Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples I

Catalog description

The Holocaust largely destroyed the centuries-long Jewish civilization in Europe. For Zionism, originating in late nineteenth-century antisemitism and East-Central European ethno-territorial nationalism, the “final solution” proved the need for a Jewish-majority state in Palestine. Yet the majority of the population in Eretz Israel was Palestinian. The creation of Israel in 1948 was the outcome of a bitter war with the local Arab population and the surrounding states, in the course of which most of the Palestinians were expelled or fled, facilitating the establishment of a Jewish-majority state. The seminar will discuss the fraught question of the two traumatic events of the Holocaust and the Nakba (the expulsion of 1948), and propose that we can both better understand these events, and begin the long path to reconciliation, by applying the tools of empathetic first-person history.