Education InstituteBelow are the books about the Arab-Israeli conflict that have been reviewed by our team to call attention to their historical inaccuracies, omission of critical facts, and misleading narratives that promote anti-Israel bias.
by Aya Ghanameh, illustrated by Aya Ghanameh
2023
A picture book on Palestinian exile that erases the word “Israel” and falsifies history can have only one goal: to prejudice young readers against Israel and Jews.
by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri
2022
Ahed Tamimi is not a model of nonviolent resistance — what she describes as an unarmed “grassroots resistance movement” was actually quite violent — but young readers with no background knowledge about the Middle East will be easily misled by her deceptive autobiography.
by Ibtisam Barakat
2010
As a story assigned to young readers in public school classrooms, there are serious concerns about messages of “Uncle Meena” on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jewish history, and American Jews.
by Reem Kassis, illustrated by Noha Eilouti
2023
Introducing children to Palestinian culture by presenting the people’s food, crafts and customs is a time-honored way to broaden the knowledge of young readers. But erasing a people’s history, as We Are Palestinian does to Jews, is promoting a lie, and has no place in any children’s book.
by Randa Abdel-Fattah
2008
When young people read about the “ubiquitous Wall” and other restrictions on West Bank Arabs, they will view Israelis as oppressors and Arabs as victims. Terror attacks and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Old City in 1948 must be part of the story.
by Jacquetta Nammar Feldman
2022
Children’s books aiming at even-handedness on the Arab-Israeli conflict usually fail – as novels, because they’re didactic, and as political tracts, because they’re inaccurate. This book is a case in point.
by Anthony Robinson and Annemarie Young
2017
Young readers can learn empathy when they listen to the voices of their contemporaries from other cultures. But when the words they hear are full of lies and distortions, they’re not learning empathy – they’re learning hatred.
by Eman Kourtam
2022
Authors of picture books often seek to glorify their vision of moral courage. However, when an author’s vision relies on antisemitic stereotypes and inaccurate history, the resulting picture book will be offensive and even dangerous.
Featured author: Naomi shihab nye
Maligning Israel for young readers
The books we read as children stay with us all our lives. In our earliest stories, big, bad wolves threaten innocent children – and few of us grow up with warm, fuzzy feelings about wolves. Replace that wolf with an Israeli soldier, and you have an indelible image. That is the danger of the writings of Palestinian-American children’s poet and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye.
