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The curriculum referred to Israelis as ‘colonizing people,’ argued Palestinians are not ‘fundamentally anti-Semitic,’ and referred to Gazans as ‘occupied people’ who ‘live for the most part as refugees.’
By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon
In 2011, Brown University’s Choices Program, which develops curriculum on history and current issues for K-12 schools in all 50 states, taught high school students “of the historic Jewish ties to the land that is now Israel.”
In 2015, anti-Israel academic Beshara Doumani, then a founding director of Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies, began advising the program—and the materials shifted in tone.
That year, the Choices Program released a revamped version of its unit titled, “The Middle East in Transition: Questions for U.S. Policy.”
The unit, which included an acknowledgment of Doumani’s “invaluable” contributions, provided students with new definitions of “colonialism” and “imperialism,” according to an Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) review of the curriculum materials obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
It also included a map that listed Tel Aviv—not Jerusalem—as Israel’s capital.
Two years later, an updated edition of the same unit went further. Included alongside the map of Middle Eastern capitals was a quiz calling on students to “fill in the missing countries and capitals below.”
Students received credit for writing “Israel” next to the listed “Country Capital” of Tel Aviv.
The unit also eliminated a section on Israel’s creation, according to the ISGAP review, “instead moving the discussion about Israel’s creation to a few brief paragraphs within the section titled ‘Israel and the Palestinian Territories.'”
Around the same time, in December 2017, Brown’s Choices Program uploaded videos meant to supplement its Middle East materials.
They referred to Israelis as “colonizing people,” argued Palestinians are not “fundamentally anti-Semitic,” and referred to Gazans as “occupied people” who “live for the most part as refugees.”
By 2019, the program’s unit on Iran—which previously referred to Hezbollah as a “labelled terrorist organization” and noted Tehran’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map”—instead called Hezbollah a “militant group,” the ISGAP review found.
One year later, Brown named Doumani the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Chair of Palestinian Studies, making him the first endowed chair in the field at any U.S. university.
While anti-Semitism in higher education has driven headlines in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, it has reared its head in public K-12 districts as well.
Doumani’s work for the Choices Program reflects the overlap between the two issues. Each year, an estimated one million students use the program’s curriculum materials, which were taught in roughly 8,000 high schools in recent years.
Brown has dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism in the program’s curriculum materials in the past, arguing that it has a commitment to “help educators guide thoughtful consideration of diverse views” and present “strongly opposing points of view and then ask students to evaluate them and develop their own questions and conclusions.”
Doumani, however, has a different view of how Israel should be taught and understood.
In a 2016 panel discussion held at Brown, he explicitly rejected the “CNN-style ‘this is your story, this is my story, let’s recognize the humanity of each other and then find some sort of a solution that we both can live with,” arguing that such an approach ignores Israel’s status “as a settler colonial project.”
“I think it’s important to explain that this is not a debate. And it’s not meant to be a debate,” Doumani said during the panel, titled, “Suffocating Embrace? The Futures of Palestinians in Israel.”
“This is a really critical conversation,” he continued. “Israel cannot be understood properly unless the features of it as a settler colonial project are understood.”
Doumani, who did not respond to a request for comment, has long driven anti-Israel activism in academia.
He has expressed support for the academic boycott of Israeli universities, and his Center for Middle East Studies last year hosted Francesca Albanese, the United Nations official who defended Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7 and accused Israel of “genocidal violence.”
When Brown’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter drafted its own statement blaming the terror attack on Israel’s “settler colonial regime of apartheid” and expressing “solidarity with the Palestinian resistance,” its members suggested sending the statement to Doumani for his review, the Free Beacon reported at the time.
From 2021 to 2023, meanwhile, Doumani served as president of Birzeit University, a Palestinian school that bills itself as “a thorn in the side of the occupation” and hosts military parades honoring Hamas.
“Doumani’s department, the Middle East Studies department as a whole, is the core of the anti-Israel movement here at Brown,” one Jewish student at the Ivy League institution said. “Anyone out on the main green protesting or leading any movement against Israel is ingrained within the department.”
For the ISGAP, the Choices Program curriculum—and Doumani’s role in crafting them—should prompt K-12 schools to review their use of the materials.
“There is no indication that Brown University ever communicated Doumani’s new pedagogical strategy to the thousands of schools with which it contracted under the Choices Program,” the organization wrote in its report.
“Nor is there any reason to believe that the ‘academic freedom’ that ostensibly exists in university settings to present a counterpoint to Professor Doumani’s views would naturally carry over to the K-12 setting.”
Charles Asher Small, ISGAP’s founding director, said that “Doumani’s approach to secondary school education misrepresents the Middle East as essentially Muslim, while portraying the Jewish people as foreigners and outsiders.”
This approach, Small added, “attempts to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jewish people and Israel and contributes to the explosion of antisemitism sweeping American education.”
Brown is one of the 60 universities under federal investigation for its alleged failure “to protect Jewish students on campus.” On Monday, the Department of Education sent the school a letter warning of “potential enforcement actions.”
Brown appears to be taking the threat seriously. A spokesman for the school, Brian Clark, said Brown is “committed to preventing discrimination and harassment based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism and islamophobia, in all of its activities.”
“We are also committed to academic freedom as fundamentally important to our mission of education and research—in accordance with that commitment, we actively seek a diverse range of perspectives and viewpoints,” Clark told the Free Beacon.
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