How To Talk To Muslim Kids About Gaza
"Home isn’t where your grandparents come from," he said. "It’s where your grandkids will live."
It’s been over a year since I last posted, but not because I’d given up. Because I’ve been too busy. Since last year, I’m teaching forty kids (there’d be more, if I had the resources.) Fourteen of these kids are middle school boys, with whom we cover the manners and mores of Muslim men.
The remaining twenty-six are high schoolers, young men and young women. We’re exploring Islam through literature, starting with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But that curriculum had to be put on pause last month. Which is why I’m writing.
On October 7th, I was in a remote part of southern Spain, and remained there for the next two weeks. It took me time to understand what was happening, but as soon as it dawned on me, I realized my first responsibility.
How do I talk to our kids, and the kids I teach, about Gaza, about Hamas, about Palestine, about Israel, about how America is responding? If I’m honest, confronting these questions helped me find my voice in the last few weeks.
While I’ve been quite busy, it’s been mostly behind the scenes—until now.
My first public piece is for Wisdom of Crowds, an amazing Substack you should all subscribe to. In What I Told My Muslim Students About Gaza, I outline what I talked to the middle schoolers about, beginning with what is obvious (and obviously necessary):
When I sat down with the younger boys for our first class after Israel began bombing Gaza, we started with some questions. What are you guys seeing? How are you feeling? What are people at school saying? They shared fear, sadness, anger. They’d be wrong, I told them, not to feel these things, given the circumstances Palestinians were suffering through.
Of course, I told them that if anyone said anything offensive or hurtful to them, or made them feel unsafe, they were to tell a responsible adult. We, their parents and their community, were and would always be there for them. And before I went into a little bit of the history, I made sure they understood the moral frame behind and above it all.
After establishing a moral foundation on which every subsequent conversation can be founded, we went into the (age-appropriate) background. Later , I share how I supplemented and built upon this for the high schoolers:
We talked in detail about the history of the conflict, why Biden’s kneejerk response threatens to drag America into another forever war (and how that’s bad for everyone, including Israelis).
We talk about how moral principles shape and guide our politics. We talked about Zionism and the Nakba. We talked about civic engagement. And then we talked about our responsibilities as citizens of faith. We’re still meeting weekly, of course. Still bridging the lessons I’d planned out and the crisis we are living through.
I’m really happy to share that we are actively exploring the overlaps between the life and work of Malcolm X and the present moment. With the older kids, we’ve also watched a powerful, painful documentary, Born in Gaza (available on Netflix). We were going to read a book from the early 20th century, on a very different topic, but the present circumstances invite us to look into a different title.
Given a choice between Atef About Seif’s The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary and Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, the students selected the latter (and I hope we can start after Thanksgiving).
We’ll keep going and, God willing, I’ll find space to share more on what we are doing together (and what questions come up). I’m also hoping to write more for a public audience, building on some of these themes and conversations, these insights and these experiences. Because, as I wrote in this Wisdom of Crowds essay, one of the most important things we can do for our kids right now is ask questions with them.
Especially with our older kids, I invite you to compare 2001 to 2023. To talk about your experiences. To talk about lessons learned. To ask what went right and what went wrong and how it all looks in hindsight.
How did we get from there to here? What worked and what didn’t? What should we have done differently? What brings us together? Are our differences inevitable or just unfortunate? We can think through what it means to be an American and a Muslim all over again. Because, after all, every generation has to define its own faith.
And it would be naïve to think they’d grow up in a world that could never blindside them. Some of these kids will be voting for the first time next year. What should they do when candidates let them down? When political parties fail? Nobody had those conversations with me. In August 2001, I didn’t know I’d need those conversations.
Give the full essay a read over at Wisdom of Crowds. Of course, feel free to share if it’s of interest. And before you go, here’s a link to my appearance on the Wisdom of Crowds podcast, one of the most enjoyable, challenging, and exciting conversations I’ve been able to have about my most recent book and the implications for American Muslims.