Letter: Hannah Moushabeck’s Homeland Tells Only One Side of a Complex Story
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I fully support ARPS’s goal to share stories of various backgrounds and cultures, as well as “promoting respect of people of diverse backgrounds and human rights.” My personal background is that of a Jewish parent of an Amherst public school student.
The Homeland book chosen by ARPS and read at Fort River and Wildwood is inclusive of only one perspective of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Whether such a complex historical period – with reverberations through to the present – should be taught at the elementary school level is questionable. But if such complex histories are to be taught to elementary school children, then other perspectives should be introduced so as to achieve ARPS’s goal of sharing stories of diverse backgrounds and cultures. For example, approximately 900,000 Jews lived in Arab countries prior to 1948 and only a few thousand remain today, the vast majority of them forcibly expelled.
ARPS appears to be supporting a one-sided view of a very complex history and negating the Jewish historical perspectives, along with historical facts, of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. If a comprehensive overview sounds far too complex to present to elementary school students, I agree.
I read Hannah Moushabeck’s book Homeland. Her book beautifully recreates her father’s life, memories, and tragedy of leaving his homeland. However, her book offers only one perspective – both personal and historical – of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War via its symbols and language, e.g., Israel is referred to as “occupied” and the refrigerator has a map of Israel with the words “Free Palestine” written in Arabic. A note at the end uses the Arab word for “catastrophe” to refer to the founding of Israel. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 and divided the land into Jewish and Arab states beginning in May 1948. The author had an interview with The Graphic (student newspaper) in November 2023 where she talks about her historical views of that time period, which are woven into Homeland.
Although I disagree with Homeland’s characterization of Israel’s founding and continued existence, I am glad that I read it, and glad that the Jones Library had it available for me to read. But I am an adult, capable of seeking out different historical and political perspectives on my own. By contrast, elementary school children should not be subjected to the political activism (however skillfully woven into a child’s book) of one person on a controversial historical and political matter.
I do not believe this letter is a good-faith response to Hannah Moushabeck’s children’s memoir. Families of all faiths and cultures, at all ages, have conversations about what it is like to live within a biased world. If children are old enough to experience bias from their peers and communities, then their communities must also be equipped to have age-appropriate conversations about those experiences. I do not believe we must avoid complicated topics and conversations with children merely because they are complicated. Children are intelligent and capable of learning and engaging with proper support.
Homeland is a memoir. A memoir is a form of nonfiction writing that focuses on a specific period or aspect of the author’s life, often with an emphasis on the author’s emotions, experiences, and reflections on those events. The very genre of this book, which is thoughtfully and critically written, means that it will share a particular perspective of the events and themes within. This is not biased, this is lived experience shared in an age-appropriate way. This letter follows a pattern of denying the ongoing, historic violence against Palestinians and under the guise of being concerned with antisemitism.
It’s unbelievable to me how Palestinian Americans are denied our “Coming to America” story. The USA is a settler-colonial state, where the indigenous population was wiped out by 90% with the survivors expelled to reservations. If you are not an indigenous American, your family has a “Coming to America” immigration story. That story that is handed down through oral histories and for the lucky of us, memorialized in books, movies, documentaries, photo essays and shared with our fellow Americans, so we can collectively understand how this country came to be and currently is. The MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in fact has standards that mandate teaching immigration stories in elementary school.
Palestinian Americans simply aren’t allowed to share our story of becoming Americans. When we tell our communities what caused our forced migration from our homeland we get punished for not writing a geopolitical history of Palestine’s colonizers. What other ethnicity in the United States has to do this when a person talks about why their father misses where they were born? Most immigration stories start simply with the strife the families face, not a history of their oppressor.
As a Palestinian American resident of Sunderland, who has two Palestinian children in local public schools, I cannot communicate the level of hurt when I read these criticisms of Homeland. When I tell the story of the ethnic cleansing of my parent’s village of Salama, I do not begin with the history of the Irgun and Haganah Zionist militias that terrorized the villagers with violence until their escape to Ramallah and Gaza. I do not recite the biography of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder Revisionist Zionism and progenitor of the Irgun. I start with my mother’s escape in the back of a pickup truck, who left the village in December 1947, the day she was born, umbilical cord still attached to my grandmother.
With tears as I type, I too, a Palestinian father, dreams of Palestine, of the lemon and orange groves I’ve never tasted, of never sitting in my grandfathers coffee shop, of the Mediterranean sea I’ve never touched, and I will never be ashamed of that.