Mideast Views Presented at UCLA : Israeli and Palestinian Strife: 2 Sides of Story

In a way, the first person to benefit from a unique summer course starting at UCLA this week was 9-year-old Youssef Nazzal.

The Palestinian youngster was traumatized when he saw an Israeli soldier shoot an Arab girl in a student demonstration near his home in Ramallah, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. After that, the word “Israeli” to him meant “soldier,” and “soldier” meant “bad.”

Then, his father, Nafez, a Palestinian-American professor at Birzeit, the West Bank’s largest university, brought home Edy Kaufman, an Israeli friend and colleague who is a Hebrew University political scientist. The two men always spoke to each other in English, but one day Youssef and his 6-year-old brother, Rami, heard Kaufman speaking in Hebrew over the telephone.

One of ‘Them’

“They were stunned,” their father recalled in an interview here. It was only then that the boys realized that their new friend was also one of “them.” And as a result, Nafez Nazzal said, “my sons now are able to distinguish between an ‘Israeli’ and an ‘Edy.’ ”

It may not sound like much, but given the social and political chasm that separates most of the Israelis and Arabs who live together so uneasily in this tiny strip of land once called Palestine, it is an accomplishment.

The friendship of the two professors grew out of their dream of jointly teaching a university course on the conflict between their respective peoples, a dream that is coming true in Los Angeles this summer.

Nazzal and Kaufman are actually teaching two courses together at UCLA, one on “The Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” and another on “Current Issues and Prospects for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

“To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first time in which such a course is presented jointly by a Palestinian and an Israeli,” Kaufman said.

It is a step that involves risk for both men, given the bitterness surrounding the conflict. They agreed to be interviewed in Israel, for example, only on condition that no article appear before their arrival in the United States.

Israelis seen as sympathetic to the Palestinian cause are sometimes harassed by political hard-liners and, under a recent change in the law, they face jail terms for even meeting with Palestinians deemed hostile to the state.

Palestinians who live here walk a tightrope between Israeli authorities ready to punish them for what they see as anti-state activity and radical Palestinians who occasionally kill fellow Arabs whom they accuse of collaborating with Israel.

According to a course plan worked out over long hours of sometimes difficult meetings, the men are to lecture alternately throughout each of their six-week, 30-hour courses, reacting both to one another and to their students. Each is to present a full range of views on “his side” of a particular issue or historical event, from the most moderate to the most radical.

‘Don’t Represent Reality’

“We don’t want the students to think we represent the reality,” Kaufman said. “We don’t represent the reality.”

Kaufman was born in Argentina and came to Israel as a student nearly 30 years ago. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Michigan. His principal area of expertise is Latin America, although he studied the Middle East early in his career. He was a member of the international executive committee of Amnesty International, the human rights organization, for seven years and is an associate professor at UCLA.

Nazzal was born here but left in 1962 to study in the United States, at the State University of New York at Albany, the University of Buffalo and Georgetown University. Initially refused permission to return by the Israeli authorities after the 1967 Six-Day War, he became a U.S. citizen.

Later, he worked in Libya and Lebanon before being given a permit to return here as a foreign professor at Birzeit. In 1979, he received a full-time residence permit on the West Bank as a “family reunification” case. He is expected to become a professor at Brigham Young University’s Center for Near Eastern Studies in Jerusalem next fall.

The two men met when Nazzal approached Hebrew University for permission to use one of its libraries, and Kaufman helped him get it.

‘Ulterior Motive’

Nazzal said he sees the UCLA experience as a chance “to be a teacher and a student simultaneously. . . . My ulterior motive is to pursue this and to understand the Israeli position--whether we have peace or war.”

“The course is not going to change what we believe,” Kaufman agreed. “It will open our eyes to what the other believes.”

For example, Kaufman said, the emphasis will be different from what it usually is when Palestinians and Israelis speak on a program together, an experience that both men have had many times.

“The problem is,” he said, “you wind up with the Palestinian talking about what’s wrong with the Israeli position, and the Israeli talks about what’s wrong with the Palestinian position. The positions quickly get polarized.”

Over several weeks in Los Angeles, the idea will be for each professor to “focus on the performance of our own leadership and how processes have affected the attitudes of our own people,” according to their course outline.

“I hope we will be very self-critical,” Nazzal said. “We need to look inwardly at both sides.”

That does not mean that there will be no arguments, they acknowledge. Disagreement is almost inevitable. Even “moderates” see the situation very differently when they are on opposite sides of the volatile Middle East conflict.

The differences showed up in small ways even as the two drew up their course plans, they said. One of the subjects that they should discuss, Nazzal suggested, was the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s peace initiative, which led in 1979 to the only peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.

Fine, Kaufman said, but it should be called the Sadat-Begin initiative, recognizing the role played by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Catastrophe, Independence

Similarly, Kaufman objected when Nazzal referred to “the catastrophe” of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Their lectures on that subject now go under the heading: “1948: Arab Catastrophe and Israeli Independence.”

Significantly, the two men speak not of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict but of the Palestinian-Israeli clash at its core.

They do so, according to their course outline, “because of our common interpretation that ultimately the keys for a comprehensive solution remain in the hands of both people and their leaders.”

“Without negating the possible influence of the superpowers and other regional actors on the behavior of both parties, the past has shown that such external elements did not possess the strength to prevent wars or impose a peaceful arrangement.”

And what does each of them see as the answer to the conflict that has so shaped their lives?

They refused to say.

It is not that they are trying to hide their sympathies, they insisted. They will answer if asked by their UCLA students. However, Kaufman said, “the purpose of the course is not to present our political points of view.”