HMØK0106EU MØS, The Israeli Palestinian Narratives of Conflict (E26)

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most protracted, complex, and contested conflicts of the modern era. Periodic flare-ups of violence among its various actors continue to claim lives and to raise the risk of wider regional war. This course surveys the major political, social, and historical junctures of the conflict and examines how they are rearticulated in contemporary political realities. Beginning with the emergence of key political fault lines in the late Ottoman period, the course traces the conflict’s development through the establishment of the State of Israel and into the present, situating these processes within broader analytical frameworks drawn from International Relations and sociology.

Beyond political history, the course examines the competing narratives that have emerged within Israeli and Palestinian societies. Particular attention is given to the formation of national identities under conditions of negative interdependence, in which the assertion of one group’s identity is often perceived as entailing the negation of the other’s. Students will analyze how narratives of victimhood, responsibility, and moral legitimacy shape collective self-understandings on both sides, and how these dynamics both reproduce the conflict and constrain possibilities for reconciliation.