A ‘Ceasefire Now’ message was removed near Germantown Friends after parents objected. That was just the start of the debate.

Quaker community members hung a “peace” sign on the campus of Germantown Friends School in the fall. It was a message everyone seemed to agree on.

But outrage ensued in late February after they added a series of cloth watermelons next to the simple five-letter message.

The watermelon imagery — an unofficial symbol of Palestinian solidarity — upset a number of the Jewish families whose children attend school on the campus. School leaders intervened, and within days, Germantown Friends head of school Dana Weeks told parents in a March email that “the inappropriate and offensive signage has been removed.”

It was one of several flashpoints over the war in Gaza that the elite private school has sought to defuse since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. But unlike the turmoil facing other schools and institutions, the Germantown Friends community has faced a reckoning of faith as its members debate the Quaker commitment to nonviolence.

Over the last six months, several incidents have unnerved some students and led parents to organize a WhatsApp group chat amid fears of antisemitism, while others have grown increasingly critical of school leaders who they say haven’t shown equal support to pro-Palestinian community members.

In April, about 400 parents, alumni, and faculty signed an open letter to school leaders decrying a series of perceived pro-Israel biases — from canceling a Muslim author’s visit to opposing a “cease-fire” banner — and calling on school leaders to adopt an antiwar stance in line with its Quaker mission.

The school’s “actions read as anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and racist, and they have created a climate of fear,” the letter reads. It accused leaders of abandoning a “simple framework for decision-making. Is an action in line with Quaker values, or not?”

Most parents have avoided talking openly about the disagreement even as it has spilled into public view. After The Inquirer contacted a parent supportive of the open letter, all signatures disappeared from the online document. Meanwhile, two parents active in the Jewish families’ WhatsApp group said they were satisfied with the school’s direction and referred questions to administrators.

About 150 Jewish parents sent the school a letter in November, asking Germantown Friends to remain a safe space for Jewish students, reinvigorate its curriculum about World War II and the Holocaust, and provide antisemitism training for students and staff, Richard Stern, a parent at the school, said in a statement.

He said that many Jewish families “fell into despair” about the open letter, “which was laden with antisemitic tropes” and falsehoods — adding that he wasn’t aware of any Jewish families who had asked the school to take a “pro-Israel” position.

The situation at Germantown Friends reflects the broader conflicts and fears that have riven schools over the last seven months — from arguments around dueling student newspaper op-eds in Lower Merion and social media postings of a Muslim student club in Central Bucks, to the Philadelphia School District’s removal of a student video about Palestinian art. Facing immense pressure to stand against both the rise of antisemitism and the staggering death toll in Gaza, school administrators have struggled to maintain a neutral position.

In an interview last month, Weeks said that the debate around Israel and Gaza marked the first time in her tenure that the school’s “very liberal-leaning” community was “not in full unity of mind,” but that her focus remained on the students first.

“I trust that it was done out of care for the school … and not out of hate,” she said of the open letter. But “that body of work doesn’t really focus on the kids.”

Some parents and faculty members behind the open letter said the concern for students came across as disingenuous after school leaders publicly accused pro-Palestinian students of antisemitism.

After the Hamas attack, Weeks sent out a letter that acknowledged students with ties to Israel and Palestine, assuring them their school supported both camps. Pushback against that neutrality was swift. “Some people wanted stronger statements in one direction or another,” Weeks said.

Germantown Friends did not provide an exact demographic breakdown at the school, where tuition for grades 9-12 tops $46,000 a year. Weeks, whose family hails from Lebanon, described herself as “one of the few Arab people in the school” and said the Jewish student population far outnumbered Muslim students.

The following months brought a series of increasingly fraught situations that involved parents, students, administrators, local Quakers, and even guest speakers.

On Oct. 20, GFS canceled a scheduled event with Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, a Muslim children’s book author who had posted on social media about the killing of Palestinian children in the war. “It was not the right time to bring in” Thompkins-Bigelow, Weeks said; in February, the school was “still not ready.”

“We hope it will happen someday,” Weeks said, describing Thompkins-Bigelow’s work as “stunning.” (On Twitter, Thompkins-Bigelow wrote of the cancellation: “I’m just supposed to write about Muslim kids, not care about them.”)

In November, members of the Germantown Monthly Meeting voted to publish a cease-fire statement against the war. In the “minute” statement approved by the meeting, the group said it condemned the Hamas attack and also “deplored the retaliatory attacks by Israel that are making Gaza a wasteland.”

That weekend, children at the Quaker Sunday school constructed a banner that said “Kids for Peace and Justice” — with a smaller message on the right edge that read: “Ceasefire Now.” Within two days, Karen Lightner, clerk of the Germantown meeting, said she got a call from the school. Parents had complained that the message made their children feel afraid.

“I thought ‘Let’s see what happens, because peace is one of our primary testimonies,’” Lightner said, of putting up the banner. “It’s not political. We don’t believe it’s antisemitic. It just means put down your weapons and stop fighting.”

The Quaker community agreed to take down both the cease-fire language and, later, the watermelon imagery, after Lightner received emails directly from upset parents.

Tensions inside the K-12 classrooms began bubbling with a message written on a middle school chalkboard in late October: “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” with the word “Israel” crossed out. It is a sentiment that some have used as a rallying cry for the destruction of Israel.

In November, school leaders publicly admonished a student who had privately voiced frustration about a speech from a Holocaust survivor visiting to commemorate Kristallnacht, the organized ransacking of Jewish homes, schools, and hospitals by Nazi paramilitaries and civilians in Germany in 1938.

According to the open letter, the student described the speaker as a “Zionist” in a private group chat with friends. The message later found its way to parents, and within days, Weeks sent out an email describing the student’s message as “disrespectful, “antisemitic” and “hate speech.”

The school declined to comment on the contents of the message. But Weeks sent out schoolwide emails announcing a disciplinary investigation after both the chalkboard and the text message incidents. Although students were not publicly identified, two parents who supported the open letter described Weeks’ emails as “wildly inappropriate” and said they amounted to silencing pro-Palestinian students. The parents, like other backers of the letter, were afraid to publicly identify themselves due to the tenor of the debate.

Other disputes followed. The open letter alleged the school had removed copies of a Palestinian poetry collection from circulation. Weeks denied removing any library books.

In February, a faculty member organized an informal information session to discuss the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with other teachers. Word spread of the event through the Jewish parents’ WhatsApp group. About 10 of them attended the meeting and confronted the instructor over what they described as pro-Palestinian bias and historically inaccurate information, according to a faculty member who was present.

“A lot of faculty were really upset afterward,” said the faculty member, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation at the school. “There were a lot of tears. People thought the parents were recording, taking pictures, and writing down names.”

Weeks defended parents’ concerns for their children. None had threatened to unenroll in recent months, she said. As for the disciplinary measures, she said she had “consistently steered members of our community on all sides of this issue away from expressing themselves through tropes,” and that she hoped the school could be a place for students to grow through these incidents without shame.

“They make all kinds of mistakes,” she said. “Hopefully, they’re going to learn and grow and become better citizens.”

Debate over the Quaker tenets of nonviolence and communal decision-making has persisted throughout the drama on campus.

National Quaker organizations — including the Friends Committee on National Legislation and American Friends Service Committee — have called for a cease-fire, as well as the Ramallah Friends School, a 150-year-old Quaker institution in the West Bank.

But Germantown Friends is not alone in striking a more neutral position, said Drew Smith, executive director of the Friends Council on Education, whose organization represents 76 Quaker schools.

Joining Germantown Friends leaders and Quakers during a community meeting Tuesday to address the school’s response to the war, Smith said the Quaker peace testimony — which begins with a vow to “utterly deny all outward wars and strife” — didn’t compel a school to call for a cease-fire.

“Is the purpose of a Quaker school to make a political demand? Most of the [students] in our community can’t even vote,” Smith said during the Zoom meeting, which was joined by more than 400 people. Of calls for a cease-fire, he noted, “Different people read what that means differently.”

Dissent was apparent in pre-submitted questions read aloud by an administrator. To a request for transparency about parental pressure on the administration, Weeks said that “no single group or single individual” had forced the school to do anything.

Another question referred to students upset that their teachers had signed the open letter.

Three parents who spoke with The Inquirer on condition of anonymity said they lost trust in the school over its handling of the debate and voiced frustration that leaders had failed to respond directly to the letter’s allegations, even as they and other supporters feared identifying themselves.

“Parents are afraid that their children will not be able to continue at GFS,” one said, “and faculty are afraid that they will lose their jobs or be reprimanded.”

Weeks said she remains open to further dialogue. The open letter authors said she has yet to reach out.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that parents directly called and emailed the Germantown Monthly Meeting clerk in regards to the watermelon imagery, not the ceasefire banner.