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 Palestinians burned alive, homes turned to ash, mothers cradling lifeless children. I’d scroll, weep quietly, and keep feeding her—two acts of sustenance at once.
I try not to let my daughters see the reels that flicker across my screen before I can swipe them away—the smoke, the rubble, the grief. When Azra asks why people are being hurt, I tell her softly, “Because some people are not safe right now.” But I quickly follow it with, “But they will be soon.”
Even though, deep down, I don’t believe it myself. How could I, after these last two years?
“Can we help them?” Azra asks.
Her instinct to care—before she even understands cruelty—reminds me that compassion is our children’s first language. So how do I explain such violence to a tender, young mind? For two years, as bombs have flattened homes in Gaza and entire families have been erased, I’ve wrestled with how to explain the unexplainable.
How do you talk about genocide, occupation, and dehumanization when the world itself refuses to name them? How do you nurture empathy in a world that rewards silence?
My daughters go to Jummah prayer with their grandparents, to Islamic summer camp, and to weekend school. We live in a community full of people like us. They don’t yet realize that being Muslim in America is a unique—and often politicized—identity.
Storytelling as Survival
For Palestinians, storytelling has always been an act of survival. Every uprooted olive tree, every demolished home, every erased village lives on in a story—a memory passed down like an inheritance.
I think of Palestinian mothers in the diaspora who carry the weight of history in bedtime stories—tales of grandparents they’ve never met, villages that no longer exist, keys that no longer open any door.
And I think of South Asian parents like me, who inherited our own fractured geographies—Partition, exile, genocide—and now must help our children see how these histories are connected.
Teaching Empathy in a World That Punishes It
What frightens me most isn’t that my children will see suffering—it’s that they might learn to look away. That they’ll grow up in a culture that numbs them with spectacle, that teaches neutrality as virtue.
So I try to teach them, in small ways, to choose compassion over comfort. Azra wants to save money for baby birds who have no food—and for Gazan children who have lost their toys.
And when I falter—when the weight of explaining feels too heavy—I give myself grace.
Across the world, parents like me are wrestling with how to tell our children the truth. We’re choosing to tell them that what is happening is wrong—not to pass down rage, but to pass down humanity. We are teaching them that silence is never neutral. That to look away is to agree.
And maybe, if we do this right, our children will grow up knowing how to hold grief without letting it harden. How to fight injustice without losing tenderness. How to see every child, everywhere, as worthy of safety and love.
Because that, too, is a form of resistance.
Resources for talking to your children about Palestine:
Books on Palestine for grades K-12
Animated short film: “THE BOX - From Playhouse to Lifeboat” Journey of a War Child, dir. Merve Cirisoglu
Animated short film: “I Am From Palestine”, dir. Iman Zawahry