I don't know how to talk to my kid about Palestine

But I'm learning.

From Animated short film: “I Am From Palestine”, dir. Iman Zawahry

A few months ago, my sister bought my daughters the sweetest gift—a Palestinian doll named Mina, along with a book called The Seeds of Palestine. We’ve been reading children’s books about Palestine for nearly two years, but this one—paired with the curious, tender mind of my almost five-year-old, Azra—sparked new questions.

“Why do people want to hurt them?” Azra asked one night.
“Why do they burn their homes?”
And, finally, “Will they burn our house too?”

For weeks, those questions followed us into the night. She woke up screaming sometimes, clutching me as if the images had crossed from the pages into her dreams.

My two-year-old daughter, Cyra, was born five weeks before October 7th, 2023. I remember nursing her in the dark, my phone lit with images of Pale…