Continuing education classes for Chicago Public Schools teachers are promoting anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda. And taxpayers are paying for it.
The Chicago Teachers Union is hosting a year-long series of “Palestine” workshops that demonize Israel and promote antisemitic and anti-American propaganda. Teachers participating in the workshops can receive professional development credits and additional pay for hours spent in class—even if they miss school time to attend.
As the North American Values Institute (NAVI), a group opposing extremism and anti-Semitism in American education reports, the upcoming workshop is run by Sawsan Jaber and is titled “From the United States to Palestine: Reading the World, Reimagining a Future Rooted in Solidarity.”
“The workshop, hosted at the Chicago Teachers Union Quest Center, runs from June 2026 until June 2027 and is a follow-up to a one-day workshop run by Jaber on the same topic held in November 2025,” NAVI reports.
The previous workshop, held last November, was “co-led by members of American Muslims for Palestine, a group under investigation for alleged terror-financing links, and a doctor affiliated with MedGlobal, a charity with alleged ties to Hamas.”
Photos of slides shown at the 2025 workshop give a deeply distorted and demonizing definition of the concept of Zionism.
“Zionism is a form of nationalism predicated on European conquering ideology and necessarily infused with a settler-colonial project that is wedded to a political mission of establishing an ethnically exclusive Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population by means of ethnic cleansing,” declares the slide shown at the front of the classroom.
“It is a complete inversion of history and reality, reducing the movement for Jewish self-determination to a hostile caricature of conquest and exclusion” NAVI states of this horrific definition in an Instragram post.
As appalling as the “message” of the ‘Palestine’ workshop is, the messengers are even more disturbing.
The 2026 series of workshops are to be led by Sawsan Jaber, who has “shared posts framing Hamas as legitimate resistance and publicly mourned October 7th mastermind Yahya Sinwar,” NAVI notes.
When Jaber led the 2025 workshop on Palestine for Chicago educators last year, she brought in several other terrorist sympathizers and extremists as co-educators and speakers.
These include Tarek Khalil, the education coordinator for American Muslims for Palestine, a group that as NAVI notes “is under investigation by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for its role in the campus protests following October 7” and has been repeatedly investigated for its fundraising links to Hamas.
Another speaker at last year’s workshop was Rifqa Falaneh who also has ties to American Muslims for Palestine. Falaneh “organized the blockade of O’Hare International Airport protesting the war in Gaza,” notes NAVI, and has a “well documented” history of extremism including social media posts stating “I won’t be happy until every last bit of the zionist entity burns to the ground.”
While a full list of speakers has not yet been announced for this year’s series of workshops, it is likely that Jaber will follow the same playbook in selecting her “tribe” of co-educators.
The ultimate goal of these workshops, of course, is not merely to indoctrinate teachers with radical pro-Hamas, anti-Israel ideology, but to encourage those teachers to bring these slanted perspectives into their own classrooms.
“The registration materials make clear that this isn’t simply about teachers getting background knowledge,” NAVI describes. “Teachers are asked how they plan to bring these concepts directly into their K-12 classrooms. When CPS pays teachers extra to absorb this material and the state of Illinois gives the program official professional development credit, parents and taxpayers deserve immediate answers.”