The Quadrant

Back in the United States for the summer, my work and connections with Al-Quds University and Palestine have continued.

In July, I had the pleasure of hosting twelve of the Master’s students in American Studies for a two-week study tour in the U.S.  We spent the first week together in Boston, where we walked the Freedom Trail, read from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience by the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, and volunteered at the “Daily Table” in Dorchester, a community organization providing healthy food for the local neighborhood.   In Washington D.C., we met with journalists at the Washington Post, visited monuments and key buildings of U.S. democracy, and had a lively session with Ambassador Husam Zumlot, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s representative to the U.S.  In New York City, we visited the 9/11 Museum and Memorial, spent a fruitful day at the United Nations talking about Palestine, and concluded our tour with a visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to talk about issues of immigration.  Along the way, students met with faculty members at Brandeis University who generously gave their time to talk with with them about ideas and topics for their Master’s theses.

I like to think that the students ended their trip with a more complex view of American people, places, and institutions.  It was a special pleasure for me to see this corner of the country through their eyes.  We enjoyed rich discussions about the role of the media in covering U.S. politics, for example, and the role that historical memory (at the 9/11 Museum and elsewhere) plays in American life.  The students filled notebooks with their observations, and I hope and trust that they will be drawing on these notes in their future studies.

The students found, somewhat to their surprise, that they felt warmly welcomed in the United States, both as visitors and as Palestinians.  Everywhere they went, curious Americans engaged them with questions about living in Palestine, and what their hopes are for the future of their region.  When they volunteered at the Daily Table and visited the Boys and Girls Club in Dorchester, they were able to swap anecdotes with Americans who, like them, had stories of living in situations of uncertainty and insecurity.

Naturally, current events on both sides of the Atlantic occupied our thoughts and conversations.  The clashes in Jerusalem and the West Bank following the violence on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif were occurring during the study tour, so students were keeping in touch with home and worrying about family and friends.  And the news cycle in the U.S. continued to provide fodder for discussions about law and justice in American life, although the students were long home before the recent events in Charlottesville unfolded.

During the 2017-18 academic year, I will be returning to Al-Quds University several times to continue my work with the American Studies program.  I will be guiding students through the process of the Master’s theses, in part by matching them up with U.S. faculty members who can advise them virtually and serve as secondary supervisors for their work.  In addition, I will be helping direct a new program called PAYCE (Palestinian American Youth Civic Engagement), which will connect Palestinan students from Al-Quds University and An-Najah University with US students and faculty members who are part of the ENACT network (created by the center that I direct at Brandeis).   I’m also staying in touch with young Palestinian entrepreneurs through my work as a senior adviser to Our Generation Speaks.   So I’ll have a busy year continuing my work in Palestine, in addition to returning with enthusiasm to the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis

With Ambassador Husam Zomlot at the Palestinian Liberation Organization mission in Washington D.C.

At the United Nations with Ambassador Feda Abdelhady-Nasser, Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations

Brandeis University provost Lisa Lynch offers academic advice to students Samer Makhlouf and Rana Zakarneh.

Executive director Carl Thompson talked to us about urban communities of Boston at the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester.

State Representative Jay Kaufman hosted the group at the Massachusetts State House — a great window into U.S. legislative and democracy at the state level.

Volunteering at the Daily Table in Dorchester: students Shadi Salameh, Wi’am Hammash, Rana Rishmawi, Helda Ereqat, and Nidal Ayesh, along with Brandeis University student Risa Dunbar, who assisted with logistics for the study tour.

My year as a Fulbright Fellow at Al-Quds University has come to an end.   I am writing this post en route to the United States, nine and-a-half months after my arrival in Jerusalem.  I’m sentimental about this departure, but I will be maintaining a significant commitment to the American Studies program and to Al-Quds University more generally in the year (and the years) to come.

I put my students through a challenging final few weeks.  First they had to complete their research projects for “Leadership in American Life,” papers of 20-40 pages that analyzed the life and work of an individual or an organization.  Then they sat for their exam on “Diversity, Justice, and Injustice,” in which they had to try to make sense of the American experience through the lenses of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality.

With American Studies student Helda Ereqat and the gifts that the students gave me.

After they finished writing and I finished reading and grading, we celebrated.  First we put some finishing touches on the American Studies library, which is now reasonably well organized into coherent sections. We’ve still got some cataloguing work to do in 2017-18, but at least now a student can reasonably well browse sections on literature, foreign policy, gender, popular culture, religion, and so forth.  (Yes, some books have stickers indicating multiple categories.)

Then we headed in a caravan to the town of Beit Jalla, adjacent to Bethlehem for a year-end celebration.  The original plan was for a barbeque in a public place called Solomon’s Pools, but the students thought better of it.  With Palestinian prisoners into the fifth week of a hunger strike, the spectacle of a group of young people enjoying cooked meats in the open air seemed insensitive (and might have aroused an angry response from others in the area).  So we opted for a lunch at a restaurant called Makhrour, in a dramatic setting on a remote hilltop.  We talked over how far we had come during the year, enjoyed lunch together, and then the group presented me with two beautiful gifts – handmade tile and glass works, one framed for the wall, the other mounted on an organizer for my desk.  I was touched and honored by their thoughtfulness.

We also discussed their upcoming summer study tour.  I felt from the beginning that some kind of guided experience in the United States is a crucial element of American Studies for students from overseas.  So we have managed to organize a two-week tour in mid-July.  I had been hoping for a more extensive program, but it was difficult to raise the funds.  (There was no way that most of them could begin to afford this without a subsidy.)   Eventually I managed to cobble together enough from various sources to manage a short visit to Boston, New York, and Washington D.C., and they are excited about the opportunity.

My last three days were absorbed in part by a conference that Al-Quds University hosted under the title, “Jerusalem: Fifty Years of Occupation.”  This month, Israelis are marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day Way by celebrating the “unification” and the “liberation” of Jerusalem.  In fact today Israel is celebrating “Jerusalem Day,” since this is the date on the Hebrew calendar that the Israeli army succeeded in re-taking the city from Jordan.

Al-Quds University, in cooperation with some of the leading Palestinian-Israelis in the Knesset, wanted to showcase the Palestinian perspective.  The focus over three days of speeches and papers was on the experience of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem.  Those families feel both hemmed in and neglected by what they perceive as a steady and systematic half-century effort by Israeli to “Judaize” the city and displace its Palestinian residents.  Palestinians in Jerusalem have an anomalous status – residents of the city, but not citizens of Israel, which puts them at a disadvantage for jobs, services, education, and which, by many accounts, undermines their dignity.  I’ll try to give a fuller account of the complexities of Jerusalem and the messages of this conference in a later post.

Of course, my last days also coincided with the visit of President Trump.  I’m afraid that in the whirlwind of my own preparations for departure, I did not have time to follow closely and think about the impact of his visit, much less really talk about it in depth with my students, friends, and colleagues.  This will have to be done from a distance, as both he and I have cleared out of town!

I don’t have time today for a longer consideration of my experience of this academic year.  And perhaps, too, I need a little time for more thoughtful reflection over the summer.  But the good news is that my connection to the students and the university will continue in a concrete way.  As I mentioned, I will be hosting the American Studies students in July in the U.S.  And during the next academic year, I will be spending a total of 12-15 weeks at AQU, where I will be helping students with their Master’s research projects, as well as continuing to help put the program onto a solid footing.  I will also do part of that work from the United States – one of the big challenges is to raise a substantial sum over the medium term and long term to support tuition scholarships for the students, as well as to be able to bring in U.S. faculty members to offer a truly outstanding program.

I am leaving in a swirl of conflicting feelings, but the most powerful among them is gratitude. Above everything, I was extraordinarily well cared-for this year by two of my closest friends in the world, AQU president Dr. Imad Abu Kishek and my 20-year AQU counterpart, Dr. Khuloud Khayyat Dajani.  My immediate colleagues in the Global Studies Institute, Dr. Amneh Badran and Dr. Mohammad Abu Koash, were everything that I could want from partners in an effort to raise intellectual standards and academic output.  I was glad to be able to continue a program started with great effort over many years by Dr. Mohammed Dajani.   The American Studies students whom I came to know over the course of year inspired me with their scholarly commitment, their personal resilience in the face of tough circumstances, and their fierce loyalty to one another.  Newer friends like Ghassan Al-Deek and Adel Ghaith made sure that I took some time to enjoy the country between periods of intense immersion in work.  I thoroughly enjoyed learning Arabic this year with Saed Mashal; any shortcomings in my progress are entirely my own fault, not his!  To former AQU President Sari Nusseibeh, whose intellect and courage have always inspired me, I am grateful for two decades of friendship, sometimes through choppy waters. My Brandeis colleagues Dan Kryder and Sue Lanser, with whom I have worked on AQU projects together for more than a decade, made invaluable contributions through multiple visits over the course of the year.  My co-workers at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University successfully hid their frustrations at the extra work that fell to them during my absence; I’m particularly grateful to Cynthia Cohen for serving as acting director this year.  Gina Cabrera-Farraj and her colleagues in the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem made me comfortable and proud to serve with the support of the United States government.  In Jerusalem, my neighbors Ellen and Dov Spolsky and Howard Rosen and Ron Kronish hosted me regularly, and made me feel that I always had a home for holidays and Friday nights. David Benninga made sure that I was comfortable and well-settled in my wonderful house with its beautiful garden.   Also in Jerusalem, I’m grateful for that James and Tina Snyder took me under their wing; their friendship will be one of the great legacies of this journey.   Many other friends and colleagues too numerous to list made time for stimulating conversations in many corners of Israel and Palestine, helping me see a region that I have visited regularly for more than twenty years in a new light.  My son Theo and his fiancée (!) Shelly Alchanati, based in Tel Aviv, took care of me with a thoughtfulness that far exceeded what any father can reasonably expect from his children.  Finally, without the support and love of my wife Maggie, none of this would have been possible.  She patiently endured my absences, obsessions, and distractions, and then uprooted herself (and our dog Phoebe!) for more than half of the year so that we could share this extraordinary experience together.

After an extended family get-together in California (happy birthday, Susan Terris!), I will be back at Brandeis by early June.  But attachments to Al-Quds University – and to the city from which it takes its name – are stronger than ever.

We closed the semester in my class on “Diversity, Justice, and Injustice” with two quite interesting class sessions.

After talking for much of the term about the struggles for equality of racial, ethnic and religious groups, we turned to the issue of LGBT rights in our penultimate session.  Our focus was on the seismic shift in American law and public opinion over the last 20 years on gay marriage.

My students, found, I think, the conversation somewhat unsettling. Most came into the class steeped in a conservative society’s view that same-sex relationships were “abnormal.”  Some were clearly uncomfortable even that the topic was raised in a classroom discussion.  Yet most were also struggling with their own opinions, believing that in some way that LGBT people were owed some form of rights and respect even if their behavior was morally questionable.  A handful said bravely that their opinions about gays had evolved, and they saw and understood LGBT rights as parallel to and intertwined with the rights of other marginalized and oppressed groups in U.S. life.  But the majority saw LGBT identity as a matter of “choice,” and thereby not entitled to the same level of protection by society that was owed to people who faced discrimination because of accidents of birth.

I tried to shift the conversation away from the moral issues to the larger question how a democratic society deals with differences at the level of basic values.  Within our classroom, I said, we were bound to have significant differences – just as every society has such differences.  The question that we had to wrestle with was this:  how does the United States, as a democratic society, use the law and other tools to promote equality and mutual respect even in the face of ideological and moral diversity?

I was aided in this part of the discussion by the presence of my brother, Michael Terris, who in his work as a political consultant has been involved with the emergence of gay political leaders in San Francisco and California more generally.  Michael was very direct in speaking of LGBT equality as a matter of simple justice, and he provided a capsule history of the evolution of public opinion in the U.S. on this subject over the past quarter-century.  The students were surprised at this shift, though we also took pains to let them know that acceptance of gay couples and families varied widely from region to region in the U.S., and often, of course, within individual communities as well.

We did not have time to explore the issue thoroughly (I’m counting on my colleague Sue Lanser to explore this topic in more depth in her course on “Gender and the American Experience” in fall 2017!), but I think that the discussion began to open some minds to thinking about diversity and equality in broader terms than they had previously considered.

For the last class session, we did some readings on working-class whites in the U.S., and issues of marginalization and outsiderness on the basis of class.  Selections from Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and Larissa MacFarquhar’s excellent reporting from rural West Virginia for the New Yorker (from October 2016) provided the backdrop for our discussion.  MacFarquhar’s article included an in-depth profile of a third-generation Arab American, now a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter who roundly rejected (and resented) the implication that support for Mr. Trump was fueled by racism or anti-Arab sentiment.

Among other things, we had a chance to talk about the paradoxes of American patriotism.  It was puzzling to some how the United States could generate such fervent devotion and such unfettered anger – from the same people at the same time.  Yet it resonated with them as well.  The most fervent Palestinian nationalists can also be unsparing their critique of their current leadership.

Today, students are finishing up their research papers on various American “leaders,” a kind of warm-up for the more ambitious research projects that most of them will take for their Master’s theses next year.  On Sunday, they will sit for their final exam for “Diversity, Justice, and Injustice.”    Then they’ll breathe a sigh of relief, and be able to turn a little more attention again to their full-time jobs and their families.

Too bad there are no more class sessions.  I’d be curious to hear what they have to say today about the sacking of Mr. Comey!  But I think that they are too busy working on their research papers to focus on that right now.

The wall separating Israel from the West Bank, immediately opposite the main gate of Al-Quds University in Abu Dis.

At the entrance to Abu Dis, the village on the edge of Jerusalem where Al-Quds University is located, there is a congested traffic circle.  Big yellow vans – shared taxis – double park to discharge passengers.  Wares from hardware and kitchen stores spill into the street.  Cars dart in and out of driveways to the ubiquitous repair shops.   If traffic is clogged in one direction or the other, drivers pull out and accelerate up the wrong side of the street, sometimes in the process creating secondary traffic jams going both ways.  Drivers like me going 270 degrees around the circle nagivate between all of these distractions, as well as pedestrians threading their way from one side to the other.

It would be an otherwise unremarkable traffic circle in the West Bank, except for this: the road through this congested intersection lies on the only route between the northern and southern halves of the West Bank that Palestinians are allowed to traverse.  If you are traveling from Bethlehem to the seat of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, or if you live in Hebron and wish to visit cousins in Nablus, the road through Abu Dis is the only way to get there.  At rush hour, you can easily wait 20 or 30 minutes at the traffic circle, while young men from the neighborhood jump into the fray to volunteer as informal traffic cops, waving cars around to allow the gridlock to ease.

Once upon a time, there was another way.  The direct route from south to north goes right through Jerusalem, offering many options when traffic gets clogged.  But most Palestinians who live in the West Bank do not have permits to enter Jerusalem or Israel, so they have to take the scenic back road around Jerusalem through Wadi Nar, past the Container checkpoint, through the middle of Abu Dis, and then past the front gate of the enormous settlement of Maale Adumim.   During rush hour, the journey from Bethlehem to Ramallah – only 10 miles or so if one could drive directly – can easily take an hour-and-a-half or more.

The roadway is a reminder of the constrained circumstances under which so many Palestinians in the West Bank live.  Everywhere the Israeli occupation imposes limits: on where Palestinians can go, what they can buy, to whom they can sell.  Even for those with decent jobs and a reasonable standard of income, these limitations are simply baked into everyday existence.  If West Bank residents want a day in the sun, they cannot by and large drive an hour to enjoy the shores of the Mediterranean; they must make do with the below-sea-level desert heat of Jericho.  If they want to start any kind of business that involves good, services, or capital, everything has to go through the byzantine complexities of cross-border exchange through Israeli checkpoints.  If they approach the main gate of the Al-Quds University campus, they come face-to-face with a high concrete barrier that keeps them safely separate from neighborhoods of Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites, that once were minutes away.

Here I am leaving aside the harsher aspects of the occupation: encounters with Israeli soldiers and police; pre-dawn raids; conflicts on agricultural land with residents of settlements; “administrative detention” policies that allow Palestinians to be held in prison for months without charges.   These matters obviously have an impact too.  But the day-to-day constraints in the West Bank affect everyone, even those with positions of privilege.  A life of limitations is bound to have its costs.

No wonder Palestinians have a reputation for being the most avid users of social media in the world; if your life is hemmed in by political circumstances, virtual networks are one way to break somewhat loose.

In another month, Israel will celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the 1967 war, and particular the re-unification of the city of Jerusalem.  The Palestinians will mark the same date as the 50^th anniversary of the occupation.

Most of my students, Palestinian professionals in their twenties and thirties, grew up under occupation, or have at least lived their adult lives under its constraints.  They maintain a spirit of hope about making changes within Palestinian society, but the years of limitations have taken their toll on their optimism about the larger prospects for Palestinian dignity and freedom.

The daily grind reinforces their adherence to a conventional Palestinian narrative.  Since 1967, as they understand it, Israel has tightened a noose around the Palestinians, moving more and more Jewish Israelis into settlements up and down the West Bank.  The Israeli goal seems clear to them:  annexation of the West Bank, and somehow the removal of the Palestinians or their diminishment to a state of insignificance.  Most of them believe that Zionism’s logic, if taken to its end point, will ultimately push Palestinians into smaller and smaller spaces.  The small box that they are living in – marked off in many places by a high concrete wall – will keep getting smaller.

They understand, of course, that Israelis live in fear as well, that the steady presence of the soldiers and the walls and the roadblocks has its roots in profound insecurity.  They understand, too, that the people of the West Bank have it better than the Palestinians in Gaza, where two million live in a virtual prison governed by a political and military organization that embraces violence.

But though their box may be more permeable than that of Gaza, it is still a box.  And it’s not hard to see how a world of narrow options is a breeding ground for resentment, especially when they need look no further than a few miles away to a place where the opportunities appear to be endless.

Palestinians look across the Green Line to Israel’s vibrant start-up culture and its spirit of unbounded possibility with envy.  Yes, start-ups are possible on the West Bank as well, but the hurdles to success are much, much higher, given the lack of capital, the lack of reliable infrastructure, and the artificial constraints on markets, among other factors.  Even the most motivated individuals can be worn down in a place where you can count the available routes on the fingers of your hands.

They are open to solutions.  President Mahmoud Abbas’s visit to President Donald Trump lifted some spirits here this week.   Seeing the Palestinian flag over the shoulder of the U.S. president offered some symbolic solace.  And despite Trump’s ties to some staunch supporters of the Israeli settler community (including the new ambassador to Israel), many still hold out hope that the president’s idiosyncrasies may be just the thing that the stultified peace process needs.

Still, it seems clear that nothing will make any substantial difference until Palestinians are able to make with some consistency the kinds of choices that free people can take for granted:  which road to travel, which career to pursue, which passions to follow.  The road through Abu Dis is a worn thread through the middle of the West Bank.  It is nowhere near strong enough to bear the aspirations of a proud people.

The “Holy Fire,” as seen from the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher

It’s the end Easter break week at Al-Quds University, and we are coming into the home stretch of the spring semester.  The students in my class on “Leadership in American Life” are deep into their research projects on significant figures in the field of their choice.  Last week we had presentations on Eleanor Roosevelt, Condoleezza Rice, Sheryl Sandberg, and Anita Hill.  This week we’ll be hearing about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Harry Truman, Frances Perkins (the first woman member of the cabinet . . .secretary of labor under FDR), and Huey P. Newton!  The assignment asks students to research key historical moments in the professional lives of their subjects, and to analyze their work with reference to some of the scholarly literature on leadership.  Among other things, the idea is to give them a taste of what it means to undertake long research project with several stages and much re-writing . . . a kind of warm-up for the Master’s thesis that I hope that most of them will undertake during the next academic year.

Interestingly, they seem to be struggling a bit with one requirement that I thought might be easy – making connections between issues in the U.S. and issues in Palestine.  For some it’s easy.  The student who is writing about Harry Truman is very interested in the dynamics of Truman’s decision to back the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.  (He has zeroed in on the political advantage that Truman was seeking by courting favor with the Jewish community in the run-up to the 1948 presidential election.)  And the student who is writing on the Black Panthers has ample opportunity to consider attempts at solidarity between radical black activists in the U.S. and Palestinian activists.  For others, this is tougher, perhaps because the issues can be sensitive.  The young woman writing about Anita Hill, for example, may be struggling with the challenges of writing about issues of sexual harassment in Palestinian society – an issue widely discussed in private but not much in public.  And Condoleeza Rice’s response to the 2006 Palestinian elections brings up the delicate question of the manner in which both the Fatah and Hamas parties in many ways abandoned democratic institutions in the wake of that troubled contest.

Meanwhile, all eyes and ears are on local political matters.  The hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody has inspired rallies of support across the West Bank, even as it has inspired cries of outrage in the Israeli community.  The strike is still in its first week; it remains to be seen how things might heat up if the prisoners maintain their discipline and hunger begins to take a physical toll on them.  Now that a date has been set for the visit by Mahmoud Abbas to Washington D.C. to visit President Trump, speculation about the future of the peace process is also on the rise.  But there are concerns as well.  One of Washington’s key demands is that the Palestinian Authority cease payments to the families of prisoners – a demand that would be difficult to meet under any circumstances, but is particularly challenging with the emotional charge of the hunger strike.

With Passover and Easter coinciding this year, Jerusalem was particularly frenzied.  With the help of our friends James Snyder and Tina Davis, Maggie and I secured a special perch to watch an extraordinary ritual: the miracle of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City.  The day before Easter, in the Orthodox tradition, a special flame emanates from the tomb of Jesus.  The Patriarch of Jerusalem enters the tomb and emerges with a taper lit from that flame, which in turn is used to light hundreds .  .and then thousands of tapers of ecstatic worshippers  inside the church . . then outside the church . . and then thanks to the miracles of modern transportation, to Orthodox churches all over the world.   (Yes, the lit flames are carried in special boxes on airplanes so that the Holy Fire can make its appearance on Easter morning in churches in every corner of the globe.)

Maggie and I (and our son Theo and his fiancée Shelly) had an amazing view from a balcony near the top of the dome inside the church.  From there we could look down as the Patriarch made his way three times around the sepulcher, then entered the holy place . . and then we watched with amazement as men ran at full speed through the crowds, bearing the torches and the light and the smoke filled the cavernous space as taper touched taper below us.

Now, with the holidays behind us, I will be settling into an intensive final month here, with a great deal to accomplish between now and late May, when I depart for the U.S.  I have this year’s coursework to finish, and also a lot of planning to ensure the smooth continuation of the American Studies program in the fall of 2017 and beyond.

Many thanks to the many people who contributed new books to the American Studies library!  My students have been inhaling them as part of their research projects.  I will be re-filling my on-line wishlist over the summer, in anticipation of bringing another suitcase full when I return for some shorter visits in the fall.

International Women’s Day is a holiday at Al-Quds University, so I have a little time to breathe and catch up.  In addition to teaching two (new!) courses this spring, I am involved in a variety of other projects at Al-Quds University – mainly initiatives that connect the university to people and institutions overseas.  So I have been going full-tilt . .and suddenly I find myself nearly halfway through my second semester.

Naturally, the new American administration continues as a major topic here, and every week provides new events that I can tie in to our class discussions.

For example, we did a week on Native Americans and land expropriation the same week that the U.S. government closed the Standing Rock camp.  It was also the same week that the Israeli Knesset passed a law that legalized, both retrospectively and prospectively, the seizure of Palestinian private land for the expansion of settlements.  (This law is expected to be tested in the Israeli courts, and is widely believed that it will not survive the judicial test.)

Similarly, a discussion of Asian Americans focused on the Korematsu case, the unsuccessful 1944 legal challenge to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.  The case, which has never been reversed, stands as one of the most infamous examples in U.S. history of the courts bowing to the argument that the executive branch should have free hand when it comes to national security.  It’s obvious how this led us naturally to the balance (or imbalance) between security and rights in our own time.

Most recently, we did a session on Jewish American history, just as the news of anti-Semitic acts and threats across the U.S. was coming to a head.  It was great to be able to have as our guest for the class Professor Jonathan Sarna, my colleague from Brandeis University, who is the world’s foremost authority on American Jewish History.   The class on “Diversity, Justice, and Injustice” cannot possible cover every topic in depth, so I asked Jonathan to focus on a case study.  He chose anti-Semitism in the 1920s, as spearheaded by Henry Ford through the publication of The International Jew, a kind of American adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The ensuing discussion, both on-line and in person, was fascinating.  Some of my students quickly grasped the nature of Ford’s propaganda, understanding that anti-Semitic sentiment represented a corrosive threat not only to Jewish people but to American values.  One student boldly pointed out to her classmates that many of Ford’s stories about Jews were “fabricated,” but that conspiracy theories about Jewish people and anti-Jewish sentiments are widely present in the Arab world today.

As though to prove her point, some other students found in Ford’s words a persuasive echo of things that they had heard many times before.  While they found themselves troubled by over-generalization, they were not necessarily convinced at first that The International Jew was inherently anti-Jewish.

The secondary readings that they read traced the history after the 1920s into the 1950s, when Henry Ford II (the original Henry’s grandson) tried to make amends by establishing close connections between the country and Jewish organizations, especially offering support for the newborn state of Israel.  For some of my students, this was too much.  “Both Henry Ford I and Henry Ford II went to excesses,” complained one student, arguing that the younger Ford’s support for Israel came at the direct expense of the Palestinian people.   Students were impressed and moved, however, by the contemporary accounts of the Muslim communities in the U.S. that have been responding in recent weeks to anti-Jewish acts with support and donations.

In any case, it was a fruitful discussion, and will allow us to continue to explore topics related to the Jewish community into the future, alongside the experiences of other groups.  I imagine that we will get closer, as time goes on, to the question of the U.S. role in the Middle East (though they will have a whole course related to THAT topic in Fall 2017).

My other colleague/guest this week was Sue Lanser, a scholar of comparative literature and Women’s and Gender Studies who recently retired from Brandeis.  Sue led a section on “Women and Leadership,” which allowed her to explore the issue of “intersectionality,” as well as to introduce the courageous example of another Brandeis colleague, Anita Hill.  (One student was so inspired that she immediately switched the topic of her major research project to focus on Hill and sexual harassment.)

Meanwhile, this region is experiencing, perhaps, less frenzy over the new American administration than people inside the United States.  While the flow of news (and fake news!) from Washington continues at high volume, the administration’s full impact on the Israeli/Palestinian situation has, in point of fact, yet to be felt.  The threatened move of the U.S. embassy to Tel Aviv seems to be on permanent hold (in other words, the same situation that has persisted for 20 years).  The new U.S. ambassador has still not been confirmed.   Mixed signals from Washington seem to be stifling bold action here, although the “regularization” or “land grab” law referenced above is certainly a major step.  President Trump has declared that he doesn’t care whether there’s a one state or a two state solution or any other solution as long as everyone is happy.   There’s a curious sense in which Trump’s words reflect a widespread attitude among both Israelis and Palestinians: that the very vocabulary of the “two state solution” has become so freighted and stale that language itself sometimes feels like an obstacle to progress.  But the prospect of making everyone happy in any kind of solution seems rather dim.  (Perhaps Trump may wish to consider the “317,000,000 state solution,” as proposed here.)

While the overall situation here has been, in relative terms, “quiet,” this doesn’t mean that it is without incident, especially within the Palestinian territories.  Clashes between the IDF and community members are a daily occurrence in various locations, and disruptions and shootings at checkpoints are regular.     Protests over the Israeli practice of “administrative detention” have disrupted traffic and sometimes closed entirely Qalandia, the main checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem.  (I read the English language web site of the Ma’an news organization, where one of my students works, to try to keep somewhat up to date.)

Next on the political docket here is the possible annexation of Ma’ale Adumim, the very large settlement just outside of Jerusalem that I pass by every time I go to the University’s Abu Dis campus.  The right wing parties in Israel would like to advance this move as a prelude to annexing the entire West Bank.  But the move is clever, because many Israelis have come to feel that this bedroom community, whose residents mostly came for the relatively inexpense housing,  is already really a part of Jerusalem.  It is considered something different from more remote settlements whose residents are fueled by passion for reclaiming Judea and Samaria for the Jewish people.   But my daily commute is a vivid reminder of how sensitive this would be.  The road that I take abuts the settlement, and it is also the only legal route for Palestinians traveling between the northern and southern halves of the West Bank.  Annexing Ma’ale Adumim would mean, in effect that Palestinians traveling from Ramallah to Bethlehem, for example, would have to cross through Israel proper.  The two halves of the West Bank would be severed, which would feel to the Palestinians like a further blow to the viability of a Palestinian state.   The vote on this controversial proposal keeps getting delayed, apparently at the request of the Netanyahu government.  The last I saw, the vote was pushed back to March 12 .  .but who knows.

On the positive side, there is . . the weather!  Spring has arrived full throttle here, with mild sunny days this week, and flowers and trees in opulent bloom.   The hills in both Israel and the West Bank are bursting with green, but we are still some weeks away from punishing heat.  At Al-Quds University, the outdoor campus has come to life again, with students thronging around the fountain, in the gardens around the cafeterias.  In these days I’m sure that the campus is a pleasant oasis for students from the rigors of life here beyond the campus gates.

The second semester at Al-Quds University is in full swing now.  I told my students that my courses would buck AQU tradition and would start on Day 1 of the semester – not two or three weeks in once students completed their registrations.  Besides, Day 1 of the semester was the first full day of the Trump administration.  We couldn’t afford to delay!

I am offering two courses in the spring 2017 semester.  The first is called “Leadership in American Life.”  When I worked with AQU colleagues to re-design the American Studies program, one of the things we said is that we wanted to emphasize issues of “leadership” and “entrepreneurship.”  The idea is that students in the program – young Palestinian professionals in a variety of fields – stand to benefit and bring back lessons (positive and negative!) to Palestinian institutions and society by understanding these two aspects of the United States.  So while the “Leadership” course is an elective, it’s central to the new direction of the program.

This class is a chance for students to pursue their own interests deeply.  Students will do a modest amount of reading in leadership theory, but they will spend much of the semester immersed in a major research project on the leader or group of leaders of their choice.  I have encouraged them to focus on an individual or individuals within their own professional field or their field of principal interest – there is no excuse for being bored or getting tired of this project!  And I have definite “leadership” for this purpose quite broadly, though I have told them that I would prefer that they choose someone who has had significant responsibility within an institution, rather than pure “thought leaders.”

To get warmed up, I have been presenting on a handful of the best-known “leaders” in American life:  Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr.  It’s a chance to smuggle in some conventional U.S. history into this course, as well, of course, to introduce them to important individuals and classic texts.  So, on the day we listened to Trump’s inaugural address, I also introduced them to the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, to give them some context for the very different tone that some leaders are capable of striking.   It did not take a great deal of explication for them to see the difference between a speech where “carnage” was the most important word, and another in which the concept of being “dedicated” (in all its meanings) took center stage.

The class is also an opportunity to host Americans from a variety of fields as guest speakers.  This week, we had a terrific appearance by Gary English, a theater director based at the University of Connecticut who has had a long and fruitful connection with the Freedom Theater in Jenin.  Gary is teaching a course at in the AQ/Bard College program on campus this spring, so I snagged him for a guest appearance.  He gave a terrific talk on theater as a “rehearsal for democracy.”

This week, the students are dedicated to choosing subjects for their research projects.  It looks like we will have an interesting range.  Some will focus on recent presidents.  One student started a mini-presentation in class on George W. Bush by declaring how much she hates him – but she still wants to spend her whole semester immersed in his life and work!  Others are following professional interests.  A student who recently started a new job at the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs quite naturally wants to focus on one of the recent U.S. Secretaries of State.  Then there’s the student whose passion in life is to help create a better pension system for Palestinian people – I have gently guided her towards a project on Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under FDR, the first woman appointed to the U.S. cabinet, and one of the guiding lights behind the implementation of social security.   A student with an interest in media wants to work on Jack Shaheen, a writer whose work focuses on anti-Arab stereotypes in Hollywood and the U.S. media more generally; perhaps Shaheen is not a conventional “leader,” but I am helping the student place his work in the context of anti-racism efforts more generally.    It looks like Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs are going to get some attention.  I’m hoping for takers for Katharine Graham, Sheryl Sandler, Paul Farmer, and Betty Friedan, in part because our American Studies library has hard-copy books by or about each of them!   It should be interesting.   Proposals are due in another week or so.

The other course is called “Diversity, Justice, and Injustice”  When my Brandeis colleagues Sue Lanser and Dan Kryder and I worked with three AQU counterparts on changes in American Studies, we came up together with the idea for this new required course.   We felt that it was essential that students have at least one course focuses on issues of racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexuality, and other forms of diversity in the U.S.  But we didn’t want a course that was a simple celebration of multiculturalism.  Hence the combination with issues of rights and law – the story of how different groups have struggled for justice was, we thought, a central story in the U.S.   We also wanted to signal that this was neither a story of steady progress (as “Diversity and Justice” might have indicated) nor a jeremiad about the immutable horror of American racism (as “Diversity and Injustice” might have suggested.  So we settled for a rather awkward course name that I have shortened to “DJI.”

Of course, there’s far too much material to cover in a semester.  But I have explained to the students that now I am beginning to treat them like true graduate students.  That is, I am assigning them more pages each week than they can possible cover, with the understanding that they have to start getting good at making choices about what’s most important, and how to spend their time.  (And they can get to some of the unfinished readings over the summer!)  I give them some guidance about what I will cover . . .but I’m leaving much more of this decision-making up to them.  This also gives me a chance to push the stronger students a little harder – and to expect them to contribute more meaningfully to the on-line forum for the class.

So far we warmed up with a terrific class focused on James Baldwin’s short letter to his nephew, “My Dungeon Shook,” (the first piece from The Fire Next Time), and Ta-Nahisi Coates’ long Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.”  Baldwin, with his combination of anger and compassion, is a great introduction to the complexities of the African American experience; while the Coates article allowed students to explore a question that has quite immediate relevance for their own region: what kinds of actions can and should be taken to address injustices from earlier eras that still reverberate in human societies?   My precedessor as Fulbright Scholar at Al-Quds University, Dominique Day, was still around and co-taught this session with me, which was a pleasure.

This week promises to be a sensitive and provocative session.  We happen to be focused on the Native American experience, and particularly legal and quasi-legal maneuvers that American whites took to deprive Native peoples of their lands.  Among other things, they are reading some primary sources on treaties, and commentaries on treaties by Native Americans themselves, which show the manipulation of American law by whites in all of its ugliness.  As it happens, this week the Israeli Knesset passed a controversial law that allows (both prospectively and retroactively!) for the appropriation of Palestinian-owned land to accommodate the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  The formal translation into English makes this the “regularization” law, but Haaretz, the most left-wing of the Israeli newspapers, has taken to simply calling it the “Land Grab Law.” Although many commentators here expect this law to be struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court, it is generating considerable controversy because of its transparent attempt to provide a legal fig leaf for existing practices.

I have asked my students, in preparation for the next DJI class, to consider similarities and differences between the two situations.  There’s a lively on-line discussion going on right now, with a variety of opinions. Suffice it to say that the Native American experience resonates loudly with my students, wherever they stand on the political spectrum within the Palestinian community.  I’m looking forward to what promises to be a vigorous discussion.

Of course, we continue to monitor closely the first weeks of the Trump administration.  This week, of course, I have been reminding them of all of the discussions we had in our “American Politics” class last semester about the separation of powers and checks and balances.  Students have taken note of the president’s steady and deliberate efforts to undermine the judiciary as an institution (including his administration’s claim that his decisions on national security are “unreviewable”).   They also understand, however, that this president likes nothing better than to stand in defiance.  We will see what happens in the Supreme Court.

Finally . . . I could not resist, last Sunday afternoon, making sure that American Studies students were fully aware of the social and cultural significance of . . . .THE SUPER BOWL.  Yes, in advance of last Sunday’s game, I devoted half an hour of class time to this weighty subject – though, in fairness, I connected it to “Diversity, Justice and Injustice” through the theme of race and sport.  (All legitimate, right?)  After all, they can’t claim a graduate degree in this field without some knowledge of the place of American football in U.S. life . . . and it was my obligation to provide it . . complete with power point showing highlights of the New England Patriots season.  This week . . . I think I’ll need to show them highlights of the historic comeback – a major event in American history, as every Pats fan will agree!

I watched the swearing-in of the 45^th president of the United States in a hotel lounge in Ramallah.  Some people were paying attention to the CNN feed; others gave the screen only intermittent looks.  The general reaction, if it’s fair to characterize it this was, was a world-weary lack of surprise. The address seemed to strike those in the room as what they had heard before from Candidate Trump.  It was left to me to express surprise about the dark and threatening tone, so out of step with the usual traditions of the inaugural events.  One friend with me did express surprise that a new president could so brazenly dismiss all the work of the men and women arrayed on the stage behind him, and he tracked carefully whether Barack Obama would applaud.  (He did when Trump talked about soldiers of all backgrounds “bleeding the same color red.”)

Later that evening, we were joined by one of Abu Mazen’s close advisers, fresh from a meeting with the Palestinian president. He was frank in telling us what was hardly a surprise – no one in the Palestinian inner circle has any idea what is coming next.  One day they receive a strong signal that the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem is imminent; the next day they hear a different message.  What did it mean, the adviser wondered, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not mentioned at all in the address?  Was this a sign of backing away from his earlier statements on the issue?  (I offered the opinion that it didn’t mean much one way or the other . . that inaugural addresses are generally not the place where presidents outline specific policy steps .  .)   And what should the Palestinian Authority do at the onset of a Trump presidency?  Sitting and waiting to react seems like a passive choice, but the options for action seem limited at best.

Naturally the question of the move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is very much on Palestinian minds.  This is a highly sensitive issue.  We discussed together Martin Indyk’s recent suggestion in the New York Times that the U.S. couple the move of its embassy with a recognition of East Jersusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.  While appreciative of the spirit of this, my Palestinian colleagues were unpersuaded.  The likely outcome, they believed, was that the U.S. would move the embassy immediately, with the implementation of steps towards a Palestinian capital delayed indefinitely.  In the end, the Palestinians would have conceded West Jerusalem to Israel, and would find themselves in a position of negotiating a division of East Jerusalem that would leave their access to their presumptive capital whittled away to almost nothing.

The next morning, my American Studies students gathered for the first session of their spring 2017 course on “Leadership in American Life.”  Naturally, we re-viewed the inaugural address as a bridge between our “American Politics” class of the fall term and our spring term work.  “He’s just like one of the Arab leaders,” one of my students laughed, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment.  “It’s all, “We will. . .” and “We will . . “   that is, all grandiose bluster.  We discussed Trump’s use of the word “carnage” to discuss the American present . . .and explored the root so that they would understand just how strong and overwrought a word this was.  We parsed the “early returns” of the fact-checkers and debated just how important it is for presidents to be “accurate.”  Some students voiced the position that since all politicians stretch the truth, Trump was really no different.  But others grasped quickly that a president in office has a different kind of responsibility to the truth from which candidates are at least partially exempt.  (We also recalled our examination at the beginning of last semester of Obama’s first inaugural address in 2009, and his stress during that speech on the word “responsibility.”)

A week later, we had a great deal more to talk about . . including the flurry of executive orders culminating with his temporary ban on refugees and immigration from seven predominantly Muslim nations.  Few were surprised.  My students actually have some sympathy for the idea that a country has the right to limit mobility across its borders.  But they quickly grasped that the proposed “priority” for Christians runs counter to basic values of non-discrimination . .not to mention a potential problem with the first amendment.   I only wish we had had more time to discuss in the depth they deserved some other matters:  the “wall” on the Mexican border; the Trump’s attacks on the press; the size of the inaugural crowds; the marches  .   . We could spend all class on these issues  . .. .   But we had a good segue into the heart of the class, because we launched into a discussion about whether we mean by the word “leadership” — simply the ability to head “successful” organizations and inspire followers, or whether we think that the word “leadership” is inevitably tied to values.  And then we took a look at the “Gettysburg” address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, with attention to the embracing spirit in which the 16th president chose to address his (and his country’s) opponents.

Amidst the flurry of executive actions, Palestinians took note that an announcement to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was not at the top of the priority list, despite previous assertions by the president and his surrogates.  Now the speculation is that pressure from Arab countries – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt – is beginning to convince the new administration that this may not play as well in reality as it did on the campaign trail.  One Palestinian businessman told me that it’s obvious that Trump will NOT move the embassy.  The president has business interests scattered throughout the Arab world, this observer insisted, and he will not want to jeopardize these concerns for a gesture that even the Israelis themselves do not seem to want very badly.  Perhaps so.   Other presidents have made this promise before as candidates, only to soften their position once in office.  Will Trump be different?  Once he meets with Prime Minister Netanyahu, presumably we will know more.  His press secretary insists that the administration is at the very beginning of studying the issue – a deliberative approach that seems wildly inconsistent with the headlong rush to declarations and orders in other areas.

I have tried amidst all this to maintain my own deliberative approach.  Events have understandably let loose a surge of emotion, and I am not exempt.  But I am trying to keep my feelings and political opinions out of the classroom.  I have told my students from the beginning of the program that all opinions and ideologies are welcome — as long as they are informed, reasoned, and based on whatever they can ascertain as fact. It’s a challenge to maintain this posture in the current environment . . . but level-headed analysis is in short supply at the moment, and I feel that the university classroom is one place where we can strive to preserve it.  If my students build new calls to action around their deeper knowledge .  . . more power to them!

On another note altogether, I had the pleasure of spending much of the last week conducting interviews for the Brandeis University-based program, Our Generation Speaks, for which I serve as an adviser.  OGS brought together 22 young Palestinians and Israelis to Brandeis in summer 2016 to create social impact start-up ventures together.  Three ventures – Genesis (which is providing genetic testing in the Bedouin community); QualIT (offering the services of Palestinian software engineers to international companies); and ScaleME (helping international start-ups do business in the Middle East and the Arab world) – were formed and are moving in various directions.  I was interviewing for the summer 2017 cohort, with a target of 26 new fellows.  As it was last year, it remains inspiring to talk with 50 or 60 young adults, women and men highly conscious of the challenging nature of Israeli/Palestinian relations, but eager to work together on substantive, tangible projects which aspire to “building shared prosperity, values, and trust through entrepreneurship.”    So many great stories among the candidates .  . . I look forward to seeing the 2017 cohort in action back at Brandeis this coming summer.

It’s Inauguration Day in the United States, but just another Friday here in Jerusalem.  At Al-Quds University, it’s the final day of the semester break, so I’ve been squeezing in both preparation and pleasure in anticipation of the return to the university routine.

Earlier this week, I got my dose of Palestinian humor – or, to be more precise, Palestinian humor in its transnational Palestinian-American form.

Amer Zahr

Two of my students, Shadi Salameh and Helda Ereqat, invited me and Maggie to go with them to see Amer Zahr, who grew up in Michigan but who is “from from” Nazareth.  (“The soldier asked me where I’m from.  I said Michigan.  He said, “No, where are you from from?”)  Zahr performed at a cultural center in the Shekh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem above the popular Gallery Café.  The place was packed, and expectations were high.  Zahr performed in English, but with a generous smattering of Arabic and local references.  The good news was that Shadi and Helda scored us seats in the front row.  That was the bad news too, as it made it very easy for Zahr to pick me out as one of the few Americans in the crowd.  He asked me my name, engaged me in conversation, and proceeded to hammer me every few minutes throughout the show every time he wanted to make fun of white Americans.  (This is something of a family tradition.  My late father David also tended to get picked on at these events.  Ask my mother about the time that Penn and Teller called him up on stage!)  Anyway, Zahr was an equal opportunity offender – making fun of Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians themselves in equal measure, performing with just enough edge that he could score laughs by apologizing to a woman in a hijab in the front row every time that he used a swear word or mentioned beer.  The routines often skewered Palestinian grandiosity (“Independence Park?  In Ramallah?  Who do they think they’re kidding?”); others, which pinched a little deeper, focused on the humiliations of Tel Aviv airport security (“The guy who strip-searched me? . .  Do you think his mother believes that this is a GOOD job?”).  Zahr even took out an oud and performed a couple of Arabic love songs in literal translation (“The air . . . There’s so much air around us .. . “), to the general hilarity of the crowd who actually knew the lyrics word-for-word in the original.  Of course Zahr’s position was delicate.  He got a lot of points from the crowd in proclaiming his loyalty to Palestine, but as a visitor from the diaspora he doesn’t experience the day-to-day challenges here, and his (English!) routines subtly reflected his awareness of his privilege.  His stage persona aptly captured the light-hearted side of Palestinian pessimism and self-absorption, while at the same time keeping a streak of anger running just below the surface.

Over the course of four days over the break, the students and I worked to clean and re-organize the American Studies library in the Faculty of Arts.  Built over 15 years by Drs. Mohammed and Munther Dajani, the library has thousands of volumes, many of them treasures of American history, literature, philosophy, and political science.  But the library was suffering from lack of attention in recent years.  Books had migrated from their original categories, and miscellaneous donations had begun to give the collection a miscellaneous flavor.  So we went to work.  We shipped hundreds of books about non-American subjects across campus to the library of AQ/Bard College, giving us space to work with and allowing us to re-sort the collection by subject matter – and, to some extent, by course.  (More on my spring 2017 classes in the next post.)   After four days of volunteer labor, I’m pleased to report that the room and shelves are free of dust, we have removed excess furniture, and tomorrow we will replace the horrid orange curtain with professionally-installed room-darkening shades, both to improve the look of room and to enable better-quality projection of power point presentations and films. 

The view from the American Studies classroom window

More importantly, I now know the collection well enough to match books to my students’ interests . . and also to know the gaps in the collection that I need to fill in the coming year.  (No books yet about Barack Obama, for example  . . and believe it or not, not a single book devoted to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)  Plus there’s now a little more room to breathe . . so it will be a pleasure to start second semester there.

Yesterday, I took a day away from second-semester preparation to sneak away to the city that Israelis know as Hebron and Palestinians call Khalil.  One of my students, Fadi Abu Shanab lives in a nearby village and works in the city.  I drove down with Fadi’s cousin Sinan Abu Shanab, an AQU graduate whom I have known for many years and who now works with the Our Generation Speaks program at Brandeis.  It was my first visit to Khalil, the largest city on the West Bank and also in many ways the most contentious.  In the international press, Hebron is known as a flashpoint for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because of the many settlements around the city and the famous settlement right in the heart of the Old City.  More on that in a minute . . . but Fadi and Sinan were at pains to introduce me to the Palestinian Khalil, a city of energy and tradition, with its own very distinct character within Palestinian society (and outside of the Israeli-Palestinian context).   Khalilis have a very distinct reputation within Palestine: they’re known for their hustling entrepreneurship (opening a shop is a kind of rite of passage), but they are also the butt of many jokes around the region for their thick skin and sometimes their thick-headedness.  Our first stop in the city was to a famous glass-blowing factory with a spectacular shop full of vases, bowls, and tiles.

Outside the glass factory

We visited Fadi’s office – a small technology firm called “Trusted Systems,” which has been serving clients in the region since 1999.  To the extent that Palestine has a start-up culture (ok, that extent is not as great as it might be), it’s centered in Khalil; Fadi represents a younger generation of Palestinians dedicated to building on local ingenuity while making connections across borders.

Fadi Abu Shanab at his office at Trusted Systems.

Later, we went down to the Old City, starting in the thriving hub of the marketplace, with vegetable stalls and clothing stores laden with goods, crowded together, and filled with shopped.  We walked down the narrow street, with walls rising on either side above the stalls.  At a certain point, the open sky above us began to be covered by a wire screen, sometimes draped with large pieces of cloth.  We were entering the borderland between Palestinian Khalil and Israeli Hebron.  We were talking through the Palestinian street below, while the homes of the Israeli settlers hovered on either side above.  The screens served as a minimal barrier to conflict, which have often erupted when Israelis rained projectiles down from above, and sometimes when Palestinians hurled objects from below.  As we proceeded further down the street, the busy stalls began to give way to closed doors, and the street became gradually quieter and quieter.  During the second intifada this whole thoroughfare had been closed to commerce.  The upper end away from the settlement, where we began our walk, has recovered.  But the stores down in the heart of the conflict zone have, by-and-large remained closed.

Passing through a pedestrian checkpoint at the end of the street, we came to the grand structure that houses the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, known in English as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Palestinians as the Ibrahimi Mosque.

Fadi and Sinan at the window to Sarah’s tomb.

This site, holy to both Muslims and Jews, is shared in a delicate arrangement with entirely separate entrances, separate windows onto the elaborate tombs themselves, and understandably tight security – since this was the site of one of the tragic incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers by Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein.  Our visit there was calm; a group of Turkish tourists joined us . .. It must mean something, I suppose, that Khalil can still host any tourists at all.

I then passed through another checkpoint to enter the Jewish settlement itself.  Fadi, holding Palestinian identification was not allowed to pass.  We tried to talk Sinan past the Israeli soldiers on the strength of his American accent in English and the fact that he is a colleague of mine at Brandeis . . . but we failed, so I strolled through the neighborhood settlement on my own.  After the high energy of downtown Khalil, the heart of Jewish Hebron was eerily quiet, long-closed Arab stores boarded over with signs that gave the Jewish version of the history of the city.  A handful of residents came in and out on foot or by car, the men’s kippot, so ordinary a sight in Jerusalem, a bit of a surprise in this environment.  At the end of Shuhada Street, another heavily fortified pedestrian checkpoint brought me suddenly back into a busy automobile roundabout with vendors shouting in Arabic at customers and at each other.

Fadi and Sinan took me to a delicious lunch in the newer part of Khalil, where I sampled several local specialties, including the famous lamb’s neck.  And then I had a chance to spend a few relaxed hours with Fadi’s family in the village of Shuyukh, a few miles outside of the city.  I was full of admiration again for Fadi’s juggling act:  a six-day per week job in Hebron, a family with two children under five, and three Master’s classes in American Studies an hour’s drive or more from home . . . and, like all of my students, in the context of the disruptions of Palestinian daily life on the roadways and in the warp and woof of everyday activities.

And after today . . .the second semester will begin . . with our instant analysis of the inaugural address and proceedings in our class on “Leadership in American Life.”  We shall see . . .

With the winter holidays over and the new year begun, Al-Quds University is open for business again, although the second semester does not begin until the third week of January.  So I have some time to continue to work on preparing my second-semester courses, as well as other projects.  In the spring term, I will be teaching “Diversity, Justice, and Injustice” and “Leadership in American Life.”  More on these when the semester begins later in the month.

Of course the talk here for the last ten days has been about the U.S. abstention on the UN resolution on Israeli settlements, as well as on John Kerry’s long speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last week.  The reaction to both in my limited circles in the Palestinian community has been positive but muted.  For some, it’s a matter of “too little too late” from their point of view: the Obama administration’s reluctance to push harder on the settlement issue over the past eight years rankles in Palestinian circles, and I have heard Kerry’s robust defense of the two-state solution derided as neither fresh or original. Still, there is appreciation that no American official has extended himself further on these issues than Secretary Kerry.

And there are plenty of rumblings about the future.  Some of my colleagues are watching Russia closely; having seen Putin manage the situation in Syria, they are expecting that he will play a more prominent role here as well, as evidenced by the reported news that the Russians will try to broker an agreement between the Fatah and Hamas parties.  Others are seeing a quieter but more influential role for China in the region.  These speculations are based, at least in part, on a calculation that the more seasoned leaders in those countries will seize on the new U.S. president’s inexperience to widen their sphere of influence generally.  They are also based on a widespread tendency here to see powerful hidden hands at work behind ostensibly mundane developments.

Meanwhile, in Israel the media attention is focused on the police investigations on charges of corruption against Bibi Netanyahu.  The news here is really just breaking – the media still has not gotten hold of the details of what is rumored to be the more serious of the charges.  It may all come to nothing, but for now this story is adding to a marked feeling of transition and instability that is settling people on both sides of the green line on edge.

Over the past few weeks, I have been posting photographs and brief bios of the American Studies students on the program’s Facebook page.  On the off-chance that not every reader of this blog is following that page, here are a few samples, which will give an idea of the range of students enrolled in the program:

W’am Hammash

Wi’am Hammash grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine, and took her B.A. in Human Rights and International Law from Al-Quds Bard College at Abu Dis. She is now working towards her Master’s degree in American Studies at Al-Quds University.She dreams to become an effective person to help Palestinian women, children and youth. She believes in her dreams, because she follows Eleanor Roosevelt’s saying: “life belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” She is interested in photography. The Facebook page of Wi’am Hammash is https://www.facebook.com/Wiam.Hammash

Mohammad Hamayel

Mohammad Hamayel is an American born Palestine-based journalist currently employed as a correspondent for PressTV. He had also worked on programs in the past including “Coffee in Palestine” and is now producing “Life Under Apartheid.” Mohammad enjoys reading up on Philosophy and History. A fan of film director Stanley Kubrick he also follows Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Michelle’ Gundry and others.

Helda Erekat

Helda Erekat was born and raised in Kuwait and currently lives in Jerusalem. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication–TV and Radio Broadcasting from the University of Cairo. She also has a higher Diploma in Media from the Institute of Arab Research and Studies in Cairo. Helda has worked as a reporter with several TV stations and news agencies, and she recently worked as a lecturer in the Faculty of Media at the PAUC University in Palestine. Helda’s family and friends have always been the first supporters of her success; she considers joining the master’s degree program in the American Studies at Al-Quds University to be an inspiration to her children, who are themselves university students. She is proving her belief that education should never be limited by age. Her favorite quotation is, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” by former Harvard University president Derek Bok. Helda enjoys bowling, traveling and hiking.

Alaa Hamamra

Alaa Hamamra holds a bachelors in English language and literature from An-Najah University. Along with being a social entrepreneur,  Alaa works as a freelance translator and content writer. For fun, Alaa enjoys blogging, sci-fiction and politics.

Samer Makhlouf, 40 years old from the West Bank town of Jifna, is the CEO of Zimam, a non-profit organization that promotes the values of democracy, freedom, justice, and moderation through sustained grassroots non-violent activities in Palestine. Samer also serves as the Director of International Relations in the Palestinian Centre for Research and Strategic Studies (PCRSS).

Samer Maklouf

Mr. Makhlouf, has 15 years’ experience in a broad range of non-profit and business organizations within Palestine. Samer has extensive international training in fundraising and non-profit management, including work with the U.S. Department of State. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Birzeit University and a master student in regional studies at Al Quds University.  Mr. Makhlouf served as the head of Ramallah’s Al Kasaba Theater & Cinematheque Programs & Development Department, and he serves as president of his home town Jifna’s Youth Club with 350 members from all ages. Mr. Makhlouf is also the leader/organizer of the Apricot festival, one of the biggest, most popular and well known festivals in Palestine.