Update: Seattle teacher responds to suspension after Israel-Hamas comments

The Seattle school district has put a high school teacher on administrative leave while it investigates comments by the teacher who said he thought the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel was justified and questioned whether women had been raped during the attack.

Ian Golash, who is listed as the social studies department chair at Chief Sealth International High School, was placed on administrative leave April 11, according to the district. 

The move comes after Accuracy in Media, a conservative-leaning advocacy group with an ongoing campaign to expose antisemitism on campuses, distributed a video interview with Golash. The teacher was already facing criticism for Facebook posts that questioned accounts of the Oct. 7 attack.

Golash initially declined to be interviewed. Late in the day Wednesday, he released a statement describing his reasons for speaking up and said he does not support the killing or terrorizing of anyone. He also described harassment he has experienced since the incident hit social media.

“I think any atrocities that happened on October 7th including rape, mutilations or killings of civilians committed by Hamas fighters or Gazans or Israeli citizens or Israeli Defense Forces are deplorable and worthy of condemnation,” he wrote.

He added that he has struggled to navigate the “information landscape” about what happened on Oct. 7 and that he hopes to understand clearly what happened and didn’t happen. Golash maintained that while “Palestinians were justified in resistance to Israel in support of their liberation from an apartheid state,” he hoped that the resistance would be peaceful.

The situation unfolded shortly after Golash posted his Facebook comments. In a video clip released this month, Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, asked Golash whether what happened to Israel on Oct. 7 was justified.

Golash said yes. Guillette then asked Golash whether the rape of women at a music festival was justified. “Where is the evidence that there was rape?” Golash responded.

Guillette also asked whether women were murdered at the music festival and whether that was justified.

“Yes,” Golash responded.

“The murder of innocent women just attending a music festival, that was justified in your opinion?” Guillette asked.

“No,” Golash said. “I think resistance against Israel is justified, yes.”

In his statement Wednesday, Golash denounced the harassment he said he’s experienced for the past four months, including threatening messages, two bomb threats and strangers showing up at his home.

The teacher called the harassment “deeply troubling” and “antithetical to the kind of spirited debate and examining of different perspectives and dialogue in the interest of deeper understanding that I hope to have in my classroom.”

Seattle Public Schools said in a statement Tuesday that the district “does not tolerate antisemitic, Islamophobic, or any kind of hate speech in its schools or offices.”

“The circumstances surrounding a conversation between an Accuracy in Media representative and an SPS teacher on April 1 are deeply concerning,” SPS said. “We are conducting an immediate, appropriate investigation into this event.” 

The district said it cannot comment on personnel matters while the review is underway and that an update would be provided once the investigation was over. It declined to say how long the investigation would take.

A United Nations report last month found there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.”

The New York-based Anti-Defamation League, which tracks antisemitism and bias, said it has seen an increase in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people.

More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last six months during Israel’s response to the attack, according to the Gaza-based Ministry of Health, an agency in the Hamas-controlled government. The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count but says most of the dead are women and children.

The ADL recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents in the country in 2023, a 140% jump from the previous year, according to its 2023 audit of antisemitic incidents, which was released Tuesday.

Material from The Associated Press was included in this report.

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