Rooted in community. Grounded in experience.
K-12 Legal Defense was founded by parents, organizers, and seasoned professionals who refuse to let educators and students face the Israel lobby playbook alone.
OUR STORY
We are two moms who met at a school board meeting. Teachers were being targeted. Students were being silenced, and a community was asking: how are we going to defend them?
We started doing this work through Berkeley Families for Collective Liberation—defending teachers, fighting for ethnic studies, keeping Palestinian voices visible in our schools. But we kept seeing the same thing across California: all eyes were on universities, while K–12 was being targeted.
Teachers unions were overwhelmed. Administrators were unprepared. And the attacks were getting more coordinated — armed with legislation like AB715, legal threats, and unlimited resources. So we built K-12 Legal Defense.
We are drawing the line in California, because what happens here shapes the rest of the country.
OUR FOUNDERS
Liz, Co-Director
Liz is a civil rights attorney and anti-Zionist Jewish organizer with fifteen years of experience defending educators and advocates facing false accusations.
- Founding attorney, Palestine Legal
- Co-author of the groundbreaking white paper, The Palestine Exception to Free Speech, 2015
- Counseled hundreds of educators, students, and organizations navigating smear campaigns and legal threats
- Brown University & Berkeley Law
“As a Jewish mother and lawyer, I will not allow authoritarian censors to bully our schools, and deny my children critical information about the world they’re facing. They belong in brave classrooms where they learn to discern truths about U.S.-Israeli wars. They have a right to hear Palestinian stories and we are here to enforce it.“
Sahar, Co-Director
Sahar is an Emmy-nominated journalist and strategist who amplifies stories about conflict, climate, and rights, the kind empire tries to suppress.
- Led viral campaigns reshaping Berkeley education debates
- Former Managing Editor, Global Voices; Senior Editor, VICE World News
- Strategy consulting for UNICEF, ICRC, and UC Berkeley
- “The Muslims You Cannot See” TEDx Speaker; Knight Fellow, Stanford University
“As a Muslim mother and daughter of immigrants, I want to protect our students’ right to question and discuss the wars our country wages and sponsors. The same tax dollars that fund our schools, fund bombs that oppress, kill, and displace millions. We deserve classrooms that give our children tools to discern the truth.”
WHO WE SERVE
We center Palestinian rights while connecting struggles across race, immigration, gender justice, and anti-militarism. We serve educators, students, and families across California who are being targeted for teaching and learning the truth.
Especially:
- Unions and administrators who need tools and legal guidance to respond effectively
- Ethnic Studies, history, and humanities teachers facing investigation or discipline
- Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Black, immigrant, Jewish, trans, and queer students whose histories are being erased
- Families advocating for honest curriculum and being shut out or retaliated against
PARTNERSHIPS
We work in an ecosystem of movement organizations. This includes the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Teach Palestine, the Council on American and Islamic Relations, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestine Legal, the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism, and other community groups, education justice groups, and union caucuses. K-12 Legal Defense depends on this ecosystem and adds to its strength.
Safety through solidarity is both a strategy and ultimately the mission of K-12 Legal Defense. The inclusion of Palestine in our classrooms provokes severe backlash because mutual understanding among young people from diverse backgrounds is an existential threat to white supremacy.
K-12 Legal Defense relies on a group of advisors that includes Palestinian-American parents, educators, lawyers, organizers, and representatives of membership-based Palestinian-led organizations.
POLITICAL PRINCIPLES
- Child Centered: We organize around children’s safety, curiosity, and critical thinking, not the interests of extractive, war-mongering billionaires.
- Naming Root Causes: We name what harms us: capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and imperial violence–systems that produce inequality, genocide, and a dying planet.
- Matriarchal Leadership: We center collective care and the leadership of directly affected people. Social change is led from within, not from above.
- Right to Learn: Children’s right to think critically about U.S. militarism is non-negotiable. We defend it against intimidation, censorship, and political suppression.
- Collective Liberation: All liberation movements are structurally intertwined. We oppose racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and settler colonialism everywhere. None of us are free, until all of us are free.
- Palestinian Liberation: We support Palestinian liberation and the sustainability of the Palestinian freedom movement. We are anti-Zionist and recognize that Zionism is a colonialist ideology rooted in white supremacy that has produced ethnic cleansing since the Nakba.
- Law as a Tool Within a Movement: Legal strategy matters, but law without collective power cannot transform systems. We work in an ecosystem and prioritize partnerships and care for the collectives.
- Indigenous & Ancestral Knowledge: We center Indigenous, diasporic, and ancestral knowledge in our work and reject extractive organizational norms.
- Abundant Imagination: Hope under repression demands imagination, discipline, and leadership. We choose abundance over scarcity as our organizing foundation.
IF YOU’RE BEING TARGETED
You do not have to face this alone. If you are an educator, student, or family member facing investigation, discipline, or retaliation—we take your situation seriously. We know this terrain.
