So here I was, minding my own business, with a nice little softball intro letter all written about why I talk to my kids about politics and you should talk politics too, and Israel began bombing Gaza, anti-Semitic attacks started taking place across the US, and reporters started getting fired because one time they supported a Free Palestine. So I thought, what a better way to introduce this newsletter about talking to kids about politics than to kick things off with the one conversation that can lose you your job and friends in this country. But seriously, we can, and need to, be helping our kids and friends understand the Israel-Palestine conflict as much as we can, so that’s what this newsletter is about.
A brief digression
The ethos of this newsletter is that we should talk to kids about politics, a lot - just like we should talk to all of the people in our lives about politics, a lot. Everything about kids’ lives is shaped by politics: the neighborhood they live in, where they go to school, whether they ride the subway or get driven everywhere, whether they live in highly integrated urban areas (like Queens, New York!) or mid-sized cities with booming refugee populations (like Lincoln, Nebraska!) or rural farming communities (I’ve never lived in one of those, so no shout outs there) - all of that is shaped by political and structural influences. We need to make those transparent to kids. Kids are fascinated by the world! We should explain it to them so they know why it’s messy!
Back to Israel and Palestine
We’ve been on vacation, which means my kids haven’t been exposed to the news in the way they normally might be. But a few day Cyrus (age 7) was looking over my shoulder as I doom-scrolled Twitter, and he saw a headline about anti-Semitic attacks. He had lots of questions. I’d been wondering how I would explain the Israel/Palestine conflict to them if they asked, since it’s got all of the makings of things that they might ask about – high intensity conflict, heart wrenching reports of children dying, and no clear answer or narrative or end in sight, though the ceasefire holding has been a moment of optimism.
What are my goals?
I’m not a Middle East expert, and we aren’t Israeli or Palestinian, Jewish or Muslim, so we’re outsiders in this conversation. What I do know something about is Comparative Politics, and I have a few things I want my kids to know about the way the world works: there are universal human rights, nation-state borders are important fictions, governments aren’t perfect and should be criticized, people aren’t their governments, and culture is complicated but we should reject the notion that there are ancient ethnic hatreds that dominate our relationships. In other words - we should be able to criticize the Israeli government and Hamas, while also rejecting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Also, on a human level, violence against minoritized people is horrendous and should be condemned - we are big on conversations about social justice, and so anti-Semitism, as well as oppression of Palestinians, fit into a long line of conversations we have had about Black Lives Matter, racism, etc.
What to avoid?
One, I try really hard to avoid morality plays. In the conflict between Israel and Palestine, it’s particularly difficult because they will encounter, in their lives, people who cast the morality play very clearly in one direction or the other. I try to frame things as complicated without oversimplifying or both sidsing.
I pay attention to the origin story, which is so important to answering the incessant “why”. With Palestine and Israel, the origin story tends to be either Biblical, or the Holocaust, or one of displacement. I tend to reject the ancient ethnic conflict narrative because I think people use history for their own reasons, and so I’m careful about not describing things as unchangeable – people change all the time! This isn’t just the Bible!
Equally critique those in power. The “state” does a lot of work in our discourse to cover up for behavior we criminalize from non-state actors (if you ever took Comparative Politics 101, you might remember that one definition of a state is having a monopoly over violence.) Here, I’m careful not to let Israel get passes because of its state status – Hamas shouldn’t be firing rockets, nor should the Israeli army be leveling housing developments – and you can use a simple body count as evidence here.
What’d we say?
So how does this factor into how I explained things to Cyrus?
Cyrus: “what’s anti-Semitism?”
Me: “it’s a hatred or discrimination against Jewish people .”
C: “why? That doesn’t make any sense.” (Of course it doesn’t!)
Me: “you’re right - it’s awful. It’s just like when we’ve talked about [brief digression to talk about Black Lives Matter and the Holocaust.]
C: “weird. So why is it happening again?”
Me: “let’s look at a globe/map” – and I showed him Israel and Palestine so he had a sense of where the conflict was happening. We located it both in relationship to the US, to where our friends and family live in Europe, and to other countries we’ve been studying.
At this point we got off on a tangent and didn’t get back to talking about Gaza and the Palestinians, but we will. When we do, we’ll talk about how both Israelis and Palestinians think they should have a country, but the Israelis occupy and control Palestinian land, so there’s always conflict because they aren’t their own country with a separate president, borders, and things like that. And we’ll talk about how governments use violence to exercise their power over other places, and people tend to use violence when they feel like they don’t have another way of making their voices heard. One of my big points in this and other conversations is that all people deserve to be citizens in democracies, and right now Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel and also aren’t allow to form their own state, and neither of those solutions are fair for Palestinians.
All of this is heavy, so I am a big fan of chunking the conversation - little pieces here, little pieces there. I circle back every few days, checking in for extra questions or tangents.
—
If you talk to your kids (or other people in your life) about this, let me know how it goes - what works? What didn’t? I plan to send these newsletters semi-regularly (every other Thursday if I can make it happen), and I’d love to report back on how things go with y’all.
—
What we’re reading these days
I always need new book suggestions, so I thought I’d pass on some of mine!
What I’m reading
Once and Future Witches – so good!
What the kids are reading
We’re reading the last Aru Shah book to Cyrus right now – these books are so fun, and have tons of jokes for Gen-X and millennial parents while doing a deep dive through Greek mythology. He started crying when he realized the series was over.
Alma is big into families right now, so we’ve been reading Love Makes a Family.
Talk to your kids about anti-Semitism, Israel and Palestine!
Hi Kelly, I found you through Substack Shoutout. My site is thecholent.substack.com, where I try to function as a sort of informal Jewish news service for my community in Seattle. Wow, brave of you to tackle this right off! I just wanted to share a couple of sources you might find useful or interesting, because I think a huge part of this topic is left out of most reports, which is the role of Iran and other Arab countries that have perpetuated the refugee crisis and aided violence.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2021/0528/From-Tehran-to-Jerusalem-via-Gaza-A-Hamas-rocket-s-trajectory
And my own post as I mired through this last round of conflict, which includes a ton of additional links:
https://thecholent.substack.com/p/not-this-again
Good luck with your work! I have four kiddos - solidarity! And I'm going to check out Aru Shah - we are in need of a good new series here.
New to this, it's great! Can't wait to read more. I was in elementary school teacher and I remember vividly explaining the Israel Palestine conflict too
my class years ago. Kids are actually uniquely suited for understanding nuance, though in some ways they are very concrete. Even my Orthodox Jewish students understood both the motivations and the transgressions on both sides. Kids are the best conversation partners for this stuff :-)