São Paulo adopts pro-Israel NGO curriculum in public schools, critics say

In early June, São Paulo's education department sent an official directive to public schools across the state recommending they adopt a curriculum on antisemitism built around materials produced by StandWithUs Brasil, a nonprofit led by André Lajst that describes itself as an educational organization fighting antisemitic prejudice. The initiative reflects Governor Tarcísio de Freitas's deepening alignment with Israel—he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024 and sent his chief of staff on an official mission to the country the following year. The program, called "Circuito Educacional," was formally distributed through the education secretariat's office and targets high school teachers and students with a six-week sequence of lessons on "Antisemitism: Past, Present, and Future."

The curriculum consists of six sets of PowerPoint presentations, one for each week, hosted on Google Drive and designed to be woven into regular classroom instruction. Students are expected to produce written work and a short documentary based on the material. At its center sits the work of Yossi Halevi, an Israeli-American author and former soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces who patrolled Gaza during the First Intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His book "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor" serves as the project's primary text. In an interview with a São Paulo newspaper, Halevi stated plainly: "It is not time to speak of peace; we need to defend the State of Israel." Yet StandWithUs's institutional message, displayed prominently in the materials, reads: "We believe education is the path to peace."

Educators and analysts who reviewed the curriculum found it presents a distinctly one-sided account. The materials contain extensive discussion of the 1967 Six-Day War, framing Israel's rapid military victory as a defensive necessity against what Israeli leaders at the time called a potential "second Holocaust." But the curriculum omits any reference to Palestinian displacement, Israeli settlement expansion in occupied territories, documented human rights violations documented by international bodies, or Palestinian interpretations of the conflict's origins and continuity. Daniel Cara, a political scientist and professor at the University of São Paulo's School of Education, characterized the initiative as a form of image rehabilitation. "It is Israel, through the São Paulo state government, invading the Brazilian curriculum," he said. "We are clearly opposed to all forms of xenophobia and racism, but this is an attempt to launder the image of Israel and sionism through the state government."

Halevi's own writing reveals the philosophical framework underlying the curriculum. In his book, he writes: "In order to allow the other side to obtain a certain measure of justice, each side must impose upon itself some measure of injustice." This formulation—what he calls "distributive justice"—reframes injustice not as something to be corrected but as a necessary condition for achieving justice itself. From a sionist perspective, this logic becomes self-justifying: harm becomes acceptable if framed as the price of survival.

A teacher from Osasco, a city in the São Paulo metropolitan area, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, warned that the curriculum will likely go unchallenged in schools. "This project comes through the school library, meaning it will probably be handled by professionals from the language arts area, who are not equipped to provide a counterpoint," she said. "Under the perspective of the São Paulo state government, an official narrative will be created, with arguments that seem almost scientific, claiming that what is happening is correct, endorsing this act of terror, death, and war we are seeing in Palestine and Lebanon. This creates a single narrative within a school, as if it were the official version of the facts."

The curriculum's framing of antisemitism itself has drawn scrutiny. By conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israeli policy, the materials align with a broader political project—notably championed by federal deputy Tabata Amaral—to redefine antisemitism in ways that would silence dissent. Brazil's National Council for Human Rights issued a technical note criticizing this definitional approach, calling it "unconstitutional" and warning that it "introduces distorted concepts of antisemitism to persecute and condemn those who express opposition to the policies of the State of Israel."

The curriculum does include one moment of apparent reflection: students are invited to consider the phrase, "Why are we arguing about who owns the land when in the end the land will own both of us?" Yet even this framing—presented as a question about a "territorial dispute" rather than an occupation—neutralizes the asymmetry at the heart of the conflict. The materials ask students to contemplate the Israeli barrier and its purpose, but within a framework that has already determined the acceptable boundaries of thought.

What remains unexamined in the curriculum is a question that has troubled even Israeli military leadership. General Matityahu Peled, who served on the Israeli General Staff during the 1967 war, declared in March 1972 that the notion of an existential threat to Israel that June had been constructed after the fact. The official narrative, in other words, was built retroactively to justify what had already been done. The São Paulo curriculum, by adopting this narrative wholesale and presenting it to teenagers as educational truth, risks repeating that same process—not in the service of understanding history, but in the service of managing how a new generation thinks about it.