Palestinian Indigenous Peoples: Integrating Teaching Resources Across the Social Work Curriculum

For anti-racist social workers, abolitionists, and educators dedicated to Indigenous liberation, the profound contradiction at the heart of social work has never been difficult to name: a profession that claims a mandate of social justice while remaining structurally tethered to systems of colonial violence, racial governance, and carcerality. The ongoing genocide in Gaza has rendered this contradiction impossible to ignore. Across settler states, including the United States and Canada, social work educators, students, and practitioners are navigating the paradoxical positionality of being called to “do no harm” while facing institutional pressures to remain silent, neutral, or complicit in the face of the genocide. This curriculum responds to the silencing of Palestinian knowledge within social work education and argues that Palestinian liberation is an Indigenous and abolitionist concern. It names Zionist settler colonialism, situates Palestinian struggles within broader histories of Indigenous dispossession and resistance, and equips social work educators, students, and practitioners with decolonial tools to teach, organize, and act in accountable solidarity.