A Tale of Two Toys: Fidget Spinners vs. Journey To Jerusalem

Two toys on separate sides of a conflict, one meant to promote peace and the other to foment violence.

What parents teach their children, what society puts in their hands, says a remarkable amount about the values of our culture and deep-seated desires. Do we yearn for our children to live in a world of peace or do we strive to instill in them a violent nature?

Fidget spinners are the latest toy fad that is selling by the millions to children and teens across the country, but few know surprising origin of the tiny plastic toys, an origin rooted in the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Far from the classroom annoyance that it has become today, the original fidget spinner was invented in the 1980s, during the First Intifada by Catherine Hettinger. Hettinger was visiting her sister in Israel when she witnessed Palestinian children throwing rocks at IDF soldiers and police officers.

Young boys, most not yet teenagers, put the lives of Israeli police and soldiers at risk, as well as their own, with a senseless act of restless violence that Hettinger sought to quell.

After first considering soft foam rocks, she instead designed the fidget spinner we know today. A small plastic triangle that rotates around a metal ball bearing, the spinner distracted restless children by redirecting their energy into the toy. 

"It started as a way of promoting peace," Hettinger told CNN in an interview. She would go on to patent her invention in 1997 but wasn't able to convince toy company Hasbro to promote it.

Her patent expired in 2005 when she wasn't able to pay the $400 renewal fee, and the toy designed to bring some small measure of peace to the Middle East languished in obscurity.

Now more than 20 years later, the fidget spinner craze has begun.

Witness a culture moving in the opposite direction with the new Hamas-designed board game Reaching Jerusalem.

Reaching Jerusalem is similar in play to Snakes and Ladders but it includes such unique elements as rockets and attack tunnels that take on the role of the ladders as well as IDF tanks and helicopters that take the role of the snakes.

A run of 10,000 copies of the board game is set to hit stores soon all across the West Bank.

As the name implies, the players must reach Jerusalem, depicted on the game board by the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, by committing acts of terrorism.

Credit for the pro-terrorism game goes to Muhammad Ramadan al-Amriti of the Hamas Interior Ministry. If the inclusion of terror-tunnels and rockets used on civilian populations were not clear enough promotions of terrorism, al-Amriti explained the purpose of the game on his Facebook page: "the purpose of the game is to teach Palestinian children the proper tenets of Islam and that return to the homeland will be achieved only through resistance and jihad."

The board contains pictures of Hamas fighters and features several Israeli cities, such as Tiberias, Ashdod, Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle and Safed.

This is a fundamental and significant difference between the two philosophies of toys and of childhood itself.

Hettinger's fidget spinner is designed to redirect nervous energy away from violent action, away from suffering and to offer hope. Today, when not annoying middle school teachers the world over, it is used to treat autism and attention deficit disorder.

Al-Amriti's Reaching Jerusalem on the other hand is designed to teach children that violence against innocents is not only necessary but morally good. It normalizes terrorism from an age when children are still developing their moral compass and instills in young Palestinian minds that conflict is the only option.

One can learn a lot about a society from what it teaches its children.