Where is Palestine in Children’s Literature and Why Should We Care?

As a social justice activist and writer on the topic of Israel/Palestine, I became interested in the lack of Palestinian lives and narratives in children’s literature in 2016 when a Quaker teacher suggested I write a book on Palestine for kids. This issue is even more critical now as students, their teachers and parents, struggle to understand, frame, and respond to Hamas’ October attack and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

As I studied the craft of children’s book writing and the age-related intricacies and publishing rules for picture books, middle grade, and young adult novels, my picture book grew into a middle grade novel, followed by a graphic novel and a young adult novel. With this work, I became focused on the task of exploring and challenging the critical absence of sympathetic Palestinian narratives in books written for young people in English.

In pop culture, the classic stereotypes for Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, often center around words like “terrorists,” “religious extremists,” or “misogynists.” How many people, young or old, think: Oh, the people who invented algebra? Or coffee? The great poets Mahmoud Darweesh and Taha Muhammad Ali? The esteemed professor, writer, and poet, Dr. Refaat Alareer, killed in Gaza in December 2023? The fabulous spices like zatar and sumac? The melodic 78 stringed qanun?

This erasure of reality starts very early in children’s literature. I am indebted here to the work of my colleague and author, Nora Lester-Murad. She notes that we see frequent examples of cultural appropriation, erasure through the denial of Palestinian lived reality or through outright deception, or through a “both sideism” that suggests that both “sides” are equal, they just need to share a pen pal, hike in the desert, listen to their respective traumas, and get along better. When teachers or librarians introduce books on Palestine, or books that are critical of Israel, they are often met with active pushback and accusations of antisemitism. These attacks have been prominent at the university level but are now increasingly seen in K-12 schools.

Murad notes that this erasure is evident in a 2004 book titled Israel ABCs: A Book About the People and Places of Israel, that stated “B is for Bedouin…Bedouins are Arab people who come from Israel’s deserts.” Bedouin lived on, grazed, and cultivated the Naqab/Negev, long before the Israeli state took over and began destroying their homes, crops, herds, and driving them into special townships. In this simple ABC book, the historical sequence is backwards, the consequences are invisible. This is an important falsehood if children are going to develop an accurate sense of history and indigenous peoples.

In 2018, P is for Palestine, another ABC book, received huge pushback. Bookstores were criticized; synagogues and Facebook filled with accusations of antisemitism, promoting hatred and extolling violence. The line, “I is for Intifada,” was attacked for supporting terror, although the author claimed that “intifada” was a word celebrating resistance against an oppressive occupation and not an endorsement of violence. Children learn in other contexts that oppressed peoples have a right to resist, (colonists in early America, slaves in the south, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto), but Palestinians living under a brutal occupation are apparently denied that claim.

In 2021, a twelve-page board book, Rah! Rah! Mujadara!, was published for children age one to four. The text exclaims: “Everybody likes hummus, but that’s just one of the great variety of foods found in Israel among its diverse cultures.” While most everyone does love hummus, this dish was prevalent in Palestine and other Arab cultures and was “discovered” by Eastern European Jews who came to Palestine and started eating the local food. Thus, the fact of Palestine and its cuisine is conveniently erased from the minds of impressionable three-year-olds.

Which brings us to Welcome to Israel with Sesame Street, a book that could easily have been written by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful US “pro-Israel” lobby that actively controls the narrative on Israel. While I found many issues with this book, I will cite a few flagrant examples. To the question: “Where in the world is ISRAEL?” a map shows Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan Heights all the same mustard color, with an unidentified dotted line to denote the occupied Palestinian territories that likely would only be understood by an astute observer wondering where the occupation went. The text, “Some families live on farms…Common crops are avocados and olives,” is illustrated by a picture of an ancient olive grove likely planted by Palestinian fellahin hundreds of years ago. “Falafel is a popular food in Israel,” shows an Orthodox Jewish man in a market, (probably in East Jerusalem), staring at piles of nuts and dried fruits with his little tzitzit-wearing boy beside him.

Ironically, they probably wouldn’t eat non-kosher food from an Arab market and falafel is a classic Palestinian dish, again discovered by those European Jews who moved to Palestine/Israel and fell in love with the cuisine. In less than 25 pages, Big Bird manages to accomplish cultural and culinary appropriation and totally avoid any acknowledgement of Palestinian existence. The book clams to give readers “new tools to become smarter, kinder friends.” If 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian (who are called Arab Israeli and thus denied their particularity and connection to the land) and five-and-a-half million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, with millions more in the diaspora, how can a child become friends with people who are almost totally invisible?

For children in the seven to eleven age group, All Around the World Israel, (2019) and Travel to Israel, (2022) both share highly problematic covers, a photo of East Jerusalem alongside the title “Israel…” Because East Jerusalem is the Palestinian side of Jerusalem, illegally annexed by Israel in 1967 according to international law, such a photo reflects the Israeli stance that Jerusalem is the “eternally undivided capital of Israel.” This editorial sleight of hand disappears Palestinian history and aspirations for a state with East Jerusalem as its capital. It also masks the decades of Israeli political and bureaucratic maneuvering, from denying building permits, evicting Palestinian families using false paperwork to allow Jewish settlers to take over neighborhoods or destroy homes so that the Elad settler organization can build the massive City of David National Park with its highly criticized and very selective nationalistic view of archeology. The book covers effectively erase the experiences of East Jerusalemites who suffer from poorly funded schools, clinics, roads, trash collection, availability of electricity and water, while paying the same taxes as their Jewish West Jerusalemites neighbors whose streets are clean and recycling bins everywhere.

The erasure of Palestinian reality continues in books for older children. There are occasional well-intentioned books about co-existence or friendship between enemies: If You could Be My Friend, (1992); Samir and Yanatan, (1994); We just want to live here, (2003). They are often written from the point of view of an Israeli kid who stumbles across a Palestinian and they become fast friends. The political conflict or any critical information about the Israeli occupation is studiously avoided. Or the conflict is front and center, but the solution lies in dialogue and mutual understanding, rather than confronting the realities of settler colonialism, Palestinian dispossession, loss, and the vast imbalance of military and political power. The limits of this approach were crystallized for me by a colleague from East Jerusalem who attended an Israeli/Palestinian Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine during her formative years, but as her friends turned 18, the Jewish campers joined the Israeli army, underwent intense military training, manned checkpoints, and controlled the movement and the lives of their Palestinian peers. No amount of soccer games, role playing, or creative theater scripts and deeply shared hugs can fix that.

In 2021, two librarians in Philadelphia, Kayla Hoskinson and Erin Hoopes, published a blog titled, Palestinian Stories in Literature for Young People. “We have compiled a list of resources for young people and their caregivers who want to learn more about what it means and feels like to be Palestinian today.” They talked about helping children understand war and developing empathy beyond themselves and drew parallels between “racial equity in the US and Palestinian liberation.” They discussed the work of respected and well-known Palestinian authors including Naomi Shihab Nye, former Young People’s Poet Laureate, and Ibtisam Barakat. After persistent attacks from the Zionist Organization of America, another powerful “pro-Israel” advocacy group, the librarians were disciplined, and Erin received intense pushback from the Free Library and on social media. Baba, What Does My Name Mean? A Journey to Palestine, (2020), a book which presented Palestine as a beautiful place, rich in history, art, music, and food, was also censored by the Philadelphia Free Library in 2021 along with Palestinian content on their social media.

Organizations dedicated to education and libraries, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Library Association, and the National Coalition Against Censorship have not acknowledged this problem. PEN American’s report, America’s Censored Classrooms, didn’t mention the lack of Palestine in curricula. In PEN’s Banned in the USA: Narrating the Crisis, there is an appropriate focus on LGBTQI, sexual violence, and critical race theory, but no acknowledgement of the powerful forces shaping the messaging and information available for students about Palestine.

We do not see these kinds of attacks and censorship when stories about refugees from Sudan or Afghanistan or Syria or a host of other “foreign” places are published in the US. It doesn’t have to be this way. More and more books are being written in English by people from the Middle East and getting published on topics like: wearing a hijab- Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005) and Hana’s Hundreds of Hijabs, (2022); 9/11- A Very Large Expanse of Sea, (2018); Lebanon- Baddawi, (2015), Gaza- Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story, (2022).

But there is very little on the young adult level.

When these kinds of books do get published, they are frequently ignored or challenged. Teachers and librarians who use them often face accusations of antisemitism, censoring, job loss, doxxing, and death threats. The accusations, or the fear of accusations, along with the dearth of books, is a major factor as to why Palestine is not taught in schools. It’s too much of a hassle. There’s too much controversy. There are more popular refugee groups and victims of war to explore with children that won’t provoke the ire of some well-funded attack group. It is almost like these books are banned before they are written.

We can do better, as white people, as Jews, as activists and writers working in solidarity with BIPOC communities. Children as well as adults learn about other people by hearing their stories; they learn about themselves by seeing their stories reflected back to them. Literature that is not written from the perspective of a white, mainstream gaze is critical to expanding everyone’s empathy and knowledge. In addition, understanding Palestinian culture is a gateway to understanding other Arab cultures which are often demonized or exoticized. Palestinians have a significant diaspora in the US, think Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Detroit, Dearborn, Chicago. They represent one of the longest unresolved refugee groups in the world and include five-and-a-half million people living under occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza, two-plus million as second-class citizens in Israel, and even more in the diaspora.

Most of all, besides the level of unacknowledged human trauma and inspiring resilience and creativity, the Middle East, particularly Israel/Palestine is a geopolitically critical area of the world, and we all need to understand the region in its full complexity and diversity. We want our children, in turn, to have deeper historical and media literacy than is currently available in our schools, libraries, and faith-based organizations.

Part of this work involves changing the environment for teachers and librarians and developing better resources for them. This is complicated because schoolteachers and librarians do not have the same rights in terms of freedom of speech that the general public has, they have different labor protections and are at risk for surveillance and harassment. Teachers are dependent on who controls the curriculum, is the school public or private, do they have union and community support.

This is all important to the task of uplifting anti-racist work for our children; with being honest with young people about the history of settler colonialism, whether in the US, Australia, South Africa, or Israel. If we ground our understanding of US history in the foundational role of the dispossession of indigenous peoples and slavery, we can see the connections between movements of First Nation peoples, Black Lives Matter, and Palestinian struggles against occupation, police brutality, surveillance, intolerance, stereotyping, institutional and internalized racism, and unconscious bias. We can begin the process of decolonizing our understanding of history and its people.

This conversation goes way beyond Palestine and exists in a world with rising levels of white supremacy, racism, Islamophobia, and real antisemitism. It exists in a world where there are extensive numbers of groups, (like Stand With Us, CAMERA, AMCHA, The Israel Project, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs), that collectively monitor all speech and publications on Israel/Palestine and generate negative pushback, often weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism to suppress discourse. It exists at a time where book bans; objections to the teaching of “critical race theory”, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and liberated ethnic studies; and the “parental rights movement” seek to polarize and politicize education and destroy the possibility for a universally available public education that aspires to tolerance, support for minorities, open-mindedness, respect for science, and critical thinking on challenging and controversial topics.

Unfortunately, according to the scholar Emmaia Gelman, Zionists organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, frequently masquerade as civil rights groups. They use the language of multiculturalism and antiracism, confusing the right of Jewish self-determination with the presumed “right” to create a Jewish state on land that is also claimed by another people with their own right to self-determination. This sense of permanent victimization and entitlement has been used to justify decades of political oppression and ethnic cleansing, with the end goal of ridding the state of the troublesome Palestinians who have long stood in the way of Zionist dreams.

The Nation State Bill passed in the Israeli Knesset in 2018, clearly created a legal framework for Jewish supremacy; the right of self-determination was declared exclusive to the Jewish people. Arabic was downgraded from an official language to one of “special status.” Only Jews were given a permanent invitation to “return,” while Palestinians were denied their “right of return” guaranteed by international law. Jewish settlement was described as a “national value.” This bill clearly privileged nationalistic, Jewish aspirations over democratic goals and dropped the pretense of equality for Palestinian citizens. No country in the world today is defined as a democratic state where the constitutional identity is determined by an ethnic affiliation that overrides the principle of equal citizenship. Many anti-racists find this extremely problematic and that has nothing to do with antisemitism.

The widely adopted 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial definition of antisemitism has made opposition and resistance to this state of affairs more difficult by expanding the definition of antisemitism to effectively include criticisms of Israel. While this working document was meant to stimulate more discussion and analysis, this list was rapidly accepted internationally and is now used to muzzle dissent and to accuse people of antisemitism who question Israeli policies or have sympathy towards Palestinians. Supporting Palestinian lives and narratives is now erroneously defined as inherently threatening to Jews and be definition, antisemitic.

I saw this dynamic during a screening of my documentary film, Voices Across the Divide, which tells the history of Israel/Palestine through the voices of Palestinians who experienced the events of 1948, 1967, the moments of dispossession, loss, and survival. A Jewish college student admitted to feeling “unsafe” while viewing the film, confusing her emotional discomfort and the intellectual challenge of the documentary with a threat of actual harm. For her, experiencing Palestinian suffering, hearing survivors whose families lost everything, seeing real people whose lives were deeply affected by the creation of the State of Israel, threatened her sense of self as a Jew who could safely move through society.

We see these kinds of impacts on children’s literature and writers, teachers, and librarians. We see these impacts in the violent responses to the largely peaceful protests on college campuses in reaction to the Israeli assault on Gaza, and the posturing by Congress people attacking educators for supposed “rampant antisemitism” on US campuses as well as the promotion of the Antisemitism Awareness Act. It is critical to remember that Israel is a state, like the US or Italy or Iran, and not a magical embodiment of Jewish people everywhere, as Netanyahu is fond of proclaiming. Thus, the state should be distinguished from Jews as a people/culture/religious group, some of whom embrace Zionism (the national movement privileging Jews over everyone else in Historic Palestine) and some of whom do not.

In a democratic society, citizens have a right to criticize the oppressive behavior of a state. Many religious leaders, academics, and activists are also challenging the longstanding belief in Israeli exceptionalism, the claim that Israeli policies should not be criticized due to the experience of the Holocaust and the uniqueness of Jewish trauma, suffering, and victimhood. Much controversy also exists around the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and it is being repeatedly challenged, mostly by activists and anti-racist educators.

Denunciations of antisemitism must be credibly nested within opposition to white nationalism, racism and Islamophobia. If we do not distinguish between valid critiques of the policies of the Israeli state and antisemitism, we are allowing rightwing forces to weaponize antisemitism, suppressing freedom of speech and open debate, and making the term “antisemite,” ultimately meaningless at a time when it is critical to identify and oppose it. Real antisemitism is a form of bigotry which is on the rise, nested in hatred towards BIPOC communities, women, LGBTQI folk, non-Christians, as well as the erroneous idea that sympathy for Palestinians or criticism of Israeli policy is inherently antisemitic. Ironically, the far right tends to hate Jews but love Israel, a state they see as advocating ethnic purity, high levels of militarism, denouncing Muslims, and wanting to destroy Iran. An odd match made in an even odder heaven.

Publishers who are largely answerable to the profit-driven market and wary of controversy, (such as the accusation of antisemitism), especially when it comes to children’s books, are not immune to these forces. Importantly, the children’s publishing industry as well as the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators have made a vocal commitment to “own voices,” (uplifting the work of groups not often heard), and to diversity. Publishers can do better by incorporating Palestinian voices into their commitment to center diverse voices and by taking a stand to protect and promote Palestinian children’s book writers and books on the topic.

As interest in refugees, indigenous populations, Palestine, and the war on Gaza in particular, grows and the Israeli right crashes on the shores of liberal Zionism, “intersectionality” becomes a powerful tool to build coalitions globally. There are a growing number of resources for good books and teaching materials on Palestine. They include:

https://catalog.freelibrary.org/Community/lists/69411/

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/162124.Books_about_Palestine_for_Children_and_Young_Adults

https://socialjusticebooks.org/booklists/palestine/

https://www.socialstudies.org/social-studies-and-young-learner/30/3/picture-books-bring-arab-voices-and-middle-east-and-north

https://teachpalestine.org/articles/

https://arabishway.com/2021/03/29/11140/
https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/books-about-contemporary-palestine-for-children/

There are also a number of tools developed to aid teachers in evaluating books, such as Teaching Tolerance’s, Social Justice Standards: Anti-Bias Framework and the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools’ Culturally-Responsive Curriculum Scorecards. Hijabi librarians also recommend a toolkit called: Evaluating Muslims in KidLit: A Guide for Librarians, Educators, and Reviewers.

Nora Lester Murad and I interviewed educators and librarians about their experiences teaching Palestine in order to develop a set of educational guidelines and resources as well as advice for dealing with the attacks and attempts to silence conversation that often follow the accusation of antisemitism. The toolkit is now available on our websites along with resources and teaching guides:

https://idainthemiddle.com/

and

https://www.alicerothchildbooks.com/

There are clearly many aspects to my deeply felt motivation for writing children’s books centered around Palestine, including my middle grade novel, Old Enough to Know and my young adult novel, Finding Melody Sullivan, both published in 2023 by Cune Press. The invisibility of diverse Palestinian experiences and people in school curricula is all part of the growing culture wars and book banning in the US that result in increasingly frightened educators and school boards whose work has been challenged, maligned, and often censored.

Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, leaders in higher education and public schools have even been dragged before Republican congresspeople and aggressively grilled about alleged antisemitism in meetings widely agreed to have been political theater. Claiming a concern for maintaining a safe space for Jewish students, the congresspeople conflate personal discomfort about ideas with a lack of physical and emotional safety. They ignore the needs of diverse student populations include Arabs, Muslims, people of color, and their supporters, and dismiss the right to free speech. Apparently, local control of schools, a central tenet of conservative Republicans, does not apply when it comes to Israel.

These trends corrupt education and the development of an informed and open-minded populace knowledgeable about the Middle East. Ultimately as writers and activists, we need to support and encourage politically and socially literate students who have a right to knowledge about challenging topics and the skills to fight complex systems of oppression. We owe our children and grandchildren nothing less.

This need for critical education is now even more urgent with the war on Gaza. The majority of schools, all libraries and universities have been turned to rubble, and schools and hospitals have been described as graveyards for children. As educators, we must not participate in this epistemicide, this destruction of the ability to know and understand an entire culture. It is extremely worrisome that laws banning antiracist education now exist for almost half of US students and that in in Florida it is now a felony if a teacher is caught teaching about race, gender, or sexuality.

Educator and organizer, Jesse Hagopian, explained that support for manifest destiny, whether in the US or Israel, is part of a colonial education that allows a brutal occupation whether it be the First peoples on Turtle Island or Palestinians in Historic Palestine, and an extreme level of violence to maintain the suppression of that population. In Israel, the word Nakba was removed from all textbooks in 2009 and in 2011 the Nakba Law cut public funding from any public institution that commemorated the “Catastrophe” in 1948. In 2024, the renowned Palestinian Tel Aviv University Professor Kevorkian was detained, interrogated, and fired for expressing support for Gazans.

Students in the US have the right to explore multiple narratives, to struggle, think, with a wide array of resources, and come to their own understanding. This history has been censured for years and this silencing has risen dramatically since October 7. Mass movements are challenging these policies at the local and national level, often led by young Palestinian and their Jewish partners. Younger generations of children desperately need the books and educational experiences that will help ground them in a fuller understanding of this troubled area of the world.