Speaker: Prof. Menachem Klein, Department of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University

Most accounts of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict see events through the eyes of policy-makers, generals, or diplomats. Menachem Klein offers an alternative by telling the intertwined histories, from street level upwards, of three cities — Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron — and their intermingled Jewish, Muslim, and Christian inhabitants, from the nineteenth century to the present. Each of these was and remains a mixed city. Jerusalem and Hebron are holy places, while Jaffa till 1948 was Palestine’s principal city and main port of entry. This talk portrays a society in the late Ottoman period in which Jewish-Arab interactions were intense, frequent, and meaningful, before the onset of segregation and separation gradually occurred in the Mandate era. Klein also scrutinizes the unequal power relations and increasing violence between Jews and Arabs from 1948 onwards. Klein bases his writing not on the official record but rather on a hitherto hidden private world of Jewish-Arab encounters, including marriages and squabbles, kindnesses and cruelties, as set out in dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies, and testimonies.

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