Tatreez is a Palestinian embroidery practice and is done by threading a needle through fabric to make pretty designs (p. 30).
Palestinians use [za’atar] to make fresh salads or akras za’atar, a flat bread layered with za’atar, green onions and plenty of olive oil (p. 60).
Dabke is a dance done in groups, usually in a line or a circle, that involves moving and stomping the feet in different ways (p. 84).
Children who read the recently released We Are Palestinian will learn fascinating facts like these about Palestinian culture. Describing the foods people eat and their arts and crafts is a time-honored route children’s books take to introduce young readers to the ways of life of other peoples and, more recently, of immigrant communities.
But We Are Palestinian is only superficially fascinating. Its captivating picture of Palestinian foods, dress, dance, and holiday celebrations, and its short biographies of notable Palestinian figures, like poet Mahmoud Darwish or journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (the focus of an anti-Israel media campaign that accused the IDF of deliberately murdering her), camouflage a more pernicious goal: to erase Israel from Israel and replace it with Palestine. Indeed, like many other Palestinian children’s authors today, Reem Kassis appears to believe that if you say “Palestine” enough times, kids will accept that as the land’s real name, with Israel as the wicked land thief.
Right from the start, Kassis posits Jews as just one people among many who have simply “passed through” the region over time:
The native people who have inhabited this land for millennia are called Palestinians. During this time, empires rose and fell, language changed, religions evolved and many powerful civilizations—Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Jews, Crusaders, Ottomans—passed through and left a mark on this place and its people (p. 6).
Identifying today’s Palestinians as “the native people,” she buys into the fabrication that today’s Arab Palestinians are indigenes – descendants of (though she doesn’t name them) the Canaanites and Jebusites, who we know disappeared with their cultures millennia ago. This is a trick employed by prominent figures like Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who proudly announced, “We are the Canaanites,” and Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who claimed to be “a son of Jericho, aged 10,000 years. . . . I am the proud son of Canaanites, and I existed 5,000 years ago.”
Kassis also ignores the historically documented Arab (and multi-ethnic) migration into the region, both before and during the period of the British Mandate. As scholar Daniel Pipes explains, after Egypt conquered Palestine in 1831, “6,000 Egyptian peasants moved to Palestine.” Ottoman and British improvements to infrastructure, in concert with the economic activity of enterprising European Jewish immigrants, spurred economic growth, attracting the in-migration of Arabs from neighboring countries in search of good jobs and wages. To equate “Palestinians” with “native people,” while equating Jews with those who just “passed through” the region, is inaccurate.
This erasure is most glaring in a sidebar to the chapter titled “Ancient History.” Kassis writes:
Over the last few thousand years, many groups and people have ruled over the land we know as Palestine. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians and Mamelukes all, at one point or another, laid claim to this significant location.
Notice who’s missing from this list.
The centuries-long presence of the Jews in the land of Israel over the First and Second Temple periods (from about 1000 BCE to the fall of the Second Temple in 135 CE) is deleted. Despite considerable archeological evidence – coins, seals, ancient synagogues, ritual baths, and candelabras unearthed throughout Israel–not to mention the textual evidence in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Books of the Maccabees and, for the Roman period, the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, our author forgets, or refuses to admit, that there was a centuries-long period of Jewish sovereignty and a longer period of effective Jewish self-government under the Persians, Greeks, and Romans.
This should come as no surprise, as it mirrors the insidious practice in academia of erasing the Jewish past in the land of Israel. As documented by Richard L. Cravatts, anti-Israel scholars accuse Israeli historians and archeologists of twisting archeology to create a Jewish narrative; they deny the historicity of the biblical account, or claim that it was created well after events occurred to bolster the Jewish narrative. Yassir Arafat himself shocked President Bill Clinton by denying that there was ever a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount.
Since Western Civilization is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, this is not just an attack on Judaism, but on the Judeo-Christian West. I would remind Reem Kassis, though, that the West is where we live, and Western culture, whether she likes it or not, is deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible. Michelangelo’s David was sculpted for viewers who knew the account of David’s life from the book of Samuel; American abolitionists, both black and white, knew that slavery was wrong because the Bible, which they read closely, told them that God stepped into history to deliver the Hebrew slaves from bondage and lead them to the Promised Land – the land of Israel, not Palestine; Martin Luther King’s ringing words, “And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” deliberately evoke the moment when God permits Moses to view the Promised Land from the summit of Pisgah.
To cover herself against potential accusations of being antisemitic, Kassis is careful to include Jews as residents of the land; she tells us they live in Jaffa and Jerusalem, though she excludes the booming city of Tel Aviv, founded by Zionists, entirely. Judaism is acknowledged as one of the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions:
People believe that 4000 years ago, Abraham decided to follow one God and left his home to travel across the present-day Middle East. Jews believe they are descendants of Abraham’s son Isaac, while Muslims believe they are descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael (p. 97).
But omitted from this account of the Abraham story is God’s promise to Abraham: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you” — the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. Had Kassis included that biblical reference, the young reader might understand the inextinguishable Jewish attachment to the land of Israel.
So Judaism gets a curt nod – but that is all. In the section “History and Religion,” Kassis accords a two-page spread to Islam and another to Christianity. But Judaism, the monotheistic faith forged in Israel, whose name derives from the kingdom of Judea, which, in turn, derives from the name of Jacob’s son Judah, isn’t accorded the same honor.
Books shouldn’t lie to kids, and a book that does, like We Are Palestinian, doesn’t belong in any school or public library. Erasing Jewish history is discriminatory and antisemitic.