A recent article in Commentary Magazine claimed that a lesson plan organized by the Palestinian Feminist Collective titled “Handala’s Return: A Children’s Story and Workbook” has made its way into schools in Massachusetts and other areas in the United States.
By Rachel Avraham
A recent article in Commentary Magazine claimed that a lesson plan organized by the Palestinian Feminist Collective titled “Handala’s Return: A Children’s Story and Workbook” has made its way into schools in Massachusetts and other areas in the United States. Stand With Us, a Zionist non-profit, claims that it is actually listed as a “resource” to be utilized by teachers by the Massachusetts Teachers Association. It was also initially listed as a resource in Portland, Oregon’s Teachers Association, but was then subsequently removed after facing backlash.
It was removed from Portland’s schools after the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland condemned the materials: “This is an effort by the teachers’ union to promote what many feel is a biased and historically revisionist curriculum. The Jewish Federation of Greater Portland received numerous complaints from Jewish PPS teachers, parents, and even elected officials about the materials.”
Although these materials were removed from Portland’s schools, they still exist in schools in Massachusetts and other parts of the United States. Any Jewish parent who has read “Handala’s Return: A Children’s Story and Workbook” will be greatly disturbed by this development. Any Jewish child in an American classroom where this workbook will be taught will be immediately sidelined as a “Zionist bully” who displaces 10-year-old Palestinian children, causes poor 10-year-old Palestinian children and their mothers to cry, and forces 10-year-old Palestinian children to live in refugee camps, even though they still have the keys to their old home.
Not only that, but in the workbook, American children are educated to act in order to help Handala come home to Palestine. There is a chart, where the young American kindergarteners and first graders are told to draw a safe passageway for Handala to come home to Palestine and to write about what Handala would do in a “free Palestine.” In the workbook, Handala has the right to a homeland, but not the Jews.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the workbook “draws on antisemitic conspiracy theories portraying Jews as predators targeting non-Jewish children, who in this narrative are “having their homes taken by Zionist bullies… always scaring” and “arresting them.”” According to the report in Commentary Magazine, the school workbook, designed for children in kindergarten and first grade, “featured on its front page a map of Israel and Gaza and the West Bank all labeled “Palestine.” Israel did not exist in this lesson plan. The students are then asked to draw their own home and key, presumably to imagine their own sadness were the Jews to come and take their home away.”
According to Commentary Magazine, “At the end of the workbook—again, designed for children about five or six years old—is a page titled “Help Handala Free Palestine.” The students are instructed to write on the page what they will do, specifically, to “raise funds for the children of Palestine” and what they will chant at a “Palestine protest.””
The young American children are not taught that there are also one million Jews from Arab countries, some of whom were kicked out of Arab countries at age 10 for the crime of being Jewish, who are refugees just like Handala. The Jewish Arab refugee experience and the brutal conditions in the Ma’aborot is not taught as part of the curriculum. In “Handala’s Return: A Children’s Story and Workbook,” the only ones who suffer are the Palestinians.
Thus, a children’s version of the Nakba is taught, but not a children’s version of the Farhud Pogrom and the expulsion of one million Jews from Arabic countries. In this manner, kindergarteners and first graders in the United States are indoctrinated to hate Israel in the public schools, very early on. This further creates an atmosphere of antisemitism in the United States, which as the recent terror attack in Washington, DC showed can have violent consequences.
This workbook also deprives children of the right to learn about the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where in reality there are two peoples who are suffering because of the constant state of war and the lack of a peaceful resolution. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, instead of teaching children a one-sided narrative, should instead teach children about the importance of peaceful conflict resolution for there is suffering by average people on both sides and should portray Jews not as bullies, but also as people who have suffered unspeakable horrors and trauma, and deserve the right to live in peace in their homes, without waking up to bomb sirens at 2am in the morning or being murdered in cold blood on the way to a hospital delivery room or being massacred, raped, beheaded, mutilated and burned alive for the crime of being Jewish just for wanting to attend a music festival.
Photo from Stories from Palestine Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBgt6EMxYMs
