FS 014 PZ -Israel and Palestine: The Crisis and Competing Histories

Institution: Pitzer

Description: This seminar provides students the opportunity to learn about the ongoing crisis in (and of) Israel/Palestine, in a constructive and rigorous context. A major focus is the competing historical narratives of various Zionists and Palestinians. We in the seminar will examine these diverse narratives by the standards of history as a scholarly activity. Using journalism, ethnographic works, films, and fiction, the seminar also introduces students to the daily lives of Jewish Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and Palestinian refugees outside of Israel. The seminar makes use of comparisons-as with the British partition of South Asia into India and Pakistan a year before the establishment of the Israeli state-to provide students ways to understand the Palestinian-Israeli crisis on the basis of general principles, rather than as a matter of this one case alone. Finally, the seminar will examine controversies about Palestine and Israel here at the Claremont Colleges in recent years. A college classroom must be a place where the most controversial issues are explored openly, and this seminar welcomes students of all points of view, including those with questions and uncertainties, into a constructive conversation-a collective enterprise of value. [Instructor: Daniel Segal]

Prerequisite(s): None

First-Year seminars are not listed on the course schedule. Incoming students will be assigned to a first-year seminar and registered automatically.