The U.S. Department of Education is defending its inclusion of “Palestine” in a country menu in a search function for its Education Resources Information Center.
In one search conducted by JNS, ERIC identified 143 items that originated in the country of “Palestine,” according to the Education Department.
The department told JNS that the “Trump administration does not recognize Palestine as an independent country” but that it uses the descriptor “foreign countries” whenever “a geographic location outside of the United States is discussed in a document.”
The Education Department drew JNS’s attention to an article “about the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War,” which has “a ‘foreign countries’ tag and includes ‘USSR’ in the ‘identifiers-location,’ even though the USSR does not exist anymore.”
JNS asked the department several times why it did so with a “state” that has never existed per U.S. policy and why it tagged an article, for example, titled “Jewish college students confront the Israel-Gaza conflict and campus divides”—which is not historical but focuses exclusively on the time period since the Oct. 7 attacks—with “Palestine.”
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a city in Arkansas and NASA removed references to the state of “Palestine” from their websites after queries from JNS.
