Empathy and Exploration: A Journey to the Holy Land Offers Immersive Lessons in Understanding Conflict

Outside a West Bank village. Photo: Alisa Giardinelli

With the press of a button, Guy Shalev raises the shades on the floor-to-ceiling conference room windows. “This is why I wanted us to meet here,” the Hebrew University of Jerusalem anthropologist tells the members of the Swarthmore College study trip as we look out over the vast landscape, including the security wall that cleaves it.

Hebrew University sits on Mount Scopus above Isawiyah, a Palestinian neighborhood of about 20,000 in East Jerusalem. From here, we can see all the way to West Jerusalem’s high-rises and construction cranes. Isawiyah’s parched streets lie below, seemingly within arm’s reach. Shalev encourages the 36 Swarthmore College students visiting the region with their eight faculty and staff chaperones not only to ask questions, but to ask “the right questions.” 

A 20-plus-year member of the college’s communications office, I audited the class and joined the trip as a chaperone with the intention of writing about it for the community.

Just a few hours later, our group will stand on the other side of those windows. We will gather on a main Isawiyah street below a 26-foot-high security wall, topped by barbed wire, that snakes its way around street corners, dividing the Palestinian neighborhood in two.

Suddenly, the communities and issues the students studied all semester in “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” will come into three-dimensional, full-color focus. 

Depth and Authenticity

This 10-day trip is the culmination of a course that Sa’ed Atshan (Swarthmore College ’06), an assistant professor of peace and conflict studies, has taught each fall since 2015. While not the only college study trip to the Levant, Swarthmore’s immersive excursion is extraordinary for its robust itinerary.

“It is completely unmatched,” says Atshan. “We are meeting a range of interlocutors from right to left and everything in between.”

Crisscrossing the region, we meet with people across the political, socioeconomic, geographic, and religious spectrums. Conversations and meals are shared with farmers, politicians, land developers, religious leaders, legal advocates, educators, mothers, and fathers. The experience provides a depth and authenticity far beyond classroom learning.

“We covered so many different perspectives that we were always challenged to view the situation from a new vantage point,” says Nancy Yuan, a senior from Auckland, New Zealand. “You’re always on the edge of your seat, hanging on every word that people say, because you don’t want to miss it. What if that was the thing that put all the pieces together?”

The first year Atshan taught the course, 25 students signed up, of whom 20 took the trip. Now, the class is capped at 75, and students must apply for a spot on the trip, the cost of which is fully supported by the college. 

Senior Max Katz-Balmes from Berkeley, California, took the class so he could “more adequately” discuss the region’s conflict with his Israeli girlfriend and her family. 

“As an American Jew,” he says, “I am claimed by [Israel] to an extent. Jewish social values influence my life. So I wanted to get a little more perspective.”

It was also personal for Layan Shaban, a first-year student at Haverford College. Her brother Ahmad (Swarthmore College ’19) took the class a couple of years ago but did not participate in the trip. 

“My dad wouldn’t let him,” Layan Shaban says, citing her father’s concerns about how an Arab would be treated in Israel. “I also wanted to strengthen my Palestinian identity. I think I’m getting there.”

Point of Origin

The trip’s distinctive nature grows out of Atshan’s own personal and professional path. He grew up in the cosmopolitan, occupied city of Ramallah, in the West Bank, where he attended the Ramallah Friends Meeting and Ramallah Friends School. (The Swarthmore study trip group met with leaders of both.) His introduction to Swarthmore came in the college counseling office at Ramallah Friends.

“I remember looking through the viewbook … at Philadelphia, the train station, and the Honors Program,” he says. “Swarthmore had the diversity, and the social justice orientation, and the Lang Center. I thought, ‘This is my dream.’ I just completely fell in love.”

Atshan was allowed to take the viewbook home that day in 1999. 

“This is so cheesy,” he says, “but I kid you not: I literally would keep it under my pillow.” 

Atshan graduated with a B.A. in political science and Middle Eastern studies. He then earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. at Harvard University and was in his second year as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University when a full-time position in peace and conflict studies opened up at Swarthmore.

“I love what I do,” says Atshan. “It doesn’t feel like work. It just feels like I’m breathing air.”

Atshan is a prolific scholar with two books published this spring and a third under contract. But the scrutiny he receives for both his scholarship and his teaching can be intense. Two years ago, a student in the course complained that the class was not sufficiently pro-Israel. This fall, another said it was not sufficiently pro-Palestine. Coupled with the hostility Atshan has faced from some critics not affiliated with the college, his growing public profile seems likely to invite more criticism.

“Sa’ed handles all this with a poise and a grace that I think I could only ever hope to achieve,” says Krista Thomason, an associate professor of philosophy at Swarthmore College, who joined the study trip this year. “Since the conflict is part of his life and his work, he has this rigorous intellectual position about hope, a holding-fast to a thing that he sees not as luxury, but as indispensable.”

Atshan realized early on that life as a public intellectual whose courses and research focus on this contested region would come at a price.

“I think it came along with my coming out as gay,” he says. “I’m very cognizant of the fact that when you step into the light and announce, ‘I am gay, and I deserve rights and dignity,’ you immediately then have a target on your forehead.” The same is true, he says, of writing about Israel and Palestine. “As soon as you choose to engage these issues publicly, you’re targeted. And it’s not just from one part of the political spectrum, because the left can be just as difficult as the right. But we have no other choice. I’m not going back to the closet … any kind of metaphorical closet.”

Still, the work can take its toll. During his last lecture for the course this semester, Atshan briefly teared up when describing the “survivor’s guilt” he sometimes feels, citing the number of men in his cohort back home who are dead or in prison.

The second half of this article will appear in next week’s Swarthmorean.

Alisa Giardinelli is assistant vice president for communications at Swarthmore College. A version of this story appeared in the Swarthmore College Bulletin.