Reviewed by Anne Rubinovitz

A Map for Falasteen purports to educate young readers in the history of the Palestinian people. Its unifying device is a trio of adults – a grandfather, grandmother, and mother - answering a child’s innocent question: Can Palestine exist if it is not on a map? The girl is Falasteen, whose very name means Palestine in Arabic, a clever double entendre for the book’s title. The adults employ different approaches to convince her that a nation of Palestine exists in present-day Israel. Grandpa draws a map replacing Israel with Palestine; Grandma fabricates a history of “Palestine;” and Mama shares her dream of a future without Jews. These inaccurate lessons render Jews invisible and deny their humanity through an obfuscating veneer of cultural warmth and jewel-toned illustrations.

In the book’s first false lesson, Grandpa applies the principle often referred to as the “big lie,” to Palestinian history. The principle is that if you tell a “big” lie and keep repeating it, people will come to believe it. Grandpa’s big lie is that a Palestinian nation exists on the map where Israel currently is. He gifts Falasteen his hand-drawn Israel-shaped map on which the name Al Quds replaces Jerusalem, mosques replace synagogues, and Arabs replace Jews. In service of this replacement of the Jews with Palestinian Arabs, the author repeats Arabic city names throughout the book’s text and as decoration on its endpapers.

So, how does the big lie work here? A nation of Palestine has never actually existed. When the Romans ended a series of Israeli rebellions in 135 CE, they changed Israel’s name from Judea (land of the Jews) to Syria Palaestina (Philistine Syria), a term based on a long-defeated, coastal Greek people, the Philistines.i Rome’s name change sought to punish the Jews by severing their link to the land.ii After the fall of Rome, the name Palestine referred to Middle Eastern land without a national designation.iii From 1516 to 1918, it was part of the Ottoman Empire.iv From 1918 to 1948, it was under a British-controlled mandate.v During these years, the population included Jews, Arabs, and other ethnic groups who had settled in the region over the years. When Israel was re-established in 1948, it was the first autonomous nation within the land’s borders since the kingdoms of Israel and Judea many centuries earlier. In other words, Grandpa’s map is an invention and a denial of real history.

Grandma compounds Grandpa’s big lie with a one-sided history lesson. In her account, Jews are invading soldiers “with their tanks and guns” who “destroyed our villages and gave them new names.” Below are the most egregious of Grandma’s material errors and omissions:

  1. Jews lived in Israel from Biblical times and, in many cases, were restoring the towns’ original names.
  2. The 1947 United Nations Partition Plans apportioned the land into two states: Israel and Palestine. The Jews agreed to the partition; the Arabs did not.
  3. The Arab world attempted to eradicate Israel at its inception with a war waged on the new state by five neighboring Arab countries: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordanvi, also using soldiers “with their tanks and guns.”
  4. Israel’s soldiers had to establish and defend the borders of their new state.
  5. In the resulting war, the Arab countries ended up with no state of Palestine.
  6. Approximately one million Jewish citizens, many with family roots going back centuries, were forced from Arab states since 1948 due to anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility.vii

Like other propagandistic Palestinian books, Falasteen employs the key as a motif of Palestinian entitlement, while ignoring its equal applicability to Jewish refugees. Grandma gifts Falasteen a housekey to remind her of the Palestinians’ forsaken homes and as an implicit promise that the land will be retaken. However, she ignores redress for the numerous attacks on Jewish homes prior to the 1948 war of Israel independence and the many homes abandoned by Jews forced to flee from surrounding Arab countries. The key is expected for Palestinian refugees yet never considered for long-dispossessed Jews and Jewish refugees.

Following the grandparents’ false and misleading history lessons, Falasteen’s Mama delivers a view of the Palestinians’ future that has ominous implications for Jews. These may be difficult to spot at first because of the author’s optimistic aphorisms (“Palestine lives in you and me”) and use of cultural touchstones, including music (“hearts that beat like dabke drums”), food (“the bread Tata bakes”), and clothing (“every cross-stitch of the thobe”). However, Mama’s grievances surface in her deterministic pronouncements (“their maps don’t erase us,” “it is wrong to deny a people their home”), religious visions cast as political reality (“our homeland is as real as God above”), and embrace of violence (“she [Palestine] is in the stones we cast”).

The book’s final images of a future Palestine are a fantasy in which more than seven million Jewish Israelis alive today, along with their religion, culture, and peoplehood, have magically vanished. Palestine “is Haifa and Yafa and Ramla and Lydd. She is Nassrah, Nablus, Jerusalem, and Jenin. She is Gaza most of all and her dear, laughing children, playing soccer by the sparkling sea.” This “utopian” vision, which Falasteen views from atop a fence, shows a pastoral land where olive trees, which frequently symbolize Palestine in propaganda books targeting young readers, grow out of homes, while children frolic with balloons, befriend birds, and play soccer. It is an irredentist dream, particularly seen against the stark realities on the ground: Israel is a thriving, modern democracy of 76 years, while Gaza, having been governed by a terrorist organization for 18 years, lies in rubble following its government’s decision to launch a suicidal war.

No review of this book would be complete without comment on the content intended for adults. The opening “Resources for Adults” section contains sharply biased references. Examples include The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe, an anti-Zionist Israeli ex-patriot; The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance by Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian professor and advisor to the PLO; and the one-sided, propagandistic website "Decolonize Palestine." A final “Author’s Note” erroneously defines all of Israel as the Palestinian “homeland” and classifies Israel as a “settler colony … like the U.S. and Canada.”

The “Author’s Note” also advocates for a nonexistent right of return, allowing for Palestinians and their descendants to claim Israeli citizenship regardless of when or how they left, and without the pertinent UN Resolution’s stipulations requiring them to accept the legitimate governance of the Jewish state or an alternative offer of compensation. The picture book inculcates rejection of the reality of a sovereign Jewish homeland with Jewish citizens and reveals the author’s intent to further perpetuate the conflict and darken the future of all children, Palestinian and Jewish.

Book link: https://issuu.com/macmillankids/docs/amapforfalasteen_9781250896704_galley

i Douglas J. Feith, “The Forgotten History of the Term ‘Palestine,’” Mosaic Magazine, Hudson Institute, Inc., (December 13, 2021) https://www.hudson.org/node/44363#:~:text=%E2%80%9CPalaestina%E2%80%9D%20referred%20to%20the%20Philistines,River%20and%20the%20Mediterranean%20Sea.

ii Ibid.

iii Ibid.

iv Ibid.

v Ibid.

vi “The Arab Israeli War of 1948,” United States Department of State Office of the Historian (retrieved December 12, 2024) https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war.

vii “The Emigration and Expulsion of Jews from Arab Countries,” MENA Research Center (June 6, 2021) https://www.mena-researchcenter.org/the-emigration-and-expulsion-of-jews-from-arab-countries/.