Fill in the Blank

From an interview with Dan Bar-On, co-founder of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East:

“One of our projects is to develop a new school textbook with a group of Palestinian teachers and Israeli teachers and two historians. We suggested that they take some dates from the history of the conflict... there were three dates: 1917, the Balfour Declaration, 1948, and the First Intifada. Each teacher should write his own narrative about these dates. Then they read each other’s narratives, they commented on them, and they asked questions. Finally, they were written up as two separate narratives. The task of the teacher is to teach both narratives to the pupils, and thereby to make the pupils aware, and to respect and acknowledge the fact that there are different narratives, that it’s not one legitimate and one not, and not that one are facts and one are propaganda, like the public says. These are two different perspectives, two different understandings of what happened in the history of the conflict.”

The book itself is a physical model of the divide — one half tells the Israeli story, flip it over and the other half tells the Palestinian story, with blank pages between the two.