A book on Palestine for young readers was pulled at Penguin Random House just before its scheduled release, following editorial disputes between the publisher and the book’s Palestinian American authors over their account of Palestinian history.
In November 2024, Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, signed the book deal with Alana Hadid, a philanthropist, activist and older sister of models Bella and Gigi, and Jenan Matari, an author and communications strategist. The book was promoted for release in September this year.
The authors, both influential social media commentators, drafted a manuscript about the history of Palestine, Israeli occupation, Palestinian resistance, and the diaspora, interwoven with references to their own families’ stories of displacement.
But the writers withdrew their book after objecting to edits by Random House that they said sanitized and misrepresented their views, and which they said were introduced after they thought the book had been finalized. A Random House spokesperson said the process “followed our standard bookmaking procedures”, and that the publisher ultimately supported the authors’ decision to pull the book.
Displacement and the Palestinian American Story would have been the eighth installment in Random House’s Race to the Truth series, an ongoing collection of nonfiction books for youth ages 10 to 13. The books aimed to provide the “true story of American history”, written by members of marginalized groups telling the histories of their peoples. A co-creator of the project said she objected to the treatment of Displacement and would not be pursuing future installments in the series with the publisher.
“It became clear that Penguin was never actually going to allow us just to write the book we wanted to write,” said Hadid. “It says a lot that they’re willing to tank an entire very powerful series that helps children learn history, just because of one book about Palestine.”
According to Hadid and Matari, who provided the Guardian with the draft manuscript and email excerpts of their communications with Random House, the authors and the publisher engaged in months of disagreements about language in the book, including a passage on the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks in southern Israel. The writers’ manuscript argued that people under “colonial domination” have the “right to resist”, but Random House urged them to incorporate arguments that the attacks that day violated international law. At an impasse, the authors withdrew their book in early September.
The authors now plan to release it through Interlink Books, a Palestinian-owned US publisher.
Random House Children’s Books has other forthcoming books on Palestine, the spokesperson said, writing: “We remain committed to bringing the Palestinian perspective to young readers.” The spokesperson also said another Race to the Truth book remained on track for 2028 publication.
The dispute over the book comes amid disproportionate scrutiny and censorship of work by and on behalf of Palestinians. The conflict also laid bare the wide gap between narratives around 7 October, one that could not be bridged in a book to be distributed by a mainstream publisher.
“I believe it was a revolutionary book, which is why it was under so much scrutiny,” Matari said. “They continued to try to sanitize our history because they didn’t want to make certain communities uncomfortable. But decolonial history is supposed to make you uncomfortable.”
‘No greater story to tell’
The Race to the Truth series was conceived by Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, founders of Race2Dinner, a program launched in 2019 to facilitate conversations with white women about racism. In 2020, Rao and Jackson sold a book called White Women to Penguin Random House, which became a bestseller, then in 2021 sold the Race to the Truth children’s series to the publishing house. Random House has since published books in the series on slavery, the colonization of the Wampanoag people, the exclusion of Chinese Americans, Mexican American history, and the forced assimilation of Indigenous youth.
As the series progressed, Rao felt it was urgent to publish a Palestine installment: “There’s no greater story to tell right now. Palestine actually tells a story of all genocides, of all settler colonial violence.”
After Random House greenlit the idea in summer of 2024, Rao brought on Matari and Hadid.
The authors submitted their first draft of Displacement in July 2025. In the introduction, they wrote that the Palestinian story had long been missing from classrooms. “The deliberate erasure of our history has left generations of Palestinians struggling to explain not only where we come from but why nearly half of us are scattered around the world, including – as in our cases – in the United States,” the intro said.
The book discussed the landscape and history of Palestine; the rise of Zionism; the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948 when more than 700,000 Palestinian people were expelled from their homes; their analysis of Israel as a “settler colony”; the relationship between the US and Israel; and life for Palestinians living under military occupation.
They also documented their family histories. Hadid’s grandparents, they wrote, were expelled from Safed days after her father was born, becoming refugees in Syria. And relatives of Matari and her husband were displaced from Deir Yassin and Ein Karem after an April 1948 massacre claimed the lives of more than 100 Palestinians.
“I just wanted children to see us as humans,” Hadid said.
Disputes about 7 October
Tensions arose on the project in June 2026 when, according to the authors, the book was distributed to reviewers and made available for preorder before Random House had shared a final version with the writers. When the authors received a copy, they said it included changes to a passage about 7 October made by Random House without their knowledge.
In a chapter called The International Right to Armed Resistance, the authors cited a UN general assembly resolution that said people under colonial domination are entitled to “the right to self-determination” and to restore that right “by any means at their disposal”. The chapter also noted Hamas’s use of prisoner exchanges to free thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel they called “effectively hostages of the state”. Referring to the 2011 exchange of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for more than 1,000 prisoners, they wrote: “This exchange was one of the most famous and showed Palestinians that resistance could bring real results.”
On 7 October, the manuscript continued, Hamas fighters “crossed into Israel in a coordinated assault”. The authors said roughly 1,100 Israelis were killed, including 37 children, and said civilians and soldiers were taken captive “to be used in an exchange”.
Their section on 7 October was brief, but argued that international law authorized Palestinian resistance “by any means necessary”, saying the attacks came after “decades of ignored suffering and repression”.
“Palestinians, like other oppressed peoples before them, have demanded freedom in the face of overwhelming military power. What happened on October 7 was not the beginning of violence in this land – it was another moment in a long history of a people struggling to be free,” they wrote.
The authors said they had, at Random House’s request, added details about the 7 October death toll, and they believed the language was finalized in May 2026. However, when they received an updated final copy of the book, they saw that a Random House editor had added a line about the 7 October attacks saying: “These actions were a violation of international law.”
The authors objected to the insertion, emails show, saying it contradicted their analysis of international law. They claimed in an email it was also a violation of their contract to make changes without their approval. One Random House editor suggested in an email that without that line or something similar, “we will lose all credibility with our readers, including those who are open-minded about our perspective” and the book couldn’t be published.
Back-and-forth negotiations surrounding the description of 7 October continued for weeks, emails show, with Random House’s head of publicity, legal department and children’s books president involved in discussions.
In the meantime, Random House came back with other edits the authors found objectionable. In July, a senior Random House official suggested removing “Jewish” as a modifier in several places, including when the authors had referred to Zionist militias involved in the destruction of Palestinian villages during the Nakba as “Jewish gangs”. “Our concern is not accuracy, but whether the repetition adds necessary clarity,” the Random House official wrote.
The authors responded that it was “shameful” for an editor to say accuracy was not the concern, prompting an editor to reply back: “Our editorial point was not about whether the word was accurate, but whether, given the context, repeating the [Jewish] modifier was necessary.”
A Random House official again pressed the authors to expand on 7 October, writing in an email that the authors could add context along the lines of: “Some human rights organizations and commentators have described Hamas’s actions that day as violations of international law; others frame the legal and historical questions differently.”
But the authors grew increasingly frustrated, writing in one email: “In a book about the history of slavery in the United States – neither of us can imagine a Black author being forced to condemn the slave rebellions or consider them a violation of international law.”
In one email to their agent, Matari wrote, “It has become quite clear that Penguin is more focused and concerned with centering Jewish feelings over Palestinian life and lived experience.”
Records show Random House repeatedly expressed their commitment to the book, with one official saying they were dedicated to publishing “a necessary and accessible book about the Palestinian American story for young readers, a perspective that remains far too rare in children’s nonfiction” and saying editors wanted to work in “good faith” to resolve issues.
By August, Random House suggested keeping the author’s text as is, but adding a “publisher’s note” to the book with some of the suggested 7 October language and changing the age range to 14+. The publisher also said if the parties could not resolve their differences, the authors could take the book elsewhere and keep their advance.
“Editorial discussion and revision are a standard part of the publishing process,” the Random House spokesperson said in an email. “We gave guidance to help ensure the intended readers for this book, ages 10 and up, had enough information to understand the subject matter and engage thoughtfully with the questions it raises, knowing that many readers would be coming to the subject matter for the first time.”
The spokesperson said the company had made digital advance copies available to industry contacts, which were marked as “uncorrected” and not final, and that this process was halted after the authors expressed concerns. “We would not move forward with a book that the authors were not comfortable publishing,” the spokesperson said.
‘No longer the book we wrote’
In an interview, Matari said she felt it was unacceptable for Random House to publish a disclaimer that might contradict their writing. Termination, she said, seemed the only option: “It was no longer the book we wrote.”
Matari was no stranger to backlash for her commentary on 7 October. Over the last year, several scheduled book talks for her debut children’s book, about a young Palestinian girl and her grandfather, were cancelled last-minute after people accused her of antisemitism, in part over social media posts describing the 7 October attacks as resistance against colonialism and declaring the US to be “under Zionist occupation”. She and a Jewish author recently sued the city of Los Angeles for free speech violations after the public library cancelled their planned joint book event. Matari has denied claims of antisemitism and defended her posts, saying she was “vehemently anti-Zionist”.
Hadid said they were not trying to minimize the harms of 7 October and had, at Random House’s request, been clear about the death toll. Their goal was to put the attacks into historical context. “I wasn’t going to publish this book with words I hadn’t written, where they were forcing us to tell the story from the perspective of the oppressors.”
Rao, from the Race to the Truth series, said her relationship with Random House had been smooth before the conflicts over the Palestine book, with previous authors given significant leeway to write their stories without interference. Hadid and Matari’s experience was fundamentally different, Rao said: “You’ve got the entire company weighing in on this one little book.”
The end of the series at Random House comes at a time when a wide range of industries and institutions are backtracking on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, raising fears about diminishing opportunities for people of color in academia, publishing, entertainment and media. The recent rise of book bans and open hostility to diverse works is further diminishing those opportunities, said Leyla Moushabeck, co-owner and longtime editor at Interlink, the publishing house taking on Hadid and Matari’s book.
“As a second-generation Palestinian-American, it’s a book I wish I had had growing up,” Moushabeck said of the book, which Interlink plans to publish next year.
Hadid added she was grateful their manuscript found a new home: “We hope that people read the book that Penguin didn’t want you to read.”
