Understanding the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict: Lessons from an Unusual Classroom

While courses like ours normally focus only on the era of conflict, we are prompted to salvage the longer historical trajectory to remind ourselves that confrontation is not a permanent feature in our relationship. Since we have had a record of coexistence in the past, a fashionable deterministic prediction that we cannot live in peace in the future is not substantiated when envisioning the long-term perspective. [...]team-teaching and co-authoring provides students and readers with a better perspective, not only on the history that separates us (which is mostly the ultimate responsibility of our leadership) but also the shared understanding of reality shaped by an epistemic community of academics and intellectuals that has evolved through years of working together.