(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.)
When is a coloring book, not just a coloring book? When its purpose is to incite children to hate Jews and glorify violence.
The Israeli police this week arrested the proprietors of an Arab bookstore in Jerusalem that was selling books promoting hatred of Jews and glamorizing terrorists. One was a coloring book, a fact that prompted much mockery on social media. Big, strong Israel is afraid of a little children’s book!
The book is called From the River to the Sea, an old Palestinian Arab slogan calling for the replacement of Israel with an Arab state of Palestine. Intended for six to ten-year-olds, the book features color-by-number pages that demonize Israel and honor terrorists and terror supporters.
There’s Ghassan Kanafani, a senior official of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, best known for its airplane hijackings in the 1970s, its murder of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001, and its massacre of rabbis in a Jerusalem synagogue in 2014.
There’s Refaat Alareer, the “poet” who called the October 7 attack “legitimate and moral,” denied the Hamas gang rapes, and joked on social media about whether baking powder was used in burning Israeli babies to death. In the coloring book, Alareer is flanked by a large flaming kite, the kind Hamas has used to torch countless acres of Israeli farmland.
There’s Ahed Tamimi, the teenager who rose to fame when she was arrested for assaulting Israelis and then later arrested again for writing on social media following October 7: “Come on settlers, we’ll slaughter you. What Hitler did to you was a joke. We’ll drink your blood and eat your skulls.”
The coloring book also features a page devoted to the Intifadas, the waves of mass Palestinian Arab violence in which more than one thousand Israelis were murdered, and thousands more were injured and maimed.
The text accompanying the coloring pages teaches children that Israel has no right to exist since it is “a military outpost of Western imperialism” that “was created on the land of Palestine”; that Israel is an evil, oppressive, genocidal monster, and that those who give their lives for the Palestinian Arab cause are “martyrs—heroes who have a special place in Palestinian society.”
The book’s author, Nathi Ngubane, explained in recent interviews and a TikTok promotional video that he wants to inspire children to action. He hopes “to educate them and let them know they can join the fight for freedom…It is important for children to get to the truth as much as possible in order to lend a hand of solidarity.”
From the River to the Sea fits in perfectly with the books that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been using for decades to educate Palestinian Arab children.
The PA textbook Mathematics, Vol. 1 teaches addition to third graders by counting the number of “martyrs” and the number of “prisoners in the Occupation prisons.” Fifth graders study from Arabic Language, Vol. 2, which extols the “hero” Dalal Mughrabi, leader of the Coastal Road massacre of 37 Israelis. “We are proud of them, sing their praise, learn the history of their lives, name our children after them, and name streets, squares, and prominent cultural sites after them,” the book says of Mughrabi and her comrades.
Eighth graders learn from Arabic Text and Reader that they need “to exterminate the Zionist germ and thrust this evil out of the Arab homeland” and that “the time has come for jihad and martyrdom” against “the oppressor.” In ninth grade, Islamic Education, Vol. 1 explains how Allah offers believers opportunities for “fighting against infidels” to “honor them by martyrdom, to forgive their sins and raise their class in Paradise.”
In General Sciences for tenth graders, Newton’s laws of physics are explained through the example of “a young girl using a slingshot towards a specific target,” with a photo of an Arab child whipping a rock with a homemade sling. The calculation uses variations in the length of the sling and the rock’s release speed to determine its rate of acceleration.
In the twelfth grade, Islamic Education teaches “the virtue of jihad in Islam,” especially “if the enemy occupied a Muslim land.” It stresses the importance of jihad both as “one of the gates to achieving martyrdom” and as Allah’s way to achieve “rescue from the fire of Hell and the attainment of pardon and Paradise.”
When this schoolhouse incitement was first documented by Palestinian Media Watch back in 2007, then-U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton was alarmed. “These textbooks do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination,” she said at a press conference. Palestinian Arab children are “encouraged to see martyrdom and armed struggle and the murder of innocent people as ideals to strive for.” The PA “profoundly poisons the minds of these children. . . . [It is] a clear example of child abuse.”
Evoking the themes in her book It Takes a Village, about the communal influences that shape children’s lives, Sen. Clinton warned that Palestinian Arab hate education would have “dire consequences for prospects of peace for generations to come.” She was right. Sixteen years later, some of the children raised on these teachings carried out the October 7 atrocities.
Israelis are justifiably concerned about the impact of the From the River to the Sea coloring book, just as the Allied authorities in postwar Japan would not have tolerated a coloring book praising the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the authorities in postwar Germany would not have allowed bookstores to sell a coloring book extolling the glories of Nazism. Raising children to be bigots and terrorists is a recipe for catastrophe, as October 7 so horrifically demonstrated.
