Why a children’s book has Zionists losing their minds

In this moment of nuclear proliferation, police brutality, resurgent Nazism, and stunning inequality, Zionists have managed to find the real enemy:  a children’s book.  The offending title, P is for Palestine, was recently published by Golbarg Bashi and Golrokh Nafisi after a long crowdfunding campaign.  Zionists have reacted as if it’s the Hamas charter.  

My wife and I bought the book for our five-year-old son.  It was a logical purchase.  Two of his grandparents are Palestinian, after all.  The kid wasn’t especially excited about the book, but he likes it.  I feel the same way.  The text is an inventory of cultural and geographic objects in alphabetical format, framed by (often beautiful) illustrations.  Filled with romanticized cultural imagery, it takes about five minutes to read.

M is for Miftah, Key of Return…Mama’s Mama, and my Jiddah’s Mama’s, for which I yearn! (Image from P is for Palestine)

In other words, it’s a typical children’s book.  The only way it differs from its numerous peers in the “diversity” marketplace is that the foreign country it glamorizes is Palestine.  Therefore, it is ipso facto intolerable to professional Zionist organizations.

We could just chalk up the latest iteration of Zionist anguish to a heightened sense of disquiet thanks to Israel’s steep decline in global prestige, pushed along by a burgeoning BDS movement.  It helps explain the overwrought reaction to a political document written in crayon.

There is more at work, though.  Something about P is for Palestine touched a nerve.  When does a children’s book get coverage in the New York Post (“Page Six,” no less), the Forward, Ha’aretz, the New York Daily News, and Breitbart?  Whenever Israel’s supporters get upset, plenty of publications are happy to amplify their grievances.  That the outrage commenced immediately upon the book’s release illustrates how Palestine can abruptly create or alter a news cycle in the United States.

But something seems a bit more desperate about this gambit, almost as if a cartoon Palestine has the special ability to summon deadly serious affection.  It likely has to do with the nature of the genre.  Children’s books aren’t merely precious entertainment; we imagine them to be conduits for the transmission of certain values.  Ever since David Ben-Gurion’s dramatically erroneous prediction that future generations of Palestinian children would forget the nakba, teaching and learning about Palestine has been a sore spot for Zionists (look at how the issue fares in secondary schools and universities).

Simply put, nothing threatens Israel more than the survival of Palestinian identity through successive generations, which is exactly what P is for Palestine tries to accomplish.  Zionists don’t oppose its content; they oppose its mere existence as a document to historical memory.  Zionists consistently express disdain for Palestinians who refuse to validate Israel.  Even kuffiyehs and falafel in caricature become an existential threat.

P is for Palestine makes manifest something Zionists fear but cannot control: from Santiago to Toronto, Athens to Oslo, Abu Dhabi to Aleppo, Palestinians continue to claim and honor their ancestral land. Zionists know these transactions happen and can do nothing to stop them.  The book provides an ocular target for their existential anxiety.

Israel enjoys a devastating military, an ever-growing land base, and an advanced economy, but it is afflicted by a remarkably fragile psyche.  There’s no other reason for its devotees to go ballistic over a self-published children’s book.  Polls repeatedly show that American Jews, youth in particular, have a declining attachment to Israel.  Meanwhile, Palestinians are united by a desire to reclaim their homeland.

Nor should we overlook the demographic for which P is for Palestine is intended.  For 70 years, Israel has visited untold misery on Palestinian children.  The state’s desire for ethnic purity has politicized notions of childhood in the majoritarian imagination.  The book presumably transforms Palestinian kids into the type of political creatures that Zionists are obliged to hate.

Nation-states are tenuous.  Indigeneity is not.  It constantly announces itself to the forces that seek its destruction.  In turn it unceasingly confers to itself the power to destroy—and it does so without weapons or without deception, but with the simple timelessness of being.

P is also for paranoia.  Insofar as one’s political fetish requires Palestinians to capitulate or disappear, the condition is perfectly justified.

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Z is for Zoned-out.
Good book review review (and good book review).

Excellent article, Steven.

Israel is no different to other settler colonial countries where identity is built on oppression. After world war 2 many Jews felt hatred against Germany. Zionism turned this hatred against innocent Palestinians . This is exemplified in how Israel treats Gaza. Israeli society is insane . Luckily for the rest of us the condition cannot be stabilised. Israel can’t reach a steady state. It is a systemic crisis .

Too bad the book isn’t delivered (yet) to Switzerland! I’m waiting for it.

Zionism is zero sum. Either or. Because it’s manufactured. Israelis are made in school. Their identity gets them ready for the army. Their identity only exists in Hebrew

Palestinian culture frightens them. The Palestinians dont have to be indoctrinated so that everyone thinks the same. They just have to know who they are

Israel is very like Northern Ireland . The British Protestants there lorded it over their Irish catholic neighbours for years. It was a Protestant state for a Protestant people. Protestant identity was defined as not Irish. For the first 2 generations of NI the catholics were humiliated as state policy. They were denied jobs and social beneits. The Protestant kids were educated to think of catholics as inferior.
The third and fourth generations of catholics began to question the narrative and they did it via politics and culture . In 1960 a Team from Northern Ireland were Irish football champions.
The catholics have centuries of culture to dip into. They can emphasise different aspects as identity is updated.
The Protestants have a make uppy identity. Not Irish. It is brittle and very hard to update.

NoW the UK is leaving the EU. Or maybe not. The Protestants have to do the British thing. But the Brits are all over the place. What is the rational thing to do? If the Brits jumped off a cliff would the NI protestants too? The answer seems to be “yes”.

That is the problem with settler colonial projects. Coherence .

John Hewitt was a Protestant poet from NI. He examined the complexities of the Protestant experience in his work.

http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/literature/john-hewitt-selected-poems

“Hewitt dared to connect the various with the particular; he suggested and then laid down, if you will, through his poetry, the nature of Ulsterness in all its varied hues. He was able to note that the landscape, as one passed from the north of Ireland to the Republic, did not alter (‘The Frontier’) and, even more daringly, implied therefore that we might all be sitting on the same island, even in the same acre.

He was aware that the province of Ulster had been colonised and had spread the psyche of colonising to eventually settle and administrate that other colony that became the United States. Only a defiant Ulster pragmatism, (and an inherently Godless one, in spite of what the inherently Presbyterian emigration ballads of the 19th century imply) one might argue, could have carried that off and thrown in seven US presidents for good measure.”

One of the best poems is called the colony . This is another one

http://johnhewittsociety.org/the-coasters-1969/

It reminds me of the gay pride marches 40 miles up the coast from a place where 80% of families need international aud to feed their kids.

And btw surely P for Palestine is wrong . Shouldnt it be b for Balestine ? ??
And ch for c in the countryside. Cheef Haalich
And a blank for q fil uds. Ya’ni