The Hidden Curriculum of Antizionism: What the Slogans Hide
The scandal is not what antizionist syllabi teach. It’s what they have to hide.
In graduate school, the conclusions often arrived before the evidence. The texts were already chosen, the interpretations already implied, and the rooms had a temperature you learned to read fast. Occupation. Apartheid. Settler-colonialism. Resistance. These weren’t just assigned readings—they were the vocabulary of belonging. You used them or you were the collective sigh when you raised your hand. These terms were canonical, the syllabus was the scripture, and the professor was…well, I’m sure you’ve met some.
I used them. I was good at theory and I cared about justice, so of course I’m going to side with the colonized, the subaltern, the wretched of the earth. I knew Fayez Sayegh, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Patrick Wolfe, and I felt like I was doing the serious, morally grounded work that was needed in our neo-liberal hegemony. I was, in the language of Philip Jackson, being educated in the hidden curriculum.
The Hidden Curriculum
Not the assigned texts. The unwritten rules. The things the room transmits without ever naming. The lesson underneath the lesson. Those intangible social norms, expectations, and values that influence your perspective. Jackson coined this term in Life in Classrooms (1968), after a B.F. Skinner-trained career of measuring children like lab rats. He attended a Stanford seminar on primates that made him realize he’d been studying kids the way researchers studied monkeys.
His student, Elliot Eisner, named its companion in 1979: the null curriculum. The subjects and authors who get buried because they complicate the lesson. The texts that are never assigned. The non-canonical works. The ones that complicate the trajectory of your arc.
Every course has both the hidden and the null. I didn’t notice the hidden curriculum until I took courses that made students uncomfortable. Or, until I did. I remember giving a presentation on the horrors of the First Crusade in front of Muslim and Catholic students. Not as easy as it sounds. I took a course on American Religious history and the room got silent when I asked how the settlers could think America was so special, like it was some kind of garden of Eden. The silence was broken by a Mormon student.
I read a syllabus for one course, and could not help but ask the professor why the chips were stacked so tightly in favor of his perspective. He paused, “You know, you’re right. They do.” Seems he had never thought of it before.
The point I’m making is that sometimes the only way to see the unseen, is for others to make it obvious. I had never had an awakening to Jewish pain outside of my studies, until October 7th made it impossible to ignore.
And here is what I know—don’t need to be told, just know—what those rooms do to Jewish students. To be the student whose people’s right to exist as a nation is a question at the colloquium. Where Zionism is deployed as a synonym for evil. Where you understand, quickly and without ambiguity, that the room is not built for you. That your identity is the complication the curriculum cannot concede. We all saw what that environment eventually produced—the encampments, the chants, the faculty letters, the Jewish students who hid their Stars of David. This didn’t come from nowhere. It came from syllabi. From what got assigned and what didn’t. From classrooms like the ones I sat in.
The Missing Syllabus
I started thinking: what would the other syllabus look like? The one I never got in graduate school or saw after the massacres. The one I never was assigned. I wanted to make the null curriculum visible. I want to compile the texts that assisted in my transition from antizionism.
The full syllabus is online, with a link at the end of this post.
Here’s what I built.
I started with a name. One that reminded me of an image. A horrible image. Amit Soussana. A forty-year-old lawyer from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who was dragged from her home on October 7th. She fought several Hamas members in a field and there’s video of it. Only watch if you can handle it. Amit was held for fifty-five days. Chained by her ankle to the frame of a child’s bedroom, the walls covered in SpongeBob SquarePants posters.
Her guard, who called himself Muhammad, began asking about her sex life within days. He raped her at gunpoint. Afterward he cried and told her: “I’m bad, I’m bad, please don’t tell Israel.” She says that after the sexual assaults she would break down, but during them she wouldn’t cry. When asked by another hostage how she managed this, she said, “I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.” In March 2024, she became the first released hostage to put her name and face to what Hamas had done to her. She received the International Women of Courage Award at the State Department. The National Organization of Women issued no statement. UN Women published no response. Organizations that had spent years building entire platforms on the principle of believing women, met Amit Soussana’s testimony with the one thing they had given her from the beginning: silence.
That silence would not have been discussed in any lecture I attended. I know because I attended them. And I know exactly why naming it would invite malaise. The theory that says “Zionists oppress and revolutionaries liberate”—doesn’t survive Amit Soussana. So she stays off the syllabus. She’s on mine, not hidden, not silent.
The Null Curriculum
The next thing I pulled was the Hamas charter. Not a summary—the document. The charter of the governing entity that has controlled Gaza since 2007, that runs schools and courts and police and a military apparatus, quotes the Quran saying the Day of Judgment won’t come until Muslims fight and kill Jews. Not Zionists. Jews. Their 2017 update softened the language, but didn’t reject the original. Both are freely available online and neither takes but ten minutes to read.
Assigning Hamas’ charter requires explaining why you assigned it. In liberal academia, that explanation is the beginning of a very uncomfortable conversation—one that may end with your commitment to Palestinian liberation being questioned. So, often the charter stays off the syllabus. The movement it governs stays abstract and its stated goals remain unread. I’m not implying Hamas get portrayed positively, but it’s important to remember they were called a “resistance” after October 7, and praised by professors at Yale, Cornell, Virginia Tech, and unsurprisingly, Columbia.
Then I found the Henry Jackson Society’s 2025 report on Hamas’ human shield strategy—what they called the “missing chapter” in all the UN and NGO analysis on Gaza. The number that stopped me was 367. Since October 7th, the UN has issued 367 reports on Gaza. In those 367, the phrase “human shields” appeared exactly four times—always as an Israeli “claim,” an “allegation,” an “unverified report.” Never a fact. Never a subject warranting investigation.
Meanwhile the UN issued more than ten reports critical of Israeli conduct in the same period. Four mentions versus ten reports. That ratio is egregious. One accused Israel of genocide without a single sentence about how Hamas actually fought the war. No mention of being embedded in hospitals, schools, mosques, residential buildings, or beneath Al-Shifa. No hospital director confessing on record that his staff were members of Hamas.
Then I reached the heavy-hitter. BESA Center’s September 2025 study—led by Prof. Danny Orbach—documented a 500-km tunnel network with 5,700 shafts embedded inside civilian infrastructure. They found war-casualty data riddled with manipulation, that aid deliveries going into Gaza during most of the war exceeding pre-war levels, no evidence of an Israeli policy to target civilians, and that starvation claims were built on a misrepresented baseline figure the UN left unchallenged. These formed months of alarmist headlines, and quiet retroactive corrections buried months later.
I kept going. The UN’s dashboard tracks daily aid flows throughout the war. 54,000 aid trucks entered Gaza in 2022 alone. I also found documented record of Hamas diverting that aid—selling portions on the black market at inflated prices, handing the rest to loyalists while other Gazans went hungry. The BBC’s Palestinian Gaza correspondent reported in August 2025 that the UN itself admitted 88% of the aid trucks it collected over recent months did not reach their destinations due to looting. This is in the UN’s own data. Raise it in a graduate seminar and you’re deflecting from Israeli culpability—as if documenting who steals the food is an argument against the people who are hungry. The standard curriculum teaches that Israel starves Gaza. The null curriculum is who eats what gets through.
Then I found the money. Khaled Mashaal—current leader of Hamas — is reportedly worth between two and five billion dollars. Ismail Haniyeh, before his death, was estimated to hold a comparable fortune. Mousa Abu Marzouk, founding member and chairman, has been estimated at two to three billion. They negotiate ceasefire terms from five-star suites in Doha while the people they claim to love starve. President Mahmoud Abbas’s net worth has been reported at over $100 million. In 2012, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing titled “Chronic Kleptocracy”—naming Abbas and his sons as the beneficiaries of hundreds of millions in diverted Palestinian Authority funds and USAID contracts.
In 2012, the International Labour Organization—a UN agency—reported that Gaza’s tunnel trade had created “over 600 new millionaires.” In the academic spaces where antizionism functions, pointing to any of this is treated as deflection—a Zionist talking point. It’s a financial record. The standard curriculum teaches that Palestinian leadership represents its people. The null curriculum is what it actually does.
I then read the UN Watch report on UNRWA. It documented a Telegram group-chat with 3,000 of their workers. Thirty endorsed the October 7th massacre in real time. One woman called the hostage-takers heroes and wished them a safe return with their “booty.” Another wrote: “dying in the name of God is our most divine aspiration.” They found 150 staff sharing content glorifying Hamas, Hitler, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Israeli intelligence indicated that 12 percent of their UNRWA’s staff in Gaza—roughly 1,468 people—had ties to Hamas. A Canadian official was told by the head of UN Relief: “I am sure there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll.” Eighteen countries pulled their funding. The standard curriculum taught me that UNRWA is a humanitarian organization. The null curriculum is what its employees were saying while the bodies were still warm on October 7th.
To bring Ms. Soussana and reports like hers back, I grabbed the Dinah Project. Named for the biblical figure, the project documents sexual violence during the October 7th attacks. Rape at the Nova music festival, on the road to Kibbutz Re’im, in kibbutz homes, and in open fields. UN Rep. Pramila Patten submitted findings to the Security Council noting clear and convincing evidence of rape, sexualized torture, and cruel and degrading treatment of hostages.
Hamas responded with a statement calling Soussana’s testimony “difficult to believe.” UN Women declined to formally condemn the attacks for weeks. I sat in seminars with people who called themselves feminists and I know—I know exactly—how this evidence would have been received. It would have been the same as the experiences as Danielle Ofek and Nataly Livsk, the women who started #Metoo_UN_less_UR_A_Jew. It’s an example of a culture saying to believe all women, and a curriculum that decides Israeli women are the exception.
Lastly, I got to the peace offers. In 2000 at Camp David, Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state on roughly 94 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat said no and offered nothing in return. At Taba in 2001, Israel improved the terms. Still no. In 2008, Ehud Olmert put forward what many analysts considered the most generous proposal in the conflict’s history. Mahmoud Abbas did not respond. I’ve spoken about this before and been told the offers had conditions and the context was complicated. It’s always complicated when the conclusion is inconvenient. The standard curriculum taught me that Israeli’s block peace. The null curriculum is the record of who walked away from the table, when, without a counteroffer, and in silence.
This is the syllabus I would never have received.
The annotated syllabus with full sources and live links is here: https://thenullcurriculumsyllabus.neocities.org/
What’s missing is the part where I pretend none of this exists, so the room stays comfortable.
