Families face difficult task of talking to kids about Israel-Hamas war

Read the Full Transcript

• Geoff Bennett:

  Over the last few weeks, horrific images have emerged from Israel and the Gaza Strip, many involving children and young people.

  Here in the U.S., Jewish American and Palestinian American parents and their children are grappling with the mental toll of a war thousands of miles away.

  I recently sat down with some of those families.

  How important is family?

• Laila El-Haddad, Journalist:

  It's — I mean, family is everything. Literally, the first thing I do when I wake up is, I check if everyone's alive.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Palestinian-American mother and journalist Laila El-Haddad says she constantly worries about her relatives in the Gaza Strip.

• Laila El-Haddad:

  They're human beings, and they're terrified. And it's — it feels overwhelming. And we all feel kind of helpless, because it feels like it's — right now, the way they describe it, it's them against the world.

• Geoff Bennett:

  At home with her own children in Clarksville, Maryland, she says their understanding of what's happening in Gaza and the broader Israel-Palestinian conflict varies by age.

  You have four children. How do you help them deal with what you describe as this collective trauma?

• Laila El-Haddad:

  It's absolutely collective. It's generational. The older ones now get that there's — this is sort of understood not just as a Palestinian struggle, but an anti-colonial struggle.

  The younger ones, of course, want to know why no one is doing anything to stop this. It's part and parcel of this — what we expect to be a very long struggle for freedom. It doesn't mean that they don't feel hurt and pain, but that's how they understand it.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Laila's 15-year-old daughter, Noor, grew up going to protests in support of Palestinians. She says she paints to express her identity and still remembers her trips to Gaza.

  Noor Daoud, Daughter of Laila El-Haddad: I would swim in the ocean in the middle of the night, horseback riding. It's just something special. And having all those memories with those family members, not knowing if they're going to live, for me to visit them and have those memories again, is just really concerning.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Twenty miles away, in Rockville, Maryland, clinical social worker Orly Zimmerman-Leizerov has spent most of her time the last few weeks counseling other Jewish and Israeli-American families like her own.

  What have the last few weeks been like for you?

• Orly Zimmerman-Leizerov, Clinical Social Worker:

  A nightmare. A nightmare.

  I think I can safely speak for all Israelis that we're not OK right now. We will never be the same. This is — there is no way for us to kind of really go back right now and be what we were before. We all know people that have been murdered. We all know people that have been captured and are still very much — we don't know what's going on with them.

• Geoff Bennett:

  What are some of the questions you get the most from parents about how to help their children understand what's happening?

• Orly Zimmerman-Leizerov:

  Parents ask, how — how should I share that somebody lost their life, that died?

  In most cases, we help children understand it. This is part of the natural cycle of life. And that's not the case in here,helping children see themselves as safe, as protected. We have the privilege here to talk with our children about being safe. That's not something that, unfortunately, people in Israel have right now.

• Geoff Bennett:

  The ongoing war has led to difficult conversations within families here in the U.S. and fear, given the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia, especially after the murder of the 6-year-old Palestinian American boy Wadea Al-Fayoume.

• Riyad Fares, Parent:

  Our son has told us that he heard this story, and he himself fears for his safety and wonders why anybody would do that to a boy. And, as he watches the news, he wonders why many children in Gaza as well have been killed.

• Geoff Bennett:

  In Portland Oregon, Palestinian-American Riyad Fares and his wife, Krista, say, since the war started, their three children have sometimes struggled to feel accepted at school.

• Krista Swaninger, Parent:

  My son came home from school, and they had a long conversation on the playground about this. And he's been struggling about talking with his friends and trying to reach to them for support, and not really getting the support that he wants from his friends, because some of his friends believe that the Palestinian people are bad.

  And that hurts him to know that. So, I try to listen and understand and be supportive and tell him that's not the case.

• Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, Kol Tzedek Synagogue:

  I got an e-mail from my kid's school principal here in West Philadelphia. Kids are talking about this in the hallway. And she's overhearing kids say, whose side are you on?

• Geoff Bennett:

  Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari is the senior rabbi at Kol Tzedek in West Philadelphia and parent of a 7- and 9-year-old. He says, while his congregants grieve, he also asks them to think critically about the decades-long Israel-Palestinian conflict and start those conversations with their own children.

• Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari:

  Children can handle complexity, and they can think critically. If we can teach them the scientific method, we can teach them to think critically about world events and politics and power.

  There's no question that, in this moment, what Hamas did is an atrocity, and, at the same time, there is still a power — there is still a power imbalance, and Israel has more power over the people of Palestine than Palestinians have over their own lives and certainly over Israelis.

  And so I think we can teach critical thinking. We can teach people to hear multiple truths.

• Geoff Bennett:

  In Albany, New York, Orthodox Jewish American mother and cellist Laura Melnicoff says her two oldest children are curious about the war, and she tries to ease their growing concerns.

• Laura Melnicoff, Parent:

  One of their babysitters that they had last year was visiting Israel at the time of the attack for the holidays. So, when my 6-year-old has a specific concern about his babysitter, I just address that. I say that we know that she's safe right now.

  I don't tell him things like — from the Monday that we heard that she was still there, and knowing that she had to wait until Thursday for a provisional flight home.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Still, Melnicoff says it was important that her children learn to distinguish between the actions of Hamas and other Palestinians.

• Laura Melnicoff:

  We wanted to make sure that they knew that the Palestinian people were not — we didn't want to hear them coming home from school and talking about whole swathes of people being animals and things like that. We wanted to make that distinction for them. And at 6 and 9 years old, I think they were capable of that.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Back in Rockville, Maryland Zimmerman-Leizerov says the lack of a clear end to the war makes it harder for both children and adults to cope.

• Orly Zimmerman-Leizerov:

  Usually, in trauma situations or tragic losses, the event happens, there's an end inside, and then you can start the healing process. Then you can start to accept it.

  In this case, the — it's so unpredictable, and there's so much uncertainty, that that really makes it very hard for us as adults to support children in this.

• Geoff Bennett:

  For El-Haddad, faith and patience are important in her own family as the war drags on. She says she's telling other families to channel their emotions into positive action.

• Laila El-Haddad:

  To be patient, but to have these conversations with them and to frame them in a context that they can understand that is humanizing.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Conversations she says she's also having with her own children.

  Since our interview, El-Haddad learned her aunt, three cousins, and another family member were killed in Gaza City.

Improved audio player available on our mobile page