LAUSR

T eaching about the ongoing crisis of Palestine and Israel poses distinctive challenges. In my case, these challenges, and the ways I address them, are specific to my being (i) a faculty member at a small liberal arts college and (ii) a teacher whose scholarly judgment is that the Israeli state is responsible for grievous oppression of Palestinians. The first of these conditions gives me a degree of flexibility and the opportunity to engage students in “serious play” not equally available to faculty teaching at institutions with larger class sizes and more intrusive top-down audit regimes. The second condition poses the problem of how can I teach what I judge to be truthful about Israel and Palestine without imposing my views on students, that is, through genuine teaching rather than indoctrination. The primary source of this problem is the conflict between my scholarly judgment about the crisis, on the one hand, and the ideas and knowledge about it that most students bring with them when they enter my course on Israel and Palestine, on the other. To start, a great many of my students, primarily many of my Jewish students, enter my course having been socialized from early in their lives to embrace pro-Israeli stances and various versions of a Zionist narrative of Jewish history and the conflict. The sources of this socialization include their parents and other relatives,