CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION April 13, 2014 To Encourage Tolerance, a Palestinian Professor Once Trained as a Guerrilla Teaches the Holocaust To Encourage Tolerance, a Palestinian Professor Once Trained as a Guerrilla Teaches the Holocaust Mohammed Dajani, a professor at Al-Quds U., visits a building at Auschwitz, where he led a group of Palestinian students on an unprecedented visit. By Matthew Kalman Jerusalem Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi is an unlikely advocate for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. He trained as a guerrilla with the Palestine Liberation Organization, was banned from Israel for 25 years because of his prominent role in Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group, and still refers to Israelis as my enemy. But Mr. Dajani, now the library director and a professor of American studies at Al-Quds University, in East Jerusalem, has become a prominent activist for tolerance. In 2007 he founded Wasatia (moderation in Arabic), a group that promotes the Muslim tradition of compromise and nonviolence. His chosen path has already led him to a lonely stand opposing an academic boycott of Israel supported by most of his Palestinian peers. Enlarge ImageTo Encourage Tolerance, a Palestinian Professor Once Trained as a Guerrilla Teaches the Holocaust 2Michal Luczak, Anzenberger Mohammed Dajani (center), a professor at Al-Quds U., leads a group of Palestinian students on a visit to Auschwitz. Recently, he traveled into further isolation by leading an effort to teach Palestinians at different universities in the West Bank about the Holocaust, which is not part of the curriculum in Palestinian schools. In addition to a series of seminars on the topic, in March he took what is thought to have been the first group of students from the Palestinian territories to visit the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland. It helped emphasize the human story of the Holocaust, to study the meaning of the historical narrative as related to our conflict, to heighten empathy, awareness, and sensitivity, said Mr. Dajani about the trip in an interview with The Chronicle. The visit was part of a study on conflict resolution organized by the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, in Germany, involving students and scholars from Wasatia and Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The German Research Foundation is paying for it. Entitled Hearts of Flesh—Not Stone, a reference to a passage in the Book of Ezekiel, it also involves sending a group of Israeli students to a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem. German doctoral students in social psychology are surveying both the Israeli and the Palestinian participants to see how they react to the visits. Of course, discussion of reconciliation with Israelis is taboo in Palestinian academe; the Holocaust is an even bigger taboo. Mr. Dajani’s involvement is not officially approved by Al-Quds, a point it emphasized after an article about the Poland trip appeared in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. The university lecturer and the students involved acted in their personal capacity and were not representatives of the university, Al-Quds said in a statement. Some Palestinians outright condemned the trip. Abdullah Dweikat, a local news commentator, lambasted the pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Let us first pay attention to our martyrs and their families, he wrote on the website for Al-Watan, a television station in Ramallah. Students involved in the project weren’t immune to such thinking. Undergraduates from Birzeit University opted to skip the trip as they were preparing to depart due to peer pressure, Mr. Dajani said. Students who did go declined to speak to The Chronicle. A Sensitive Subject Mr. Dajani was somewhat surprised by the anger the trip ignited. I find it difficult to understand why anyone would oppose such a visit since students learned much more than they would sitting in a classroom, he said. Yet he knew the project was dealing with a sensitive subject for Palestinians, in part because of the misinformation that exists about the Holocaust. The few books in Arabic about the Holocaust are tarnished with bigotry, he said. People have not been able to deal with this sensitive issue because they believe it is at the core of the establishment of the state of Israel which, in other words, is the source of the Palestinian Naqba, he said, using the Arabic term for catastrophe by which Palestinians refer to the founding of the Jewish state, in 1948. Mr. Dajani said his eagerness for Palestinian and Israeli students to learn about their historical sufferings resulted from his own journey, which he began as someone dedicated to pursuing armed struggle against the Zionist enemy. Born in 1946, Mr. Dajani is a member of one of Jerusalem’s historic Arab clans. The honorific Daoudi was added to the family name after an ancestor was appointed keeper of the Tomb of King David, on Mount Zion, in medieval times. He had planned to study engineering in Lebanon, but his plans changed after the 1967 Six-Day War. He was recruited into the ranks of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah guerrillas, where he received military training but never fired a shot in battle. Mr. Dajani eventually became head of the organization’s English-language propaganda arm. Banned from Jerusalem, where his family lived, because of his Fatah activities, he pursued an academic career that took him to the United States, where he acquired a Ph.D. in government from the University of South Carolina at Columbia and a Ph.D. in political economy at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1993 he was teaching at a university in Jordan when his ailing father finally secured a permit from the Israelis for him to return home. Mr. Dajani began to regard Israelis differently after he accompanied his father for cancer treatment at a hospital in Israel and also witnessed the care given to his dying mother by Israeli doctors and even soldiers. I became confused about my enemy, who did their best to help my father and my mother, he said. I started to see the other side of my enemy, which is the human side. American Studies The Holocaust course is not the first time he has pushed curricular boundaries. At Al-Quds, he has established the somewhat radical idea of an American-studies program. He concentrates not on the history, politics, or culture of the United States, but instead tries to teach his students what made America become great. I teach about religious freedom, about multiculturalism, pluralism. These are things I extracted from the American experience, and these are the things that I wanted my students to learn, he said. These are deeply unfashionable sentiments in a Palestinian context, where America is regarded with suspicion because of its backing for Israel, and American values are seen by many as secular Western implants alien to Arab culture and inimical to Islam. But Mr. Dajani said the only way for Palestinians to advance is to acquire the skills of critical thinking and risk taking that characterize their neighbors. And the only way to engage with Israelis is to understand their deepest fears—and vice versa. Such thinking has earned him supporters. He is very unique, said Shifra Sagy, a professor of psychology and chair of the Martin-Springer Center for the Study of Conflict Management and Negotiation at Ben-Gurion University, who took the Israeli students in the Hearts of Flesh program to the refugee camp. Other Palestinians are very cautious to do such projects, especially ones that concern the Holocaust. But any cooperation now between Israeli and Palestinian academics is very difficult. Ultimately, Mr. Dajani said, Palestinians cannot begin to understand Israelis unless they learn about the impact of the Holocaust. It is my role as a professor to open the minds of my students to knowledge and to learning without any restriction or prohibition, said Mr. Dajani. I would like Palestinians to explore the unexplored and to meet these challenges, even though you might find that within their community there will be a lot of pressure on them not to do it.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 05:58:14 +0000
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