Free Palestine, Free Speech: Dissent and Dialogue in Bucks County, Pennsylvania

(PHILADELPHIA) – On June 12, 2024, school buses, faculty members’ cars, and family vehicles filled a bustling parking lot of Central Bucks West High School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Community members prepared for the high school’s graduation ceremony the next day. But in all the movement, one truck stood out – an electronic billboard with a bright red background that read, “On October 10, Youssef Abdelwahab posted in support of Hamas.”

Accuracy in Media, a conservative non-profit “dedicated to exposing media bias,” created the billboard. The organization has a record of supporting the Vietnam War and creating personalized websites to vindicate students and educators who post in support of Palestine. Its ad ran around Bucks County for the entire day. It made no mystery of who it was targeting, plastering Abdelwahab’s face along the entire right hand side of the billboard. 

However, Abdelwahab, a co-advisor of the Spanish National Honors Society at Central Bucks West and the faculty sponsor of the school’s Muslim Student Association – affectionately known by his students as “Mr. A” – is a far cry from the Islamophobic stereotype Accuracy in Media and a group of Bucks County parents portrayed him to be.

As someone who was born in Cairo, Egypt and taught English in Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps, Abdelwahab’s connection to Gaza is personal. Some of his Instagram posts highlighted direct action. “Resistance is Justified when people are occupied,” read one post in which Abdelwahab wore a red keffiyeh head scarf while holding his child. Others highlighted his pride in his students and Jewish Voices for Peace activists “saying no to genocide.” He even showed unity between Jewish people and Muslims with a post highlighting that whoever you are, “we must come together as a human species to stop the genocide of Palestinians.”

Still, the posts were more than enough to launch a year-long campaign against Abdelwahab in a district that attracted national attention for public battles over book bans, transgender student rights, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Throughout the last school year, suppression of conversation around Israel and Palestine began to take hold in Bucks County. Abdelwahab, and his students by proxy, had been labeled as “anti-Semitic,” with some reporters coming to his house unannounced.

Earlier this year,  the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched a “shared ancestry investigation” into Central Bucks School District and Central Bucks West High School after an unknown person alleged that Abdelwahab’s posts and activities discriminated against Jewish students, according to Newsweek.  

“I taught at a predominantly Black and Latino school,” Abdelwahab told The Click regarding his previous teaching job in the significantly more diverse Washington, DC five years ago. “All of my principals and school administrators were minorities, so obviously, a completely different cultural environment. I probably wouldn’t be going through what I’m going through right now.”

Despite pressure from local and national organizations, Abdelwahab said he and his students have continued to encourage diversity and plurality through conversation. They have built a community, which has pushed back against attacks on free speech, he says.  With many US universities suppressing protest and discussion of Israel’s siege on Gaza which is being investigated by the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention, a similar conflict is brewing in high schools in Bucks County.   This geopolitical crisis which is expanding into Lebanon is on many voters’ minds as they enter the voting booth before the 2024 presidential election, and could play a major role in the decision of this closely watched Pennsylvania district.

Abdelwahab’s students, fellow parents and community members defended him at the March 2024 Central Bucks School Board Meeting where a group of local parents were trying to have the teacher fired. In his testimony to the school board, Central Bucks alum and local organizer Sidharth Nair challenged the board to hold a higher standard.

“Let’s not forget last year, our district was under the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons,”  Nair said. “That’s why we voted in a new board last November. But we’re not done.”

“Targeted and persecuted in this community”

Throughout the last 10 years and into the pandemic, Bucks County has emerged as one of several school board battlegrounds where parents, teachers, and board members have sparred over policies and curricula. Located just north of liberal stronghold Philadelphia, the county reflects the polarity of frequent swing state Pennsylvania. After voters declined to send two Moms for Liberty members back to the board in late 2023, the public comment period at school board meetings was filled with pleas for civility. 

Some members of the Muslim, Desi, and Arab American minority in Bucks County felt their concerns had not been addressed. Parents like Ayesha Umer of Chalfont expressed dissatisfaction with the way Islamophobic bullying, like blaming children for the attacks of 9/11, was handled with little accountability in Bucks County public schools. After moving her daughter to an all-girls Catholic high school nearly 40 minutes away from Chalfont, Umer feels that the private school is more compassionate to Muslim students despite the religious difference.

Desis of Doylestown Eid Event in spring 2024 at Bucks County Community College [Credit: Genevieve Hartnett]

Student Mary Ayata noticed the dynamic in Bucks County schools immediately. Before the 2022-2023 school year, Ayata moved to Central Bucks as a rising junior after living in State College, Pennsylvania, for most of her life with a larger community of Muslim friends. 

In her senior year, Ayata created Central Bucks West’s first Muslim Student Association with a friend.  She said the goal of the club was to form a safe space for Muslim and non-Muslim students alike to learn about a different culture and religion often stigmatized in American media. Given his kind demeanor and openness to include all students, as well as him being one of four teachers of color in all of Bucks County, Ayata knew that their faculty advisor had to be Mr. A.

“He created a bridge between white students and students of color,” said Mean Alfeen, a junior at Central Bucks West in his testimony to the school board at the March 2024 meeting. 

Throughout the school year, the Muslim Student Association meets weekly to pray together, provide presentations about different practices in Islam, host school leaders and school board members, and celebrate holidays like Ramadan and Eid.

“We’ve always talked about Palestine because we see it as something that involves us, but we don’t just talk about Palestine,” Ayata said. “We talk about Muslim countries and minority countries in general, like Congo and Sudan, and just racism in general. And to us, what’s happening with Palestine and Israel is not a religious thing. It’s a racial thing to us. We want to talk about racism in the whole world and how it affects everyone, not just Palestinians and Muslims.”

They have even begun to hold interfaith events with the CBW’s Jewish Student Union to facilitate difficult discussions around Israel and Palestine. Composed of students who are from Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Pakistan and other Southeast Asian countries, the MSA is the most diverse club at the high school, according to Abdelwahab.

Given the topics discussed in their club, Ayata anticipated a degree of pushback from more conservative members of the Bucks County community. But fighting the suppression of alternative opinion and the campaign to get her teacher fired is not how she intended to spend her senior year of high school.

“As a representative of MSA,” said Ayata to the school board in March 2024. “I’d like to make it clear that we feel targeted and persecuted in this community.”

The surveillance of club activities reached a new level following an event hosted by the MSA in February 2024 when students wrote to Pennsylvania State Treasurer Stacy Garrity to encourage the office to divest in Israel and instead invest in domestic priorities. Abdelwahab feels that this is where the attacks against the club started and where momentum gained amongst parents in the campaign against him. 

“The students were asking tax dollars to be spent in a more responsible way, like helping the poor here and fixing potholes,” said Abdelwahab.

In their public comment to the school board in spring 2024, the group of parents and even a few students who raised concerns about Abdelwahab’s Instagram post also cited the flyers for the event as anti-Semitic. Still, Ayata and her friends were more skeptical as to why an event about budget reappropriation would bring about such fervor. While many comments received on their Instagram and in private messages were from adults in Bucks County, Ayata traced some accounts to states outside of Pennsylvania.

“It was quite literally random adults,” Ayata said. “But I guess those people realized that they can’t attack students, so they just pointed their fingers at Mr. A.”

The Click reached out to parents who spoke out against Abdelwahab at the meeting for a comment, but none responded.

“We’re Not Numbers; These Are Human Beings”

Israel’s ongoing siege on Gaza and occupation of the West Bank has lit a fire under many young people across America. With the continued organizing of students around this issue, high schools and universities have begun to impose controversial new rules to regulate protesting.

However, the effort to shut down civil conversations around Israel and Palestine has been an ongoing political project long before 2023. In its report, “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US,” Palestine Legal lays out what it claims are coordinated efforts by Israel’s staunchest defenders in the United States to suppress conversations around Palestine dating back to 2010. Very often, the subjects of these attacks are Muslim Student Associations who support boycotting Israeli products, host events to display Palestinian culture or share first-hand accounts of Israel’s human rights violations. In 292 incidents reported between 2014 and 2015, individuals and campus groups critical of Israel  were routinely labeled as in support of terrorism and were subject to lawsuits and legal threats. 

As a result, Palestine Legal maintains that honest conversation around this ongoing geopolitical issue has long been stifled in American universities. But for the last year, it has reached new levels and expanded into high schools as more and more young people are becoming aware of Israel and Palestine.

“Schools often write a statement that’s very one-sided,” said Asiyah Jones MPH, Youth Leadership and Advocacy Projects Coordinator at the Council on American-Islamic Relations Philadelphia, of the response of most schools after the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023,  “It doesn’t really take into account both sets of students … and it pits students against each other.”

Philadelphia Families at the Gaza Encampment at University of Pennsylvania [Credit: Genevieve Hartnett]

“There’s always this dismissive tone towards the students, like, ‘Oh, you’re a bunch of kids. You’re idealistic,’ or, ‘You’re extremist,’ or, ‘You’re being manipulated by these outside agitators,’ trying to discredit their ability to have nuanced positions,” Hirji said.

Just north of the city, Abdelwahab and the students felt a strong connection to the organizers in Philadelphia, many of whom have continued to defend Abdelwahab against sustained attacks by Accuracy in Media. In spite of them being labeled as “anti-semitic,” the Muslim Student Association held several interfaith events with the CBW Jewish Student Union, and they have had constructive conversations around Israel and Palestine.

But they were not without tension. According to Abdelwahab, many students in the MSA were deeply hurt by the JSU’s February 2024 thank you letter-writing event to soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces, as CBW students have had 150 relatives killed in IDF attacks since October 7, 2023.

“This isn’t something that has been reported on,” Abdelwahab said. “One of the main concerns about why writing letters to the IDF was painful is because they, according to the students in MSA, are engaging in a genocide in Gaza, frankly, rather than self-defense. So, the JSU students are seeing the truth in that.”

Ayata and Abdelwahab have talked about the cultural and religious gaps being bridged in these discussions.

“They [The MSA and JSU] are having discussions that were thought to be impossible,” Abdelwahab said. “At the end of the day, they have hearts and minds … they’ve been open to hearing more of the other side that they’ve admittedly been cut off from for most of their upbringing [of hearing], ‘Israel can do no wrong.’”

Former school board Vice President Dr. Mariam Mahmud MD, who resigned from her position in August 2024 after her family moved to a different region in Bucks County, dedicated her tenure to “hearing those not often heard.” In her eyes, the MSA standing up against the negativity is a sign of Bucks County moving in a more inclusive direction.

“I think it’s important to recognize that sometimes people are not speaking about hard things for marginalized groups,” Mahmud said. “It doesn’t mean that they’re not hurting, and we need to always remember that we do have an obligation to find out what needs to be said or amplified.”

The Jewish Student Union’s sponsor declined to comment. The district’s Acting Superintendent Jim Scanlon said of the interfaith discussions, “The crisis in the Middle East is emotional, horrific, and innocent people are being killed every day … There is an opportunity to educate people on the impact this war has on our families in Central Bucks.”

While the Central Bucks School District School Board upheld Abdelwahab’s right to post freely on his social media, the pain of even having to defend their teacher in this way remains a dehumanizing reality for Ayata—now in her first year at Penn State University— and her classmates. 

“It’s crazy that we even have to debate this,” said Ayata, “These are children, women, men, innocent people living on their land that was taken from them. When I say I’m pro-Palestinian, people think I’m this terrorist, but I’m the one saying, ‘Ceasefire now!’ We’re not numbers; these are human beings.” 

“Last gasp of a particular story”

Many of the adults and organizations who brought about the charges against Abdelwahab continued to monitor the activities of the MSA. They identified other social media posts as concerning to school board meetings last spring.  In May 2024, after the Department of Education launched its investigation into Abdelwahab, the school board discussed changing the school district’s social media policy.

“Don’t Stop Until You’re Proud!” Window at Desis of Doylestown Eid Celebration [Credit: Genevieve Hartnett]

In the face of outside influence and politicking, the community of allies around Abdelwahab and the MSA continued to support the club and their rights. CAIR Philadelphia has continued to share his story on its social media and created a petition to the Central Bucks School District to protect his employment and to “not waste any more taxpayer money on investigating false accusations.”

“It’s not about me or my feelings,” said Abdelwahab of the attacks. “At the end of the day, these kids’ voices are being silenced for presenting alternative views.”

Abdelwahab and the MSA are working to move beyond last year while remaining aware of the increased scrutiny against Philadelphia high school teachers who support Palestine, as well as the heightened response of the University of Pennsylvania to peaceful protests and vigils for martyrs in Gaza and Lebanon. The MSA’s latest Instagram post may have the hopeful promise of “another year of fun,”  but it is not without dedication to protecting the group’s rights of free speech and community in a district where it was attacked for months.

“I think it’s really brought a lot of awareness to Palestine, the history of the conflict and a lot of critical attention to the project of Zionism,” Hirji said of students raising their voices about genocide. “I hope that the trajectory continues and that some of what we’re seeing is the last gasp of an attempt to hold on to this particular story.”