Since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, more and more Harvard students are considering the relations between Israelis and Palestinians. The topic frequently emerges in charged settings among like-minded students: on social media, at rallies, or at this past spring’s pro-Palestine encampment. But this semester, students are civilly considering this contested history in a classroom setting.
Frost professor of Jewish history Derek Penslar has taught university courses about Israel for the past 35 years. But his current class in the history department, “One Land, Two Peoples: The Modern History of Israel/Palestine,” comes at an especially fraught time for the Middle East—and for Harvard. Penslar, who co-chairs Harvard’s antisemitism task force (the group’s report is expected sometime in the near future), has found it difficult at times to get through his whole lecture, but not because his class gets disrupted; students, he remarks, are asking a lot of questions.
That was the case on March 24, when Penslar covered “Israel and the Arab World, 1949-1967.” During his lecture on Israeli-Palestinian relations in the wake of Israeli statehood, students constantly peppered him with questions. They asked about Israeli-Palestinian relations in the 1950s and wondered how those ties carried over into today’s conflict.
Once the pre-class student chatter ebbed (the course has about 50 enrolled undergraduates, alongside a smattering of graduate students and auditors), Penslar opened the session by discussing what the community of Arabs living in Israel looked like after Israel’s 1948 war of independence. Most Palestinians who lived on the land that became Israel fled—either by choice or by force—to other nations, he said. Israel confiscated property of Palestinians who fled and prevented most of them from returning. But a significant group of Palestinians (around 150,000) stayed. By 1952, this group—usually known as Israeli Arabs—had obtained Israeli citizenship.
While officially Jews and Arabs were legal equals, Penslar said the reality was more complex. Israeli leaders debated whether Israeli Arabs should be forced to assimilate, or whether such assimilation should be delayed. A core dispute, he said, was whether Israeli Arabs should serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Military service often paved the way for enhanced social and economic status. From the start of modern-day Israel’s history, some Israeli Arab groups—like the Druze and nomadic Bedouins—served in the IDF, but most Israeli Arabs did not. Penslar recounted a 1954 incident in which the Israeli defense minister issued a draft decree for Israeli Arabs, assuming few would actually register, thus proving the community’s disloyalty to the state. But the draftees, Penslar said, showed up in droves, and the minister rescinded the order. Penslar called this back-and-forth “a good example of how people who are subordinate engage in peaceful protest.”
One student wondered what the Palestinians who remained in Israel were like. Did the people who took up arms against Israel choose to stay, subject to rule by those they had fought? Penslar clarified that of the estimated 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs living on the land that became Israel in 1948, no more than 10,000 took up arms against Israel. Few of those people stayed and became Israeli citizens. The Israeli Arabs, he said, were “a pretty pacific population.”
Penslar recounted meeting with an Israeli Arab while living on an Israeli kibbutz (a collective agricultural settlement) as a foreign volunteer in his early twenties. The man was a schoolteacher who lived in relatively comfortable circumstances in a nearby village. He assured the foreign volunteers of his loyalty to the state, yet Penslar’s peers kept asking the man what he’d do in a war between Israel and its Arab enemies. Penslar recalled the man repeating, “I would suffer in my heart.”
Penslar has taught this course before—most recently in 2020—but current events led him to update his material and approach. He added information about Israel’s early policies toward Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip (a locational term, he noted, that did not exist before the 1948 war). Penslar put these remarks in the context of the 1949 Lausanne peace conference, where Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, suggested accepting an additional 100,000 Palestinian refugees to appease the Americans, whose leaders sought a quick solution to Palestinian resettlement. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Penslar said, did not support that plan.
Paradoxically, Penslar noted, the prime minister also proposed adding more Palestinians to the Israeli population. In 1949, Ben Gurion suggested absorbing the Gaza Strip into Israel—along with its Palestinian residents—in exchange for recognition of Israeli statehood by Egypt, which had taken over Gaza during the recent war. Penslar said he could not tell whether Ben Gurion was serious about this proposal, but Egypt refused the offer, insisting that it would only recognize Israel if it ceded the Negev (the desert that constitutes the southern half of the state of Israel).
One student wondered why the American government expressed interest in Palestinian refugees. Penslar’s answer could be applied to much of American post-World War II international diplomacy: the Soviets. American leaders worried that, if a large number of Palestinians remained impoverished and restive refugees, Arab support for the Western powers would weaken, opening the door for increased Soviet influence.
In closing, Penslar turned to a historical echo of the October 7 massacre. In April 1956, 21-year-old Israeli Roi Rotberg was patrolling the fields of his kibbutz near the Gaza border. He rode toward a group of Palestinians who were pretending to harvest the kibbutz’s crops. As Rotberg neared, the fake farmers disappeared and a group of armed Palestinians came forth, killed Rotberg, dragged his body into Gaza, and mutilated it.
The next day, Moshe Dayan—a prominent Israeli military and political leader who was then the IDF’s chief of staff—eulogized Rotberg. He opened with empathy toward the Palestinians, saying, “Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”
But instead of a call for peace, Dayan raised a call for action. In Gaza, he said, “hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces.” He continued, “We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood.” Israelis, he said, must “be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.” Sixty-seven years later, hundreds of terrorists from Gaza again attacked that border village, killing and abducting many of its residents.
Penslar attributes the success of his course to its scaffolding. Students abide by the Chatham House Rule, which allows them to share what was said in class with others so long as they do not reveal who said it. Though debates have not often emerged during the lectures, they do happen in weekly discussion sections, Penslar says, where students who hold different opinions grapple with the weekly readings and lectures. The course also has an intellectual-vitality course assistant, Shira Hoffer ’25, who provided a tutorial on respectful disagreement at the outset and continues to host weekly dinners, where students can get to know and trust each other outside the formal confines of a classroom setting.
The tone of discussion in class is quite different from the rhetoric emanating from this past spring’s encampment. Penslar recalls walking past an encampment sign that read, “It’s not complex,” which upset him. He says that studying Israel-Palestine relations and history requires an embrace of complexity. “If you see [Israel] entirely as a triumph, Palestinian views don’t matter,” he said after class. “If you view [Israel] as a crime, then Israel is dismissed. I don’t accept either of those. I think the Jews had good reasons to want to create a state there. I understand the Palestinians are a people with rights who also wanted a state there.” He continued, “It is possible to have a very deep attachment to Israel and acknowledge Palestinian national rights and claims. How you reconcile them is another story.”
