ABSTRACT

Framing a historic period of analysis is a matter of subjective interpretation of history, determined not only by the national ethos of each of us but also by our joint approach. Conventional wisdom has taught us that we should start our analysis from the moment when the two emerging national movements clashed. Indeed, the early Zionist arrival in “the land of the ancestors,” Eretz Israel, coincided with the Arab awakening to emancipation from the Ottoman yoke. Both processes occurred around the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Jewish nationalism was naturally resisted by the Arab

indigenous population as part of an initially wider Arab national movement occurring in the same territory as Filastin (Palestine). However, we also could argue that Arab-Jewish relations need to be traced back many more centuries and that we should study relations over a period longer than the last hundred years of bloody confrontations. A colleague of ours has written about the “Common Heritage of Arabs and Jews,” and that is how we like to start team teaching the conflict resolution course we have taught for more than ten years at the University of Maryland-College Park.1 Based on Israeli and Palestinian narratives, watersheds for both nations were the defeat of 1948 and the

results of the 1967 conflict leading to the separation of the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt. For Israel, peace with Egypt in 1978 was an important landmark. For Palestinians, landmarks were the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1965 and the transition from a call to steadfastness to an active uprisingan intifada (Arabic for “shaking off”)—in 1987 that provided a strategy for ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and creating a twostate solution. Again, for both sides, the mutual recognition in the Oslo agreement of 1993 was the first step toward direct negotiations and mutual acceptance.