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“Younger generations of children desperately need the books and educational experiences that will help ground them in a fuller understanding of this troubled area of the world.”[i]

It is with these high-sounding words that author Alice Rothchild advocates for a less lofty goal than a “fuller understanding of this troubled area of the world” (that is, the Middle East). What she promotes is smuggling pro-Palestinian propaganda into American classrooms. Rothchild never explains exactly why it’s only the Middle East conflict that younger generations “desperately need” to understand and not, for example, the conflicts with America’s arch-rivals — Russia and China. Still, so determined was Rothchild to close the knowledge gap she claims is there that she set about writing Old Enough to Know, a novel for middle grade students about a Palestinian-American boy entering fourth grade in a new school.

Mohammed Omar Mohammed Abu Srour is afraid that his distinct Palestinian identity will make him stand out. With his unusually long name, the Palestinian food he brings for lunch, and the gaps in his knowledge of his family’s story, he is ill at ease with his Palestinian identity in an American classroom. His problems are echoed big time by his older sister Zaynab, the only girl to wear a hijab in school. Teasing and harassment make adjusting to the new school uncomfortable for both of them.

In Mohammed’s case, it is an assignment to research his family background that opens the conversation with his beloved grandmother (his “Sitti”) about her past.  She describes the family’s displacement in 1948 from Beit Nattif, a small village in the Jerusalem hills, not too far from Bethlehem. Her stories offer Mohammed a firm sense of who he is and where he came from. They also inculcate a sense of outrage at Israel for — in the words of his Aunt Layla — having “chased us out of our homes” or, in his Uncle Tahrir’s words, stealing “my land” (136).

Because Old Enough to Know is a polemic, every character’s speech and every turn of plot is contrived to send a message. For example, on the way to his new school, Mohammed mutters, “I will find a friend/I will blend-blend-blend.”  While it’s true that kids arriving at a new school tend to feel anxious, “blend” is not the word a fourth-grader would use to describe this discomfort; it’s a politically loaded term, a dig at educators who want American schools to acculturate immigrants. Most fourth-graders don’t think in political terms unless they’ve been coached.

Sittis and Olive Oil

Two staples of anti-Israel propaganda figure in Rothchild’s story: the “sitti” (grandmother) figure and the olive tree, each signaling Palestinian rootedness in the land. Mohammed and Zaynab’s Sitti, repository of warm family memories, charms the reader with her culinary specialties (hummus, maqluba, rolled vine leaves). Significantly, Mohammed’s parents are almost invisible in this book; instead, it is Sitti who is nostalgic for the olive oil and almond trees of her home:

Ghada: “I want to tell how we will return to our olive trees, how our family’s olive oil was the best in the village.”

“And remember the almonds and the lemon trees.” Fatima [the young Sitti] smiles and kisses Seema on her cheek. . .  “I still dream of my house and the wheat fields. Someday, we will go back. Hopefully soon, insha’allah. Never forget, my little dreamers” (93).

Good food is a common motif in children’s books — think of Mr. Tumnus’s sumptuous tea in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But Rothchild weaponizes hummus to attack pro-Israel children’s books for cultural appropriation: “[T]his dish was prevalent in Palestine and other Arab cultures and was ‘discovered’ by Eastern European Jews who came to Palestine and started eating the local food.”[ii]

Not quite, according to renowned Jerusalem cookbook authors Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi:

Hummus for example, a highly explosive subject, is undeniably a staple of the local Palestinian population, but it was also a permanent feature on dinner tables of Aleppine Jews who have lived in Syria for millennia and then arrived in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s. Who is more deserving of calling hummus their own? Neither. Nobody “owns” a dish because it is very likely that someone else cooked it before them and another person before that. . . . [I]n this soup of a city it is completely impossible to find out who invented this delicacy and who brought that one with them.[iii]

Sitti’s hummus and stuffed vine leaves may earn sympathy for the family’s plight, but the book’s message – that Israelis have no right to live on Sitti’s stolen land, and Palestinians have every right to return to the Edenic world they inhabited before those pesky European Jews arrived – is never balanced in this book by the Israeli perspective. The pastoral world Sitti invokes was far from Edenic – there were anti-Jewish pogroms well before the Zionist influx, in 1834 in Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem and Safed, and in 1920, 1921, and 1929 in Hebron, where Jews had lived at least since the Byzantine era. The erasure Rothchild accuses Zionists of cuts both ways.

Erasure or Indoctrination?

Rothchild wrote Old Enough to Know to address what she views as “a critical absence of sympathetic Palestinian narratives in books written for young people in English”[iv], yet as of this writing, the “Anti-Israel Books” page on the Camera Education Institute website comprises 27 titles. Many of these are promoted on popular children’s book platforms[v].  Authors of anti-Israel children’s books also speak against Israel at major educational conferences and deliver webinars for teachers.[vi] This is hardly “a critical absence.”

Rothchild’s call for “deeper historical and media literacy” through “better resources” for teachers to understand and teach the Middle East conflict also rings hollow. She is doubtless aware of the many anti-Israel curricula on offer, like “Teach Palestine,” and the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum being promoted for use in California and other states. CAMERA has documented the anti-Israel bias in much of this material.

Rothchild decries parental objections to these biased curricula as erasing Palestine, or as “book-banning,” a handy slur that smears parents as right-wing extremists. But parents are well within their rights to object to smuggling privately-held political views into taxpayer-supported public schools.[vii]

Rothchild’s anti-Zionism is so vitriolic that, as early as November 8, 2023, only a week into Israel’s counter-attack on Hamas following the October 7^th massacre, she used her Substack to accuse Israel of perpetrating a “live-streamed genocide”.[viii] Old Enough to Know promotes hatred of Israel, and especially of Israeli soldiers, by omitting the context for some IDF actions and distorting history.

Lack of Context

Whether the villagers of Sitti’s Beit Nattif fled on their own initiative, were encouraged to flee by Arab leaders or the IDF, or were expelled is unclear, but Rothchild uses Sitti’s narrative to lay most of the blame on the IDF. Describing the mass flight of the villagers in 1948, she writes:

On each side of the road, a cluster of men and women, Israeli soldiers, guns pointed at the villagers, yell in Arabic, “Yalla, yalla. Faster, faster” (58).

Later in the story, Sitti shares another memory with her grandchildren:

“I know what that feels like, getting hit in the face.”

“You do?”

“It happened when we left the village, on the long walk east. It was a soldier. We weren’t moving fast enough. I was hungry, really wanted to pick some apricots. I was only ten.”

Zaynab peaked [sic] into the kitchen. “He hit you?”

“He hit me with the end of his rifle” (71).

The take-away for a young reader? IDF soldiers are very, very mean. How could a fourth- or fifth-grader, who has studied no military history, know that any army, not just Israel’s, will have some undisciplined soldiers?

Nor does Old Enough to Know provide any context for the flight of Beit Nattif’s villagers. Was the location strategic? In his history of the War of Independence, 1948, Israeli historian Benny Morris explains that the IDF’s General Staff was anxious to “pin down unengaged Egyptian forces and widen the corridor to West Jerusalem as well as to secure the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv railway line,” thus authorizing “twin attacks on the Egyptian and local irregulars in the Beit Shemesh and Bethlehem areas,”[ix] which is where Beit Nattif was situated. If the villagers were encouraged to leave or expelled, was this to make it easier to fight the enemy without worrying about civilians getting caught in the crossfire? Rothchild offers no context, only the family’s grievance.

Another poignant story cries out for context. Having fled the village in 1949, the family found shelter in a cave. Fatima’s mother was pregnant:

Suddenly they hear a wailing from inside the darkness. As she peeks into the cave her grandfather pulls her away. But she has seen everything. Her grandmother kneeling over her mother. Her mother lying on blankets on the floor. Her aunt stroking her forehead. Blood was everywhere.

Grandfather wraps her up in his arms as she starts to cry. “Let’s go, habibti, let’s walk. You should not see this.” Then they both stop, waiting for the sounds of the newborn.

There is nothing but brutal silence. Suddenly her other lets out a deep moaning shriek. “Noooo” (34).

War is harsh, and innocent civilians suffer. The likelihood of losing a baby when a woman’s strength is depleted from a long, grueling trek is elevated. Rothchild lays all the blame for this suffering on Israel, leaving her young readers to come to the same conclusion.

But she misinforms them.

According to Sitti’s account, “The British pulled out before the war. When the war started, the Arab League joined forces to oppose the creation of Israel, on our land” (72).

But the War of Independence didn’t start on May 14, 1948 with the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the departure of the British. It started immediately after November 29, 1947, when the UN partition resolution was passed. The Jews accepted partition, but the Arabs rejected it, as they had earlier rejected the Peel Commission’s partition recommendation in 1937. It was the Palestinian Arabs who instigated widespread rioting, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Jews and Arabs. (In fact, the UN Commission blamed the Arabs for the riots.) On January 9, 1948, about 1000 Arabs attacked Jewish communities in the north. On April 26, 1948, Jordan’s King Abdullah declared that he would “have the pleasure and honor to save Palestine,” and on May 4, 1948, again before the British decamped, the Arab Legion attacked Kfar Etzion.

Nor was it “our land,” as Sitti puts it, on which Israel was to be created.  None of the land that the Jews had acquired before 1948 was “stolen” from Arabs; it was purchased, often at exorbitant prices, from Arab landlords, many of whom lived outside of Mandate Palestine. After the end of hostilities, the Israelis gained more land, but that’s what happens when you start a war and lose.

Why is this important? Not just because it’s a factual error, but because it highlights Arab rejection of the entirely legal UN partition.

Jewish Refugees Erased

While Rothchild tells us that young Sitti’s family of ten was graduated from tents to a two-room concrete house built by the UN, we’re not informed that displaced Jews faced similar living conditions. As recounted by Puah Schneider in her moving memoir, Forever My Jerusalem, Jews ethnically cleansed by Jordan in 1948 were forced into one-room housing when transferred to homes in the Baka quarter of Jerusalem vacated by fleeing Arab families. Jewish refugees from the Arab world (more than 800,000) fled to Israel and faced miserable living conditions in tents in muddy fields while awaiting more permanent housing, which was still very cramped. This was a real comedown for many from the housing they had left behind in Iraq, Egypt, or North Africa. UNRWA offered them no assistance.

Wall (or Fence?)

Sitti complains that “Israelis surrounded the [Aida refugee] camp with a huge concrete wall. A prison”  (150). It’s true that the residents of Bethlehem are divided from other parts of the West Bank and Israel by a separation wall (though most of this “wall” is an electrified fence), but this was necessitated, in the wake of the Second Intifada, by infiltration of suicide bombers into Israel. According to Jewish Virtual Library, “From September 2000 until the end of 2005, more than 3,000 terrorist attacks originated in the West Bank, resulting in the deaths of 1,622 people inside the Green Line. By comparison, since 2008, when most of the fence was erected, until mid-2022, 141 attacks killed 100 people.” The much-maligned separation barrier saves lives.

“A Bully that’s a Country”

Sitti: “Israelis thought if they grabbed the whole place just for themselves, that the world would look the other way.”

Mohammed: “You mean like a bully that’s a country.”

Sitti nodded . . . “Israel wants the land but doesn’t want the people from that land” (148).

If Israel “doesn’t want the people from that land,” why is Israel twenty percent Arab today? It hasn’t driven out its Arab citizens. Moreover, it accepted partition on multiple occasions, starting with the Peel Commission proposal of 1937 and the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947, both of which the Arabs rejected. Then, following the Oslo Accords, two Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Barak (2000) and Ehud Olmert (2008), offered to return most of the West Bank to the Arabs in exchange for permanent peace. The Palestinian Authority rejected both offers. It wasn’t Israel that wanted “the whole place just for themselves.” It was the Arabs.

If all of this sounds way too complicated to explain to fourth-grade students, that’s because it is. But if the alternative is to force-feed a biased version of events to vulnerable young students, then maybe it’s time to reconsider whether the Arab-Israeli conflict should be taught in schools.

Literature vs. Propaganda

There’s another reason Old Enough to Know doesn’t belong in the classroom, and it has nothing to do with the book’s anti-Israel agenda.

It’s because this type of book is simply no fun to read. Kids don’t open up a book to be hectored about geopolitics. They read to be entertained.

When I taught fourth and fifth grades from the early 1970s until 2008, I selected novels to pique my students’ interest in reading. Here’s a sampling of books that worked:

• Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three, a pseudo-medieval adventure featuring a hapless young hero dispatched on a quest to rescue a mysterious runaway pig.
• B. White’s Stuart Little, whose hero, a humanized mouse, proves that size doesn’t matter, but courage does.
• James Houston’s Akavak, which pits an Inuit boy against the elements on an Arctic odyssey.
• Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and Henry Huggins stories, which capture the angst and joys of Everychild at home and in school.
• Barbara Smucker’s Underground to Canada, which tracks the harrowing escape of two slave girls along the Underground Railroad.

Classic children’s books don’t rant at children about politics; they explore character, reveal universal human emotions, transport young readers to times and places they couldn’t otherwise visit, offer a broad sampling of polished writing styles, and make them laugh. The Secret Garden explores how two spoiled children transcend their selfishness; Bridge to Terabithia confronts death and offers consolation; Tom Sawyer delivers an ironic take on American con artistry; Little Women and Little Men challenge readers to grapple with nineteenth-century prose and understand Victorian norms; and The Wizard of Oz regales readers with utterly convincing, almost-human fantastic creatures.

Why would you even think of handing children a work of pseudo-literature — a vehicle for someone’s political obsessions — when you can share priceless literary treasures with them and get them hooked on reading instead? If there’s anything children “desperately need,” it’s to develop a love of classic literature and the beautiful writing that undergirds it.

 

–Reviewed by Marjorie Gann/Oct. 7, 2025

[i] Alice Rothchild, Medium, “Where is Palestine in children’s literature and why should we care?” Thursday, June 27, 2024.

[ii] Alice Rothchild, Medium, “Where is Palestine in children’s literature and why should we care?” Thursday, June 27, 2024.

[iii] Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, Jerusalem. appetite by Random House, 2012, p. 16.

[iv] Alice Rothchild, Medium, “Where is Palestine in children’s literature and why should we care?” Thursday, June 27, 2024.

[v] Social Justice Books, Teach Palestine’s “Books for Students” page, We Need Diverse Books, Pragmatic Mom

[vi] See “Radicals Tried and Failed to Expel CAMERA From A Teachers’ Convention,” CAMERA’s account of the 2024 National Council of Teachers of English conference and “Bringing Anti-Israel Activism to Schools Under the Guise of Arab Heritage.”

[vii] Alice Rothchild, Medium, “Where is Palestine in children’s literature and why should we care?” Thursday, June 27, 2024.

[viii] https://alicerothchild.com/2023/11/when-the-messages-stopped-reflections-on-israels-ongoing-assault-on-gaza-november-8-2023/

[ix] Benny Morris, 1948. Yale University Press, 2008, p. 329.