Protesters gathered at CUNY Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez’s office under the mantra ‘End Jew Hatred’ to protest growing antisemitism within CUNY and their campuses on Sept. 12, 2023. Photo by Meir Chaimowitz/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect

Ten Republican US House members from New York issued a letter this week imploring the state’s top education officials to remove what they described as material biased against Israel from the New York State Education Department’s website.

In their letter to state Education Department Chancellor Lester Young Jr. and Commissioner Betty Rosa, the lawmakers flagged a video and article linked from the website designed to help educators teach children about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Jewish teachers, rabbis, and community leaders have complained about the video — titled “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Explained” and produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — according to the lawmakers, who described it as misleading and inaccurate.

Specifically, the lawmakers noted in part that the video features maps that do not show the Golan Heights as part of Israeli territory, describes Jerusalem as a split city with its eastern portion “occupied,” and claims that the West Bank is similarly “occupied.”

The US recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, in 2019.

The letter adds that the video contorts Israel’s founding into something wholly inconsistent with documented history and claims that the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “about one thing: land.”

According to the lawmakers, “this notion glosses over the true essence of the conflict, which is the desire of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and their supporters to wipe out Israel and the Jews, whereas Israel is fighting for the right of it and the Jewish people to exist.”

The video also allegedly skips over or grossly oversimplifies key details surrounding Israel’s establishment in 1948 and its subsequent years of existence, portraying the Jewish state as a key obstacle to peace.

“Israel has offered numerous land-for-peace deals to the Palestinians, creating a state of their own in exchange,” the lawmakers argued. “The Palestinians have rejected these offers. The notion that Israel is merely trying to hold onto all of its land claim is ludicrous and has no basis in reality.”

The lawmakers also took issue with the training materials seemingly equating Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that invaded the Jewish state earlier this month and perpetrated the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

“Hamas broadcasted videos of its soldiers murdering, beheading, raping, torturing, kidnapping, and brutalizing children, women, and the elderly,” the letter stated. “There can be no equivocation between violence used by these barbarians and the Israeli Defense Forces, which have clear rules of engagement consistent with international law.”

This is not the first time that the New York State Education Department has courted controversy over its representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In February, for example, activists and lawmakers called on the department to investigate why a standardized test required for attaining a high school diploma and taken by over 50,000 students a year contained questions asking if the UN’s partition plan for the land of Israel was prompted by the Holocaust and whether “Zionists and Jewish immigrants” have benefited most from territorial changes that have taken place since then.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.