The Case of Samantha: A Child’s Understanding of the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian Conflict
Discussion Handout
Samantha cannot remember a time before she learned about the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. Through her 6-year-old eyes, the conflict — which she calls "the war in Israel" — is something that she has known about since before her birth. "I learned about it in my mommy's tummy," she explains.
In kindergarten, Samantha understands four basic ideas about the conflict: that it is violent, that it is ongoing, that it touches the lives of people who live in Israel, and that there is much more to life in Israel than the conflict. She situates the conflict within a larger arc of Jewish history. In her telling, the Jewish people fought against the Greeks, and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is all that remains from the Temple that "got bombed many times." In first grade, she worries about the safety of the Jewish "soldiers trying to protect Israel" because they've been working so hard for so long.
By the start of second grade, Samantha begins to view the conflict not as a war throughout time between Israel and its enemies, but as a very specific conflict between Israel and its closest neighbor that is "trying to steal Israel." She is confused about what that neighbor should be called, wondering if it was "either the Gaza people or the Palestine people," and she's incredibly frustrated that she doesn't have a solid grasp of the language that would allow her to explain what's happening. When she talks about this conflict, she is confident of only one thing: that "Israel's trying to make peace. They don't want war."
Through the end of third grade, Samantha is adamant that Israel rightly belongs to Israeli Jews and that Palestinians are "trying to steal Israel from us, and they have no right to." In her stories about the conflict, Israeli soldiers are heroes and Palestinians are villains. She believes that God "promised [the land of Israel] to the Israelites, and the Israelites were very kind, and they let Palestinians live in Israel, but it's not their country.”"
In fourth grade, Samantha starts to distinguish between Palestinians as a collective and the specific Palestinians who "terrorist attack us." She explains that "we can't judge every [Palestinian] just on how [some Palestinians] behave," insisting that it is only "some Palestinians [who] are not nice to the Jews." For the first time, she begins to see the conflict as two-sided. In her revised position, it is not Palestinians but the conflict itself that is a problem. She frames it as a situation in which
"Palestinians are fighting the Jews and the Jews are fighting the Palestinians and it's not good." Samantha no longer thinks the story of the conflict "is a story with heroes and villains. I think everyone's kind of at fault here."
By fifth grade, Samantha is still frustrated, but no longer at her own limited understanding of the conflict. Instead, her frustration is directed at the intractability of the conflict, and she repeatedly talks about how worried she is about long-standing tensions. Yet Samantha still believes in the possibility of peace. Even as she worries about a situation that she characterizes as moments of war and terrorism punctuated by moments of "resting peace," she has no doubt that lasting peace is possible. "This conflict might happen now," she explains, "but we know the Jews will eventually make peace because that's what they've done in the past."
In middle school, Samantha begins to follow the IDF on Instagram. She does this because "I think it's important to know what's going on, because since I'm Jewish I feel a connection to Israel." It means that she instantly "hears about any attacks on social media," but it also means that she's hyper-aware of all the times that her rabbis and Jewish educators don't talk to her about the conflict. "Look," she explains, "we have peace with Jordan and Egypt. Lebanon, Syria, we still don't have peace with. So we're trying to make peace. And then there's the Palestinians. But it's not like they'll teach us about what's going on now. Teachers will teach us about the Torah and stuff like that, but they'd never really talk about this stuff."
2021 Sivan Zakai Children’s Learning About Israel Project of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University
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