History Behind the Headlines: Approaches to Teaching Israel-Palestine

AHA Online | December 7, 2023
History Behind the Headlines Approaches to Teaching Israel-Palestine
Moderator: James Ryan, Foreign Policy Research Institute
Omer Bartov, Brown University
Michelle Campos, Penn State University
Ussama Makdisi, University of California, Berkeley
Katharina Matro, Walter Johnson High School and American Historical Association
This conversation is intended to help teachers, at the K-12 and college levels, develop strategies to teach the Palestine-Israel conflict and many of the attendant sensitive historical topics it entails, in an atmosphere as charged as the present. It might seem that this history is a minefield worth avoiding, but thoughtful and engaged teachers have been teaching such difficult topics in a civil and empathetic way for decades. A panel of historians with relevant expertise discussed classroom strategies and how current events have influenced their approach to teaching, as well as how understanding history and engaging seriously with people who inhabited the past can help our students to better understand current events.