MES 325 - Conflict and Change in the Middle East Today

Credits: 4

Examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or what many scholars now call ‘the 100 Years War.’ Beginning with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the course traces the origin of the conflict from the early encounters between Arabs and Jews in Palestine to the contemporary struggle to achieve a final status agreement between Israelis and Palestinians today. Because the conflict and its consequences—human, geographic, social, cultural, and political—are so proximate to the student experience, they learn more intimately about the complexity and difficulty of reaching peace in an otherwise tiny space shared by two peoples with competing civilizational visions.