Clements Center Concludes “A Summer Beyond Borders: Israel & the Palestinian Territories”

This June, the Clements Center led nine undergraduates from UT-Austin on a tour of Israel and the Palestinian Territories in order to study the modern political history of Israelis and Palestinian Arabs from the late 19th century through the present.

Students learned firsthand from scholars, policymakers, and even a few who lived through the politically tumultuous 1930s-40s, including a Holocaust survivor still living at Kibbutz Lavi and a Melkite Palestinian who fled his village as a young boy in 1948 and never returned. The cohort learned to appreciate the independent, impressive histories of both peoples, while simultaneously charting the trajectory of the enduring political strife between them. Students also became intimately familiar with several of the local and regional implications of World War I, the British Mandate, World War II, the establishment of the United Nations, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Suez Crisis, and the surge in American involvement in the region from 1973 through the present.