This paper analyzes Jewish peace organizations’ ability to advance Palestinians’ human rights through travel to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). My analysis is based on a case study of the organizational structure and pedagogical approach of Encounter, the leading tour organization bringing American Jews to the West Bank. From 2012 to 2016, I conducted 38 interviews with both tour participants and organizers, as well as 100+ hours of participant observation. Using these data, I analyze the ways that Encounter’s model contributes to and collides with the Palestinian struggle for human rights. In particular, I focus on how the organization’s strategy of appealing to mainstream Jewish leaders can perpetuate an adherence to exclusionary frameworks that enable certain human rights violations. I argue that, on the one hand, Encounter’s depoliticized emphasis on listening and thoughtful reflection facilitates transformative experiences for a wide range of Jewish leaders. Rabbis, summer camp directors, and Jewish federation heads experience increased levels of empathy and compassion towards Palestinians through Encounter’s trips. On the other hand, by working within dominant Jewish institutions, Encounter must represent Palestinians and the political content of their tours in ways that are palatable to a mainstream Jewish-American audience. This in turn enables the continuation of unequal power dynamics, stunting solidarity activism. By deconstructing this duality, I explore the limits and capabilities of travel-based peace organizations to promote social justice. On a broad level, my findings speak to the need to democratize travel and mobility. Current models of social justice tourism rely on “Westerners” undergoing a process of enlightenment that motivates privileged individuals to devote resources to the liberation of the oppressed people they meet with on their travels. Such a model for social change reinforces current economic hierarchies that enable wealthy North Americans and Europeans to expend their disposable incomes on such experiences, while forcing marginalized populations in the Global South (in this case, the Middle East) to perform political injustice and suffering for economic gain. Furthermore, individuals must perform these injustices in ways that generate income, which in turn, can distort and decontextualize their lived experiences. The result of these dynamics is that tourists’ outlets for activism are generally limited to forms of engagement that allow existing power imbalances to remain in place.

This pedagogy-centered paper, sponsored by MESA’s Committee for Undergraduate Middle East Studies (CUMES), will discuss my experience teaching an upper-level seminar on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS). Founded by Palestinian NGOs in 2005, BDS aims to pressure Israel to comply with international law and end the occupation of Palestinian land. The paper’s first section will evaluate the rewards and challenges of teaching the BDS controversy. BDS raises hard questions regarding movement ethics, strategy, efficacy, etc. Detractors allege the movement is unfair, based on false analogies, and even anti-Semitic. While these debates may push faculty to avoid discussion of BDS entirely – especially with undergraduates – I argue the pedagogical potential for students and instructors alike is extraordinary; studying BDS calls into question our core political, academic, and ethical values. The paper’s second section will describe my seminar’s structure and methodology. Structurally, the seminar starts with a study of general questions of authority and dissent. I will list readings that have resonated most with students. The seminar then turns to case studies. First, students read and discuss the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict, and the United States’ role in it. Second, students study the domestic and international anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the inspiration for today’s BDS. The seminar’s final case study, titled “Arguing BDS,” assesses the utility of historical analogy and the movement itself, including its tactics, potential, and fairness (one concern that really engages students is whether BDS harms those it intends to help). I am open about my own views; at the start, for example, I inform students that, despite initial misgivings, I support BDS, but do not share the reasons why. Methodologically, the class incorporates regular small-group discussions and one formal debate. Students often argue in favor of views contrary to their own. In sum, the seminar pushes students to think through two vital questions: When is public dissent the right thing to do? When is it the smart thing to do? The paper’s final section will raise persistent pedagogical concerns. Any seminar involving ethics and identity carries risk. Do students feel pressured to support certain positions? How might such pressures be minimized? How may an instructor’s “authority” be managed to ensure openness of mind, freedom to disagree, etc? How much historical context is enough for informed discussion? Might the seminar be better structured? I look forward to input from the audience.

Moving beyond traditional lectures has become increasingly necessary in teaching historical concepts in the college survey course. In world history, with case examples often distanced from student perspectives, shifts in instructional methodology may offer new paths to increased student participation and data retention. This paper describes an active learning method first developed in 2011 at the University of Arkansas to approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the context of a world history, western history, or Middle East history course. Over the last nine years, instructors have used this multi-stage activity at a variety of campuses across the country as well as at different course levels. Using knowledge from a focused textbook, students work in both small and large groups to “resolve” the conflict along set parameters. The addition of primary sources from a reader help supply added depth to immersion and background material. While initially negotiating within a small group, students then progress to discussions among larger groups, before finally forming a broad consensus between “Israel” and “Palestine.” Upon completing the activity, students write feedback papers assessing their knowledge of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including earlier peace proposals, the nuanced nature of respective domestic political scenes, and the involvement of outside actors. Students also learn skills about public negotiation with peers, working within small and large groups, and expressing an educated position based on evidence. Past activities showed tremendous creativity and resourcefulness, as well as engagement and empathy for the Arab-Israeli conflict and resolution process. Along with the general parameters of the activity as well as a description of the variations, I also highlight the trends in discussions and conclusions that students generated. While pedagogical outcomes have remained consistently successful, the actual negotiations have shifted in ways that match dialogue of stakeholders in the actual process. One notable example is a shift from two-state to one-state solutions, which picked up dramatically over the last four years. Utilizing nine years of student-submitted peace agreements along with reflection papers over the last four years, I hope to not only show the efficacy of this project but also the ways in which American students at community colleges and research universities engage with and learn about Middle East issues.

In 2016, speaking in Hebrew in front of leaders of Israeli settlements in the northern West Bank, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin urged the settlers to “maintain the belief that we have returned to our land, to our homeland, even if our cousins are unwilling to accept this fact”; in an Arabic song first recorded a few years earlier, Palestinian protest singer Jawan Safadi wondered sardonically “who wants to ride us next, once our cousins leave?” Rivlin and Safadi, while using different tones and expressing opposing political viewpoints, both enlisted a common term: “our cousins,” a contemporary colloquial term designating Arabs/Muslims in Hebrew and Jews/Israelis in Arabic. In this paper I examine the historical emergence of the metaphor of Jews and Arabs as cousins, by examining Hebrew and Arabic deployments of the term in the first half of the 20th century, in the context of the colonial struggle in Palestine. I begin by analyzing uses of the term in texts written by early Ashkenazi Zionists. I argue that the idea of an immutable bond between Jews and Arabs was crucial to early Zionism, as a movement that not only sought to de-Semitize and Europeanize the Jew, but at the same time to completely racialize Jews as Semitic. Within this ambivalent Semitism, the metaphor of cousinhood with the native Arabs worked perfectly, as it allowed early Ashkenazi Zionist writers and activists to distinguish themselves from the native Arabs, while concurrently strengthening their own claim of indigeneity by way of an imagined blood relation to the very same natives. I highlight this ambivalence by comparing depictions of Arabs as cousins with an alternative kinship metaphor – that of brotherhood – which was prevalent on the margins of the Zionist movement before 1948, especially among Middle Eastern Jews. Finally, I look at the way in which Palestinian and Arab nationalists responded to the Zionist deployments of the term, with some rejecting it explicitly as a concoction, and others adopting it for their own purposes.