Side By Side: Competing Histories of Israel/Palestine

Description

In 2000, a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers gathered to address what to many people seemed an unbridgeable gulf between the two societies. Struck by how different the standard Israeli and Palestinian textbook histories of the same events were from one another, they began to explore how to "disarm" the teaching of the history of the Middle East in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms. The result is a riveting "dual narrative" of Israeli and Palestinian history.

Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) is a nongovernmental organization established by Palestinian and Israeli researchers with the help of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. A co-founder with the late Dan Bar-On of PRIME and its current co-director, Sami Adwan has published widely on the role of education in peacebuilding. PRIME co-director Eyal Naveh is a professor of U.S. history at Tel Aviv University and teaches history and history education at the Kibbutzim College of Education.

"Innovative... A small but important step, if not toward peace, then perhaps toward understanding... Developed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers, this text will prove useful not just to the young, but to anyone who quails at the thought of even attempting to unravel the knotty history of the Middle East." -Kirkus Reviews "The battle lines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict extend to the classroom, where the two sides' versions of their shared history diverge sharply. Now, two university professors aim to change the way the conflict is taught by exposing Palestinian students to Israeli history lessons and Israeli students to the Palestinian version of history. USA Today