P for Palestine, G for Gaza, F for famine: Why Ms Rachel can teach the world more than phonics

Saviour of overstretched parents everywhere, Ms Rachel has been an honorary member of households with small children since her smiling face and singsong tone catapulted onto our screens during the pandemic.

It’s hard to think of someone less controversial than a never-tiring teacher who has your child reciting phonics sounds in their sleep, but recently, the educational content creator has come under fire. She is even being boycotted and cancelled by some, all for voicing something that should go without saying: that children in Gaza do not deserve to be killed.

You heard that right. Someone like Ms Rachel - a mother and early years teacher by profession, who has dedicated her life to supporting and educating children - simply asserting that, like all children, Palestinian children deserve to live, is so utterly abominable to some that she is being accused of being a terrorist sympathiser and a pro-Hamas agent.

Earlier this year, the New York Post accused her of being a “woke brainwasher” and the pro-Israel lobbyist group StopAntisemitism called on the US Attorney General to investigate whether she was “being enumerated to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda” . This is all because she was sharing fundraisers and news from the ground in Gaza and appearing in videos alongside Palestinians who have experienced the genocide like journalist Motaz Azaiza and three year old Rahaf Ayyad who lost both legs in an airstrike.

Palestinian children’s lives matter

Half of Gaza’s population are under 18 and in a two year campaign of genocide by Israel, over 50,000 children are estimated to have died. We have watched children crushed under the rubble of their homes and burned alive in their schools, targeted by snipers and bombed in refugee camps, parents burying all their children in one go and clinging onto the blooded pieces of their limbs because that’s all they have left.

Doctors Without Borders has deemed Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”. There are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere on earth and the situation is so dire that medics were forced to create a new acronym “wounded child no surviving family” to describe the thousands made into orphans by the murderous actions of the Israeli state and its allies.

And now, as Gaza becomes the “hungriest place on earth”, we are watching scores of children a day die from deliberate starvation and malnutrition - slow and painful deaths that would be entirely preventable if aid was allowed into the besieged strip. When this is what we are witnessing, I can’t help but wonder how anyone with a career dedicated to children is able to not speak out.

Ms Rachel, who has over 15 million subscribers on YouTube, has now even stated that she won’t be working with anyone who has remained silent over Gaza. "I especially can’t understand those with so much privilege - the uncancellable - who still remain in the shadows," she wrote in a post.

I wish Ms Rachel’s advocacy was the norm in the parenting and education space, but as both a mother of two and a school teacher, I can unfortunately attest to the opposite.

The hypocrisy of ‘motherhood experts’

I’ve lost track of the number of motherhood influencers who make fortunes from projecting a wholesome, child-centric approach to parenting who have had nothing to say about the ever-growing pile of children's bodies in Gaza. I can’t help but be disgusted by the experts whose advice I clung to in my early postpartum days, now that they are unmoved by the brutalisation and murder of children who look like my own.

The online parenting world is filled with gurus that tell you feeding your baby formula or letting them “cry it out” at night is an unconscionable crime but tens of thousands of Palestinian children dead at the hands of a Western ally is fine, it seems - or too controversial to warrant an opinion on. Massacring children is too nuanced and complicated an issue for the entertainers and celebrities whose entire platforms are aimed at children exactly like those in Gaza.

The local parenting groups that rallied to organise charity fundraisers and collect donations for Ukrainian refugees have been painfully silent now that the dead are brown children from an Arab land. The schools that held assemblies about Ukraine, teaching children “never again” about the Holocaust and “lest we forget” about the world wars and have all turned a blind eye to the self-same atrocities reproducing themselves as we speak.

Growing repression in schools

As a teacher, I have witnessed how Palestine over the last two years has been treated as a controversial taboo at best and a symptom of extremism at worst in schools. Children have been penalised for criticising Israel in the classroom, wearing Palestine pin badges on their uniform and even referred to counter terror police for voicing an opinion on genocide.

As a climate of authoritarianism grows in the UK and other Western nations, with heightening islamophobia and support for Israel becoming ever-more synonymous with acceptable notions of Britishness, we are seeing this distilled in our schools.

Young people with access to social media have more idea of what is happening in the world that ever before and witnessing a genocide of their agemates, livestreamed in real time, has left them feeling confused, angry and desperately in need of answers. But with the state rendering any support for Palestine as terrorism and any criticism of Israel tantamount to antisemitism, they are left feeling disenfranchised, silenced and confused - and criminalised if they do speak out.

That’s why Ms Rachel’s advocacy for Palestinian children is so important. It’s not just about displaying a functioning moral compass where so many don’t. As a mother of young children, I am grateful that there is someone thinking about how to speak to toddlers about the atrocities in Gaza without traumatising them - and as a teacher, I only wish there was more effort to do the same for my teenage students and their peers.

In a recent post on her Instagram responding to the backlash, Ms Rachel said: “what people don’t understand is that I will risk my career over and over to stand up for kids”, adding that she wouldn’t be Ms Rachel if she didn’t care about all children. I know I’m not alone in feeling that, when I became a mother, I suddenly bore responsibility to keep all children safe. That’s why watching these atrocities occur in Gaza is precisely so painful - because those children are all our children and as mothers, we are all their mothers. Or so it should be.

But what does it say about our morality as a society, and about the extent that Palestinians are dehumanised, if calling for all children to live in dignity and safety can turn even the likes of Ms Rachel into an enemy in the eyes of some?

Nadeine Asbali is a freelance writer and secondary school teacher based in London. She is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain

Follow her on X: @nadeinewrites

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.