Genocide posters and Palestinian flags: Oakland schools face new claim

A Jewish employee of the Oakland public school district walked into a ninth-grade classroom at Oakland High School on Tuesday. Affixed across a wall were more than 20 political posters and flags, including a large Palestinian flag. Multiple posters alerted students to a “genocide” without explicitly naming the perpetrators or the victims. Others voiced support for Palestine.

“There are no two sides to genocide,” stated one poster marked with bloody footprints. Two trumpeted Cuba, while others opposed “imperialism,” “capitalism” and “empire.”

Another poster looked like a page out of a comic book. “How many ways will I justify genocide today?” it said. “Bcuz the Bible told us so,” one speech bubble responded. “Some 1 else genocided us first so why don’t you ask them,” replied another.

The Jewish employee, who took photos of what they saw in the classroom, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for professional consequences. 

“It’s just really scary,” the person said.

The employee bounces among middle and high schools across Oakland in their role. Over the last two years, they have compiled a trove of photographs of pro-Palestinian displays at different schools. They shared the photos with J. this week.

The staff member said many teachers across the city have decorated their classrooms to show support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel. Still, the Oakland High School case was an extreme example.

“This was the worst I’ve seen,” the person said.

Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panther movement and a neighbor to Berkeley, an epicenter of left-wing protest movements, has for decades been intimately associated with far-left politics. It is part of the culture and the identity of the city.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, some Oakland public school teachers have taken up the mantle of the pro-Palestinian cause, promoting anti-Zionist politics and the Palestinian national movement, linking the conflict to racial dynamics at home. 

Soon after the Hamas attack and the start of the war, the Oakland Education Association published a statement condemning Israel, which it called “an apartheid state” whose leaders were espousing “genocidal rhetoric.” The teachers union statement, released in October 2023, condemned the founding of Israel in 1948 as the start of a “75 year long illegal military occupation of Palestine.”

The California Department of Education has issued findings over the past several months stating that the Oakland Unified School District had contributed to a discriminatory environment against Jewish students in three incidents, each in some way related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and all in the last two years. One complaint centered on a Palestinian flag flying on a school flagpole; another on unauthorized anti-Zionist materials taught during a December 2023 “teach-in”; and a third on maps of the Middle East that did not include Israel.

The photos taken by the OUSD staff member have been submitted as part of a sweeping complaint alleging discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students and staff, first filed in November 2023. Many of the photos are from the 2023-2024 school year; some were taken more recently.

This week’s discovery at Oakland High — the latest addition to the running complaint — centers on the pro-Palestinian posters and worksheets in the classroom of Jorge Paniagua-Lorenzano, a teacher in his 20s. Paniagua-Lorenzano did not respond to a J. request for comment over Facebook, and emails sent to an address listed in the OHS directory were blocked. His LinkedIn profile states that he graduated from college four years ago and teaches ethnic studies at Oakland High.

Pro-Palestinian signs and posters have been widespread across the district. 

One of the photos submitted to OUSD was taken in 2024 at LIFE Academy, a 6-12 school, showing a poster near a classroom doorframe. On the poster, a young person wearing a kaffiyeh launches a slingshot, backgrounded by a Palestinian flag. “What if all you had was a slingshot to defend your life?” the poster said. 

An undated photo, also from LIFE Academy, shows a door painted as a tribute to Leila Khaled, a leftist Palestinian activist and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terror group. Khaled hijacked commercial airliners in 1969 and 1970 for the Palestinian cause. 

A February 2024 image taken at Westlake Middle School shows a Palestinian flag hanging from a bulletin board. Photos taken in September at Edna Brewer Middle School show posters that say “Free Palestine” and “Gaza Must Live.”

The OUSD employee estimated that about one in three schools they visit bear some kind of pro-Palestinian poster, flag or message.

The staff member described feeling “shocked” over the atmosphere of one-sided material across the district. Many Oakland public schools are majority non-white and serve students whose first language isn’t English and who may have limited exposure to Jews in their day-to-day lives.

“The most egregious material,” the staff member said, “is at schools where there are few or no Jewish students at all. It’s concerning to think that these young, impressionable students are learning about Jewish people or Israel in this very negative context.”

In the Oakland High classroom this week, the staff member photographed a worksheet for students that stated as a fact that Israel is committing a “genocide in Palestine.”

The phenomenon is not unique to Oakland schools. But over the past two years, OUSD has been flooded with discrimination complaints. 

Spearheading the effort is Marleen Sacks, an Oakland attorney representing the Oakland Jewish Alliance, a grassroots group of Jewish residents and OUSD parents. 

Sacks tacked the Oakland High case onto a long list of discrimination allegations already on OUSD’s desk. Eight incidents have been adjudicated; the rest have not. The Oakland High incident was the 25th amendment to Sacks’ initial discrimination complaint. Sacks files an amendment each time she obtains new evidence of alleged discrimination, and amendments often contain multiple incidents, she said.

“Our tax dollars at work,” Sacks said sardonically. “All because the district refuses to address antisemitism.”

In her complaint under the state’s Uniform Complaint Procedures regulations, Sacks described the extreme nature of the Oakland High class.

“This display takes indoctrination to a shocking new level,” the complaint said.

OUSD replied to a request for comment from J. by noting that the district could not comment on specific cases because of pending legal proceedings.

The district’s statement, emailed by spokesperson Ericka Doolittle, said that “most of the complaints addressed in media inquiries were about incidents that took place in late 2023 and 2024,” adding that the district had hired “several third party investigators” to look into “more than 20 complaints.”

The statement noted that the district is “in the process of implementing corrective actions” in response to some of the complaints, which include teacher training on antisemitism and the impact of “providing only one viewpoint” in the classroom.

“While the District has taken intentional steps to combat antisemitism, we still have much work to do,” the statement said.