Table of Contents
What This Course Aims to Do
This course is designed to introduce absolute beginners to the Israel-Palestine conflict in a careful, structured, and critical way. Many people encounter this topic first through social media, emotionally charged news, or personal conversations. That can create a sense that you are “supposed to” already know the history, the terminology, and “who is right.” This course assumes none of that prior knowledge.
Our central objective is to give you enough historical background, conceptual tools, and awareness of competing narratives so that you can understand what people are talking about and begin forming your own informed views. The goal is not to persuade you to adopt a particular political position, but to help you understand why the conflict is so complex, why it inspires such strong feelings, and what kinds of evidence and arguments are used by different sides.
By the end, you should be able to follow current events related to Israel and Palestine with far greater clarity; recognize the main historical reference points people invoke; understand the basic legal and moral terms that come up; and identify where the main disagreements actually lie.
What This Course Will Cover
This course follows a loose chronological structure while weaving in political, legal, and social themes. It begins with the historical background before the twentieth century, moves through the waves of nationalism and empire that reshaped the region, and then focuses on key wars, political developments, and peace efforts. Later chapters explore everyday life, narratives, and possible futures.
In the historical sections, you will learn about the different communities that have lived in the land over time, the period of Ottoman rule, and how modern Jewish and Arab national movements developed. You will see how European antisemitism and colonial politics intersected with local aspirations and fears, leading to new migration patterns and rising tensions.
Chapters on the British Mandate, the 1947-1949 war, and the period up to 1967 will show how international decisions, wars, and population movements shaped the emergence of Israel, the Palestinian Nakba, refugee communities, and the armistice lines that became borders in practice.
The course then turns to the 1967 war and its aftermath, examining military occupation, settlement policies, Palestinian political movements, and daily life under occupation. You will encounter the formation and evolution of the PLO, divisions within Palestinian politics, and the role of the diaspora.
Subsequent chapters examine diplomatic efforts such as the Camp David Accords, the Oslo process, and later peace plans, alongside the reasons commonly given for their failure. The Intifadas and cycles of violence are treated in their own section, focusing on forms of resistance, armed actions, and military responses, as well as their impact on civilians.
Beyond conflict events, the course explores the political split between Gaza and the West Bank, humanitarian conditions, and questions of international law and human rights. It introduces how occupation, refugees, and alleged war crimes are understood in legal frameworks, and what roles international organizations have tried to play.
You will also study how Israelis and Palestinians, and others around the world, remember and narrate this history differently. Chapters on narratives, media, and education will help you see how the same events can be told in conflicting ways. The course then situates the conflict in its regional and global context, including the involvement of neighboring Arab states, major powers, and regional rivals, as well as recent normalization agreements.
Finally, the course looks at life, society, and culture in Israel and Palestine, presents competing proposals for the future (such as two-state, one-state, and confederation models), and discusses how to think critically about all of this, including evaluating sources and wrestling with moral questions.
What This Course Will Not Do
This course does not offer a comprehensive history of the Middle East, Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. It only touches on those wider subjects where they are directly relevant to understanding Israel-Palestine. You will not find detailed military analysis of every battle, nor exhaustive biographies of leaders, nor a full legal treatise on every convention and resolution. Instead, the focus stays on what a beginner needs to navigate the conflict’s main contours.
The course also does not promise “neutrality” in the sense of erasing moral stakes, but it does avoid telling you what positions you must hold. It will present widely accepted facts and also flag areas where sources strongly disagree or where interpretations are contested. You should not expect a final answer to “who is right” or “who started it.” Rather, you will see how those questions themselves are framed differently by different groups, and what evidence they use.
Nor will this course provide real-time updates on each new escalation. The “Current Developments” section will outline recent patterns and examples, but given how fast situations change, it is meant to illustrate dynamics rather than serve as live news.
Who This Course Is For
This course is intended for people who feel they “should know more” about the Israel-Palestine conflict but are unsure where to begin, or who feel overwhelmed by the intensity of public debate. It assumes no background in Middle Eastern history, international law, or political science.
It should be accessible to students, professionals in other fields, and anyone trying to make sense of headlines, campus debates, or conversations in their community. If you already know a lot about particular aspects of the conflict, you may still find value in the structured overview and in sections that cover perspectives or dimensions you have not encountered in depth.
At the same time, this course is not a specialized training for diplomats, military officers, or legal practitioners. It introduces concepts from diplomacy, security studies, and law, but always at a level aimed at building general understanding, not professional expertise.
How the Course Is Structured
The course is organized into several major parts, each with its own internal logic. The first major block provides historical background up to the early twentieth century and explains the rise of modern national movements. The next block follows the conflict through the British Mandate, the establishment of Israel, the displacement of Palestinians, and subsequent wars up to 1967.
A third block concentrates on occupation and resistance, Palestinian national institutions, and Israeli and Palestinian politics. This includes focused chapters on key agreements and uprisings.
A fourth block addresses thematic issues: legal frameworks, human rights debates, competing narratives, regional and global involvement, and the roles of media and education.
The final sections turn toward everyday life, current developments, and potential futures. The course ends by drawing together key takeaways, highlighting unresolved questions, and offering suggestions for further reading and learning.
You are encouraged to read sequentially, because later chapters often presume familiarity with earlier ones. However, the thematic sections (for example, on international law or narratives) can also be revisited independently once you have the basic historical outline.
How to Use This Course
The chapters have been written to stand on their own, but they are most useful if you move slowly and reflectively. When you encounter new terms, try to notice whether they are descriptive, legal, or political. For instance, some words are widely accepted categories in international law; others are strongly associated with a particular side’s viewpoint. Subsequent chapters will unpack this more fully, but pausing to notice your own reactions as you read will deepen your understanding.
Because the conflict is emotionally charged, you might find certain sections upsetting or challenging. It can help to read in smaller portions, take breaks, and return with a focus on understanding what different actors believed they were doing at the time, even if you disagree with them.
Where possible, use this course alongside primary materials such as speeches, UN documents, and first-hand testimonies, as well as secondary sources with different interpretive angles. A later chapter will guide you in evaluating sources and identifying bias; for now, it is enough to approach all materials, including this course, with an attitude of questioning and comparison.
If you are using this course in a classroom or study group, discussions can be most productive when participants commit to listening, asking clarifying questions, and distinguishing between describing what people believe and endorsing those beliefs.
Scope and Limits of the Material
No single course can capture every experience or argument related to Israel and Palestine. The decisions about what to include here reflect several priorities. First, the emphasis is on developments that significantly shaped the political map, the lives of large numbers of people, or the main narratives of each side. Second, the course spends proportionally more time on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, because those eras most directly structure today’s realities.
Third, within each period, the course seeks to avoid presenting either Israelis or Palestinians as monolithic. It gestures to internal diversity (religious, political, and social) while recognizing that it cannot map every nuance. Later chapters on society, culture, and internal political divisions will elaborate on this.
Fourth, the course gives attention both to what happened and to how it is remembered and interpreted. This means that some chapters discuss contested facts or diverging accounts rather than a single settled narrative. Where scholarly consensus exists, it is indicated; where it does not, the disagreement itself becomes part of what you are learning about.
Because the scope is introductory, many topics are outlined rather than exhaustively covered. More detailed reading suggestions are provided toward the end of the course if you wish to go deeper on particular wars, peace processes, legal debates, or cultural expressions.
Your Role as a Learner
Your most important task in this course is not to memorize every date or name, but to practice holding multiple ideas in mind at once: that people can be both victims and agents; that suffering on one side does not erase suffering on the other; that legal categories and moral judgments do not always align; and that sincere, informed people can disagree profoundly.
As you move through the chapters, you might notice your sympathies leaning more strongly in one direction or another. Rather than suppressing that, try to ask: what experiences or arguments led me to feel this way? What might someone on the other side of the issue say in response? Later chapters on empathy, ethics, and critical thinking will help refine this practice, but you can begin it from the start.
Finally, remember that “not taking a side” is itself a position with consequences in real-world debates. This course does not require you to adopt or reject any particular stance, but it does invite you to recognize the responsibilities that come with understanding, whether you are voting, engaging in activism, teaching others, or simply talking with friends and family.
By keeping these objectives and limits in mind, you can use the rest of the course more effectively: as a guide through a complex and painful history, a framework for making sense of conflicting claims, and a starting point for further inquiry rather than an endpoint of knowledge.