The National Council for History Education (NCHE), which provides resources to teachers for quality history education, removed a lesson from its website and is reviewing the lesson’s contents, after the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) raised concerns about the lesson’s many falsehoods and its anti-Israel bias.

NCHE’s lesson, titled “Plan Displacement and Resistance: The Nakba of 1948 Continues,” was “shockingly inaccurate,” ZOA wrote in a letter to Jessica Ellison, NCHE’s executive director.  The lesson, the ZOA asserted, “downplays and ignores critical facts in order to deny Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend its people from violence and terrorism.”  The ZOA identified numerous examples of the inaccuracies and bias, which violated the NCHE’s own mission to support the “accurate” and “inclusive” teaching and learning of “complex histories.”

Since NCHE’s derives its funding primarily from federal grants, the ZOA notified NCHE of its intention to alert the Department of Education and other federal funders to the problematic materials.  Federal agencies would be unlikely to favor continued funding of an organization that, in this time of rising antisemitism, is fomenting the problem in K-12 education, the ZOA informed NCHE. 

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein and Director of ZOA’s Center for Law and Justice, Susan Tuchman, Esq. praised NCHE for its decision to remove the problematic anti-Israel lesson from its website and review its contents, stating: “NCHE did the right thing in recognizing that the anti-Israel lesson, with all its inaccuracies and omissions, should be taken down from the website and reconsidered. ZOA has offered its expertise and resources to NCHE, so that if the organization decides to provide and promote a lesson relating to Israel, it is a lesson that is based on historical facts that K-12 educators can responsibly rely on.”