• P is For Palestine: A Palestine Alphabet Book

    by Golbarg Bashi, illustrated by Golrokh Nafisi
    2018

    Reading a good picture book with a child can be a joyful experience. But picture books that privilege indoctrination over imagination aren’t really literature. They betray the bond of trust between adult and child.

  • Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story

    by Malak Mattar
    2022

    Seeing Gaza through a child’s eyes offers young readers only a partial perspective on the conflict – especially when Hamas is erased from the story, and Israel is held responsible for all suffering.

  • Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood

    by Ibtisam Barakat
    2007

    The author’s memories of the Six-Day War are poignant, but feelings aren’t history. This memoir inverts responsibility for the war, replacing information with distortion.

  • The Cat at the Wall

    by Deborah Ellis
    2014

    Post-October 7 revelations about UNRWA schools expose the naiveté of this dated account of the Second Intifada. It’s not misunderstanding, but hatred, that underlies the Arab-Israeli conflict.

  • The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

    by Sandy Tolan
    2020

    Many authors strive for even-handedness when tackling the Arab-Israel conflict in novels for young readers. But when critical context is omitted, the results will reveal an author’s bias or ignorance.

  • These Olive Trees: A Palestinian Family’s Story

    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.

  • They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom

    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.

  • Uncle Meena

    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.

  • Wishing Upon the Same Stars

    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.

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.