Finding Mideast Unity in the Classroom

Israeli, Palestinian Develop Friendship Through Years of Teaching U-Md. Course

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Professors of Peace
For 12 years, Palestinian professor Manuel Hassassian and Israeli professor Edy Kaufman have found a peaceful middle ground in their college classroom. Their belief in open dialogue to solve the raging violece overseas has fueled their lectures and long-term friendship.

Every detail had to be negotiated when an Israeli and a Palestinian started team-teaching a class on the Middle East. They haggled over the syllabus, the readings, the maps, even the words used: Was 1948, when Israel was formed, the War of Liberation -- or the Catastrophe?

Now, 12 summers and many debates later, professors Edy Kaufman and Manuel Hassassian have learned to share not only the lectern in their six-week University of Maryland course but also an office, a house near campus and an unexpected friendship.

Their class teaches the narratives of each side, the way history is retold and how news is understood, with the hope of bringing the sides together. "There is no military solution to this conflict," said Hassassian, a Palestinian Christian and an ambassador to the United Kingdom. "Only dialogue."

When Kaufman, 64, and Hassassian, 52, started teaching together in 1993, they thought peace in the Middle East was within reach. This year, as Kaufman and his wife arrived in the United States from Jerusalem, they heard news blaring from the airport TVs with reports of kidnappings, Katyusha rockets, funerals -- the worst fighting in years.

So as the class meets this month and next, their lessons in conflict management seem more important than ever. Or are they more futile?

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Like everyone in the Middle East, the professors have their own narratives, stories intertwined with the history of the region, memories that laden the fighting, the negotiations, the land itself with meaning.

Kaufman left his whole life behind in Argentina in 1960, when he was 18, to help build a new country. "I was very much in love with Israel," said Kaufman, whose parents were ardent Zionists.

He met his wife there, a sixth-generation Jerusalemite whose father disappeared during an attack in 1948 when she was about 4. Lisa Kaufman remembers a city under siege, not having enough food and how she kept talking to her father, long after he was gone.

Now the Kaufmans have children of their own, whom they raised in Jerusalem through years of war, bloody attacks and tension. Their son, a doctor at a hospital in Haifa, is delivering babies now with rockets crashing into the city around him; he recently lost a close friend.

Hassassian was born in Jerusalem, in a neighborhood that came under Israeli control after the war in 1967, when he was 13. His wife, Samira, remembers her father putting on his doctor's coat and telling the Israeli soldiers in her town near Bethlehem that the Palestinians would not leave.

The Hassassians raised three children, through years of occupation and checkpoints, curfews and intifada, while Manuel Hassassian taught at and helped lead Bethlehem University. A few years ago, during crossfire between Palestinian and Israeli forces, a bullet shattered a window of their house while Samira was making dinner. She gathered the family to pray to the Virgin Mary in thanks that no one had been hurt, she said, and at that moment, an explosion sent glass shattering, her children screaming.