Israeli “oppression.” The draft also refers to the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as one aiming to establish “freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” 

Those who have rightly objected to this content (on grounds that it distorts history by omitting the self-defense context of Israeli decision-making) have mainly sought to eliminate it from the state framework and from curricula adopted by local school districts. So far, they’ve had some success: the state government not only removed the anti-Israel lessons from its framework, but also added requirements stating that lessons should not “reflect or promote . . . any bias, bigotry or discrimination.”

But a number of California school districts have moved forward with programs that maintain the anti-Israel bias. For example, the Santa Ana Unified School District approved an ethnic studies course that treats Israel’s founding as “colonialism” and Israel as guilty of “[s]tate sanctioned violence against Palestinians.” An ethnic studies class in the Sequoia Union High School District included a slide that uses an inaccurate map to claim that Israel is “created on Palestinian land.” Several districts, including the Hayward Unified School District, have worked to resist the state updates with organizations like the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, which has promoted the idea that Israel’s attempt to defend itself is a form of “genocide.”

This resistance to eliminating anti-Israel lessons helps to show that they are not merely an accidental element in the curriculum that can be easily extracted. The source of the anti-Israel lessons isn’t the random bias of some curriculum creators. The source is in the core ideas of the field of ethnic studies itself, which is influential well beyond schools and universities. Ethnic studies is not primarily a fact-based field, but an activist discipline injecting a poisonous moral outlook.

The anti-Israel bias is merely one manifestation of the fundamentally corrupt worldview of ethnic studies.

The basic moral ideas that inform the ethnic studies field are enunciated clearly in the current version of the California state framework. Consider these items from the “Guiding Values and Principles of Ethnic Studies” section, in a list introduced with the statement “Ethnic studies courses, teaching, and learning are intended to do the following”:

Center and place high value on the precolonial ancestral knowledge, narratives, and communal experiences of . . . groups that are typically marginalized in society. . . .

Critique empire building in history and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression.

Although part of these statements seem like opposition to racism, treating that as their main focus would miss the sinister meaning behind them.

Consider the call to “critique” — meaning narrowly to identify and condemn the negative aspects of — “empire building” and “its relationship to . . . forms of power and oppression.” The document defines both “power” and “oppression” in tendentiously broad terms: it treats many different phenomena as essentially the same, launching an assault on all of them at once.

It defines “power” as any “political or social authority,” and “authority” as “the power or ability to make rules and influence others.” This critique, then, targets all political power. It means condemning a dictatorship such as North Korea or Nazi Germany, which forces its people into concentration camps, and also condemning the government of a free society, such as the United States or the UK, which strives to defend its citizens’ rights from criminals.

This definition of “power” also condemns any influence of others by “social” means. This treats skilled writers or technologically advanced publishers who “influence” through persuasion as worthy of the same “critique” as those who exercise political power — the power of forcible compulsion — to oppressive ends. So: Abraham Lincoln and George Orwell, both remarkably persuasive communicators, are to be treated as somehow equivalent to the likes of Stalin and Pol Pot, notorious for totalitarian coercion.

Worse, this “critique” targets all ideas used to justify powerful social systems, regardless of the nature of that system or those ideas. This comes out in the document’s lesson on the term “dominant narrative,” which it defines as “an explanation or story that is told in service of the dominant social group’s interests and ideologies.” Properly, one would evaluate such explanations or stories by reference to the question of whether or not they are true. But, perversely, the lesson teaches students to evaluate them by asking “whom does this narrative serve?” and “whom does this narrative harm?” Some of the examples of “dominant narratives” provided are blatantly false ideas used to justify brutally unjust social systems, such as the idea that slavery in the American South was justified because it was actually good for enslaved people. Similarly, the document lists forms of “oppression” that include bigoted ideas such as misogyny and antisemitism.

But the document also lists “anthropocentrism,” the idea that our primary concern should be with human (rather than animal or plant) life, as a form of oppression. Translation: this places everyone who thinks the interests of humans should take precedence over the well-being of ants in the same category as defenders of Jim Crow. And the document includes as a “dominant narrative” the idea that “America is a land of equal opportunity” in the same category as the justification of Southern slavery. Without even attempting to argue that this land-of-opportunity idea is false or unjust, it singles it out for the same sort of “critique” and condemnation, simply on the ground that people use it to justify the “dominant” system.

What is the meaning of this categorical vilification of all forms of “power” and all arguments raised to justify a “dominant” social system?

In the broadest sense, power is the ability to do things. The more power one has, the more one can do. Some abilities are wrong to exercise — such as the ability to rob or murder people — and these acts deserve to be condemned and opposed. But there is also power to accomplish good things that transform human life for the better. Think of what has brought us from life as hunter-gatherers to our technologically advanced, breathtakingly prosperous civilization. I mean the economic and scientific power to produce abundant food crops; to generate electricity; to proliferate knowledge and develop life-saving medicine; I mean the political power to protect a country from an invading dictatorship.

Meanwhile, while attempts to justify destructive social systems, like dictatorship, draw on false ideas (think of the racial-nationalist collectivism of Mein Kampf), the justifications of systems that protect people’s rights and ensure that they can benefit from living together draw on true ideas (think of the principle of individual rights announced in the Declaration of Independence).

The power to accomplish good things — the economic power to produce them, the political power to protect rights, etc. — and the social systems that make peaceful coexistence possible are the products of civilization. Over the course of millennia, courageous thinkers and producers have discovered new knowledge, created new technologies, and pioneered new forms of government that make human life better. They built on the achievements of individuals before them who contributed to the development and growth of our civilization.

Without civilization, we would all be poor and vulnerable, with little power to sustain and improve human life or protect ourselves from evildoers. Yet this would be the result of tearing down all power for being power, all successful social systems for being successful social systems. This is the result of the ethnic studies framework’s attacks on “power” and “dominant narratives,” without regard to whether that power is used for good or those narratives are true.

If this is difficult to believe, consider the call to “Center and place high value on . . . precolonial ancestral knowledge, narratives, and communal experiences” on the grounds that it is held by “groups that are typically marginalized in society.” This is not a call to investigate the ideas of “precolonial” societies to see how they explain their history, including both their successes and their failures. This is a blanket assertion that we should concern ourselves with these societies because they were eclipsed by more powerful societies that are scientifically and technologically advanced. It means we must “center and place a high value on” tribal myths, folklore, and superstition — over life-furthering achievements, such as Gutenberg’s printing press, Newton’s Principia, Edison’s electric light, and Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine.

This is the perverse, anti-civilization moral perspective conveyed by ethnic studies: weakness is what makes a society virtuous. Ability — “power” — of any sort deserves condemnation. We should always side with the less civilized group. No other considerations matter.

This is the same essential perspective advocated in a variety of newer academic fields, including gender studies and the ethnic studies subfields like Indigenous studies or Asian American studies, as well as by some within more established humanities fields like English — and that is metastasizing beyond academia into the wider culture.

It is this anti-civilization worldview that California seeks to teach every young person in the state.

Given this perspective, it’s no wonder that ethnic studies teachers endorse Palestinian claims to be justly resisting Israeli “oppression” (because Palestinians are seen as weaker), and look on Israel with skepticism or hostility (because it is more “powerful,” wealthier, militarily stronger, scientifically advanced).

But this is a distorted moral perspective. It elides important facts about Israel, including the nature of its power and what the Israelis seek to do with it. Israelis built their wealth through their own innovative thought and entrepreneurial effort, not by harming others. Their ability to do this is the product of political freedom, which helped them win Western allies. And Israel wields its military power (derived from its economic power) to defend its citizens, not to initiate unprovoked attacks on neighboring countries.

This stands in a marked contrast to Hamas, the ruling Palestinian power in Gaza, which uses resources stolen from its citizens (and mooched from the West) to fuel its genocidal aim of murdering Israeli civilians. The October 7th attack made the barbaric evil of Hamas, and the complicity of many Gazan civilians in that evil, obvious for all to see. It also makes starkly clear why Israel is engaging in its current military campaign.

To justify hostility to Israel simply on grounds of its “power” is to condemn it for its virtue: the fact that it is a civilized, scientifically advanced, and basically free society. And, to favor the weaker side waging war to destroy a free, prosperous nation for the sake of a religious dictatorship is to openly license the worst sort of evil.

Yet this is a direct application of the corrupt moral perspective behind ethnic studies, not an oddity that must be explained by random bias. The same vicious perspective leads ethnic studies advocates and those with similar ideas to attack the United States and civilization more broadly.

For example, the California ethnic studies framework includes lessons — like the “dominant narrative” one — that promote unjust claims about the United States, also a “powerful,” highly civilized country. Another lesson explicitly promotes “Native American epistemology” as a means of understanding “environmental issues that affect . . . the fragility of Mother Earth” — thus placing tribal myths on the same level as modern science. In fact, taken fully seriously, this moral perspective entails an opposition to science, technology, industry, and political systems based on the rule of law — all practices and viewpoints connected with “powerful,” advanced civilizations, because they’re foundational to civilization.

Consequently, even when critics are able to campaign for curriculum changes at the state or district level, these changes will not blunt the anti-Israel and the broader, fundamentally anti-civilization force of the core ideas of the program. To the extent that ethnic studies teachers accept these ideas and follow guidance from ethnic studies advocates, they will apply it to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as it in fact applies to the detriment of Israel. Further, even when teachers don’t promote anti-Israel views, students who learn the core ideas of ethnic studies will still be susceptible to the anti-Israel perspective as well as anti-Americanism and every other form of hostility to civilization.

Opponents of anti-Israel elements of ethnic studies must recognize that the real issue is not a bias against just one country, but a perspective that is set against civilization as such. To stand up for the values that Israel represents at its best, one must stand up for the achievements of civilization as a whole and against the entire moral perspective behind ethnic studies.