In this 6,500-word excerpt from my book, “Blackspanic College,” a memoir about my years teaching journalism at a predominantly Black and Hispanic community college in South Central Los Angeles, I attempt to explain the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms of racial tensions in America. To set the scene, it was the Spring 2002 semester, the next semester after I’d been accused by one of my students of being a racist, and who had branded me “Fungus Amongus.” I changed the names of the students and the college (Los Angeles Southwest College), to protect the innocent and spare the guilty from cheap shots, as well as to avoid meddlesome lawsuits. (In this blog post, some of the punctuation got omitted during the copy and paste process. Sorry about that.)

Chapter 11: Final project

I felt sorry for Jake, but free from my caretaker role, I considered other options for the class. To get students involved in the school newspaper, I thought about having them put out another “good news” edition, which could be considered a public relations project, and in addition, I’d be teaching students basic research and writing skills they could use in other classes.

After calling roll I told them about Jake having a relapse and how I’d be teaching the rest of the semester. By this point we had bonded enough so no one seemed particularly perturbed. But when I pitched the idea of publishing a newspaper the students rebelled. Desiree was especially upset. Young, thin and intense in a buzz cut and narrow tinted glasses, she said she couldn’t find anything about putting out a newspaper in the class syllabus. When Elicia, the student I’d hoped to make editor of the newspaper, said she was in Ikechukwu’s Mass Communications class, and he had also decided to produce a newspaper, which she was already editing, I relented, sort of.

Instead, as a public relations exercise, I assigned the students stories on campus services and facilities for a student handbook or “Survival Guide for Southland College.” Desiree was still upset, but when I asked why, my paranoia that she didn’t want the campus racist publishing newspapers turned out to be unfounded. She had thought public relations was a speech class and she wouldn’t have to write anything.

I divvied up assignments and had them read brochures, interview teachers and write stories on campus programs. Very informative and profoundly boring. After grading their rough drafts, I decided to chuck the handbook and get back to a more conventional curriculum. Then I got a more audacious idea. It started with me oversleeping. I called the English chair and made up a story about car trouble, and as I lingered in bed, half asleep, with an extra few days to prepare a class plan, I cast about for a topic that might capture the students’ interest more than a student handbook.

It was April 2002, and what was capturing my interest was the second Palestinian intifada. Sparked by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat walking out on peace talks at Camp David, or thenIsraeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon taking a walk at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, take your pick, throughout Israel, Palestinians were rioting, launching missiles, and blowing themselves up in Israeli buses, discos, and malls, killing scores of civilians.

It was called the second intifada because of the first intifada, which was a massive Palestinian uprising between 1987 and 1993. The first intifada included strikes, boycotts, and other forms of civil disobedience, but its most memorable feature was defenseless Palestinian youths throwing stones — sometimes using slingshots, like David vs. Goliath — at heavily equipped Israeli Defense Forces, who responded with tear gas, clubs, and rubber bullets.

Stone-throwing youths were back for the second intifada, but its most prominent feature was the horrific onslaught of suicide bombers. One result was that Sharon, a hardliner, was elected Israel’s prime minister, and he reoccupied the West Bank and put Palestinian cities under curfews and martial law.

I wondered what Southland students thought about the Middle East, and why minorities and immigrants in this country weren’t strapping explosives onto themselves to kill white people. I assumed blacks and Hispanics would sympathize with the Palestinians as oppressed peoples and view Israelis, if not Jews, as “the man.” What coping mechanisms did they use to deal with the daily indignities and overall oppressiveness of white America that the Palestinians seemed to lack in the Holy Land?

Bam. Then it hit me. What could be more in the public interest than a public relations campaign to bring peace to the Middle East? And what better group of public relations practitioners to design such a campaign than those who have had to cope with oppression in their own lives?

Needless to say, taking the class in that direction was risky. Before the students could do their P.R. campaign, I would need to give them some background on the history of the people, cultures, religions, governments, and factions in the Mideast, which would be taking the class far afield from learning how to write a resume. And if Fungus Amongus appeared to be proselytizing for the Zionist cause, that would not be good. There was also the risk of offending a student while trying to draw analogies between different cultures. Worst of all, there was the distinct possibility that the Middle East would hold even less interest for the students than a handbook on campus services and facilities.

I tested the waters by assigning a case study from the textbook about international public relations — BMW holding a photojournalism contest in the Mideast to promote the car company’s image in countries like Saudi Arabia. I had the students do market research by using an encyclopedia to answer basic demographic questions about the countries in the region. Then I broke them into groups to create P.R. projects.

I was encouraged when one group suggested the best P.R. would be for BMW to build a factory in the Middle East that would create jobs so more people could afford to buy BMWs. I was still nervous about committing to a class project on such a contentious subject, but had become obsessed with the idea and was spending all my time boning up on Mideast history, so in the end I decided to go for it.

At the start of the next class I told the students it would be an exciting day — for their final project they were going to bring peace to the Middle East.

Bemused stares.

“Like the class exercise to create a public relations campaign for BMW, you’ll break into four work groups. Only instead of a car company, you’ll be working for either the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority, and your target market will be either the Palestinian people or the Israeli people. And instead of selling cars, you’ll be creating a public relations campaign to get Jews and Arabs to trust each other enough to agree to a so-called two-state solution.”

I paused and there was an air of expectancy. At least I had their attention. Next I did my mea culpa. “As most of you probably know, I’m Jewish. Not a super religious Jew, not even a slightly religious Jew, but as comedian Chris Rock might say, Jew-ish. So consider me biased on the side of Israel, the so-called Jewish homeland. For example, I’m all for land for peace, only I think it ought to be Arab land for Israeli peace. I also believe the Palestinians should have their own country. It’s called Jordan, which is where most of them lived when Israel became a state.”

Stone silence.

“Palestinians,” I said, “have more in common with other Arabs than with European Jews, so it only makes sense — to me, anyway — that when the Arabs lost wars against Israel in 1948 and 1967, that other Arab countries should have taken in their Palestinian brothers and sisters and let them assimilate and become citizens, just like America takes in refugees from all over the world. Instead, more than a million Palestinians still live in some 60 U.N.-run refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. Except in Jordan, they are denied citizenship in other Arab countries.”

I said no matter how much the Arabs say they care about the Palestinians, they’ve never considered any other way to improve their lives except to destroy the Jewish homeland and replace it with a Palestinian homeland. “It’s kind of like during the early stages of the civil rights movement,” I said. “Whites said they wanted to help blacks — they just didn’t want them moving into their neighborhoods.”

Uneasy laughter.

“Like I said, I’m not the most objective source of information on the Middle East,” I cautioned again. “So I’m not going to pretend to be objective. But I am going to try to tell both sides of the story as best I can, because I’m not trying to get you to pick a side but to empathize with the other side. To look for things Israelis and Palestinians have in common, things that can be used in a public relations campaign to get them to trust each other.”

I then tried to explain the difference between Palestine and Israel by saying Palestine is the name of a tiny region in the Middle East that is also known as the Holy Land, while Israel is the name of a country in Palestine that was created by and for victims of antisemitism. “Not antisemitism as we think of it today,” I said. “More like pogroms in Czarist Russia, where villagers would periodically pillage and massacre their Jewish neighbors, or the Holocaust, when Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany systematically exterminated 6 million Jews.

“Throughout history, no matter whether Jews tried to segregate themselves in rural villages in Ukraine called shtetls, or assimilate into Berlin society, their lives were at risk. As a result, a movement known as Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, emerged among Jews who felt the only solution to their plight was to establish a homeland, or Jewish state, which they called Israel, so the next time some madman decided to wipe them out, they’d have some place to go. Kind of like a wildlife refuge or protected area for an endangered species.”

Then I switched gears. “In addition to being a region,” I said, Palestine is also the name of a proposed country for Palestinian Arabs who are the victims of the victims of antisemitism.” I said the original Zionists had a slogan — a land without a people for a people without a land — but it was untrue. Although there has never been a country called Palestine, Arabs had been living there for eons, and many of them were displaced during the creation of Israel.

“So one thing Israelis and Palestinians have in common is a sense of victimhood,” I said. “Jews were victims of the Holocaust, while Palestinians were victims of what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe — a mass exodus of more than 700,000 Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Some were massacred, some were terrorized, and some fled in a panic, which some would call ethnic cleansing. But I must add that a similar number of Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries to Israel in the years after the Nakba.”

Another thing Jews and Palestinians have in common, I said, is that a lot of them have been refugees. I said Jews have what is known as the “right of return” to Israel, even though most of them have never lived there, and Palestinians also want the right to return to their homeland.

“Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust, so it’s unfair that their land should have been used to create a Jewish state,” I said. “But it’s one thing to kill people, as the Nazis did, and quite another to take their land, oftentimes by buying it, as the Zionists did. Yet the Palestinians have decided that statehood is the only solution to their problems as well. I don’t see the necessity myself, but if they want it, I think Israel is willing to let them have their own country if they’d just stop blowing things up.”

Short of obliterating one or both sides, two solutions have been suggested to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I said. Under the one-state solution, Jews and Arabs would become citizens of the same state; under the two-state solution, they would each have their own state next to each other. The problem is that the Palestinians have never been willing to accept a two-state solution, if one of the states is a Jewish homeland, while the Jews have never been willing to accept a single state where they would become a minority again.

“Many in our country are also concerned that immigrants, especially from south of the border, will become the majority,” I said. “The difference is that most immigrants to this country don’t hate America. They come here to share in the American dream, not to destroy it. Until the Arabs, and especially the Palestinians, can accept a Jewish homeland, not just on paper but in their hearts, it seems suicidal for Israelis to allow 4 million angry Arabs into their country.”

In 1947, the U.N. voted to “partition” the region into two states, I said. The Jews accepted the compromise while the Palestinians rejected it. Instead, the Arabs went to war with Israel, and lost, so Israel became a state while the Palestinians became what is called a stateless nation. Since then, more wars between Israel and the Arab states have resulted in Israel occupying more territory, as Jewish settlers continue to encroach on land that could be used for a Palestinian state.

ISRAEL IS BUT A SPECK ON A MAP OF THE MIDDLE EAST

With a public domain CIA map I’d downloaded off the Internet, I showed them what a speck Israel is compared to the rest of the Middle East, which runs from Egypt to Iran. The two dozen or so Arab/Islamic countries in the region cover 5 million square miles, which is one-and-a-half times the size of the continental United States. That’s more than 600 times the size of Israel, which, including the occupied territories, is about 10,000 square miles — the size of New Jersey, or Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties. There were 325 million Arabs in the Middle East, compared to about 6.5 million Israelis. Some Israelis are descendants of European and Russian Jews who moved to Palestine over the past century, but more than a million are Palestinians who never left and became Israeli citizens.

Using a second CIA map, I showed how the proposed Palestinian state included two disconnected areas known as the West Bank and Gaza. The West Bank is 2,000 square miles of rocky and hilly terrain on the east side of Israel and west of the Jordan River. It includes Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other sites sacred to three religions. At the time, there were roughly 3 million Palestinians and 500 thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which used to be part of Jordan, and in biblical times was the heartland of the Hebrew kingdoms of Judea and Samaria. Gaza, which used to be part of Egypt — and in biblical times was occupied by the Philistines — is a 140-squaremile strip along the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, with 2 million Palestinians and (at the time) 7,000 Israeli settlers.

I said everyone blames the Jews for the plight of the Palestinians, since obviously they took their land and continue to colonize the West Bank. But there are also other factors, including Islamic fundamentalists who want to turn back the clock to the Middle Ages, and Arab nationalists who prefer socialist dictatorships. “Colonial meddling by outside powers like Europe and the United States is another factor in the plight of the Palestinians,” I said. “Throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, and much of the rest of the world, Israel is seen as a nation of infidels who kicked a million Muslims out of their homes as part of an imperialist plot by the West to take over the Middle East, steal its oil, and replace its culture with McDonald’s and Baywatch.”

I said that whether or not I thought the Palestinians needed their own country, or where I thought it ought to be, I believed they should have better lives, and that Israel and the international community should help them. “But so should the Arabs,” I added. “Instead, other Arab states use the Palestinians as pawns in a military and public relations campaign against Israel — the more the Palestinians suffer, the worse Israel looks. The oil-rich Arab states haven’t allowed Palestinians to assimilate and become citizens of their countries, and they’ve contributed less money than America and Israel to the U.N. agencies that oversee the refugee camps and resettlement efforts.

“But I believe there’s still another reason for the plight of the Palestinians, and that is the Palestinians themselves,” I said. “Many Palestinians don’t want to assimilate. At the core of the Palestinian national identity is the desire to return to their homeland. So instead of building new lives elsewhere, many Palestinians have chosen to remain refugees and endure incredible hardships until they can go back to where their families once lived. “The Israelis have a saying,” I added. “‘Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ They have for decades turned down peace proposals and stirred up civil wars in the countries that did let them in, like Jordan and Lebanon, setting up guerrilla bases and provoking Israel to retaliate, which it inevitably overdoes.

“Israel is hardly perfect, and the Palestinians got royally screwed. But despite its faults, I think Israel deserves to exist, mainly because of the Holocaust. Throughout history, Jews have been persecuted all over the world, but the Nazis took antisemitism to a whole new level. They whacked two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe, while other countries, including the United States, wouldn’t take them in. As a result, after World War II, the U.N. voted to let the Jews have their own country.”

As I talked, I felt like most of the students were agreeing with me, which I wasn’t expecting. Whether they felt some kinship with Jews because of Sunday school stories about slaves in Egypt, had a crime-infested neighborhood appreciation for what the Israelis were going through with the intifada, or just hadn’t been exposed to the Palestinian side of the story, I perceived little sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Then again, all I had to go on was their grim-faced silence, because they weren’t asking questions, blurting out opinions, or making wisecracks like they usually did. They were listening and they were judging how they felt about the Middle East, and, I began to realize, me.

I proceeded to launch into a fanciful history of the Middle East, from the biblical birth of Abraham in Ur to Jesus in Bethlehem and Muhammad in Mecca, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabian Muslims, Christian Crusaders, Ottoman Turks, England and France, Hitler, Stalin, Zionists, Nasser, Arafat, superpowers, and terrorists. The students were captivated by the narrative I was spinning, but after two days I was stalling out badly and losing focus on a P.R. campaign for peace in the Middle East. In desperation, I tried to simplify matters.

“Now that you have some background on the history of the Middle East, forget about religion and politics and just think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a neighborhood zoning dispute,” I said on the third day. “Like in the 1950s, when Los Angeles decided to build a baseball stadium at Chavez Ravine, a Mexican-American community in East L.A. There was a lot of local opposition to the idea, and when some Chicanos wouldn’t sell their land, the city took it by eminent domain. And when some still wouldn’t move, the city forcibly evicted them and tore down their houses.

“In this scenario, the Palestinians who lost their land to Israel would be like the Hispanics who lived in Chavez Ravine, and the Zionists would be like the city of Los Angeles, except instead of bringing the Brooklyn Dodgers to L.A., Zionists brought endangered Jews to Palestine. Another difference is that instead of going away, the Palestinians are still trying to get their land back. It’s like the former residents of Chavez Ravine still squatting outside Dodger Stadium, 50 years later, demanding to return to their barrio in the outfield. You’d think at some point they’d say, ‘Hey, there’s a big stadium here. Maybe we should move somewhere else, like South Central.’ But not the Palestinians.”

One of the Hispanic students, José, raised his hand. “That was wrong what they did to those people,” he said, referring to the Mexican Americans who used to live in Chavez Ravine. “It was illegal.”

“That’s right, José,” I said. “It was unfair to the people who lived in Chavez Ravine, and a lot of people are still pissed off about it. But you don’t see anyone trying to blow up Dodger Stadium, do you?”

José shrugged.

“For a two-state solution to work, Palestinians must recognize the existence of Dodger Stadium and stop trying to knock it down,” I said. “Jews have to stop building settlements on the West Bank — to stop erecting a basketball arena next to the baseball stadium, where Palestinians want to put in a soccer pitch.”

Then I turned up the heat. “Imagine the Hispanics of Chavez Ravine are Jewish, and the blacks in South Central are Palestinian,” I said. “When the city, which is Hitler, evicts the Jews from Chavez Ravine, they flee to South Central, where they speak a different language and have a different culture from the resident black community. Next, a Hispanic gang called the Zionists claims South Central as their own turf. A black gang called the PLO retaliates by killing some Hispanics, who kill some more blacks, and next thing you know there’s riots and a full-fledged gang war. In this scenario, getting a two-state solution to work would be like a gang truce. The Jewish Hispanics would have to give back half the turf they took from the Palestinian blacks so blacks could have a state, while the blacks would have to give up half their turf to make room for a Hispanic state.”

I moved on. “Here’s a third way to look at the situation,” I suggested. “Imagine that America is the Middle East, Hispanics are Native Americans, and blacks are European Jews. The Palestinians are a tribe of Hispanics who live in a place called Brownland, which is Southern California from L.A. to the Mexican border. In 1492, Columbus discovers America, but there is no mass migration of white people or black slaves. Instead, European countries turn the indigenous Hispanic tribes of America into a couple dozen separate states, except for Brownland, where European blacks fleeing poverty, racism, and genocide move in and create their own state, called Blackland, with Southland College their Jerusalem, or capital. Blackland is the only state in America where blacks are a majority, and imagine there is no Africa, so Blackland is the only black homeland on the planet.

“Further, imagine Blackland is surrounded by Hispanic states that want to drive Blacklanders into the Pacific Ocean. They support the cause of the Brownlanders, who instead of moving somewhere else, like Cleveland or Miami, live on squalid reservations, where they form gangs of pachucos to reclaim their homeland by any means necessary.

“For the Israelis, allowing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would be like Blackland giving up a chunk of South Central L.A., including half of Southland College, and letting Brownlanders have their own state there. Brownland would also include Surf City. Only instead of laid-back beach communities in Orange County, it’s a seething slum of refugee camps crammed with vengeful descendants of Brownlanders who had been driven out by Blacklanders. Like the West Bank and Gaza, Surf City is full of gangs, with names like Fatah and Hamas.

When no one had any immediate response, I quickly moved on. “I’m going to switch things up once more,” I said. “This time, imagine the Palestinians are an ethnic group made up of both blacks and Hispanics, called Blackspanics, who live in Southern California. The Jews are whites who have immigrated from Europe, displacing many Blackspanics and creating a white supremacist state called Whiteland. Blackspanics who live in Whiteland are allowed to become second-class citizens, working as domestics or farm laborers, but they live under Whiteland military occupation, with curfews, checkpoints, racial profiling, and other daily indignities.

“A resistance group called the Blackspanic Liberation Organization commits some dramatic acts of terrorism to draw attention to their cause, and Whiteland responds with disproportionate force and collective punishment such as bulldozing the homes of suicide bombers’ families. Even Blackspanics who believe in nonviolence resent the oppressive Whiteland rule, and strikes, protests, and riots are another aspect of their civil rights movement.

Whitelanders have offered Blackspanics a homeland in South Central, but the BLO wants to destroy Whiteland and replace it with what they say would be a secular democratic state for Jews, Christians, and Muslims called Blackspanicland. And lately, Blackspanic freedom fighters have been blowing up shopping malls, nightclubs, synagogues, and buses all over Whiteland.”

I paused and silence filled the room. As I had laid out the scenarios, some of the students had kind of rooted for Blackland or Brownland. But now they were mostly staring at their feet, uncomfortable with how gnarly race relations can be.

Finally, Desiree broke the ice. “Why can’t they all just get along?” she asked. Paraphrasing Rodney King had become a cliche, but everyone welcomed the excuse to laugh, as did I.

“Actually, that’s a good question,” I said after the room quieted down. “In a more perfect world, Jews and Palestinians would blend into a single country with a secular government and multiethnic society — call it Israelstine, Palisrael, or perhaps New Canaan. It’s politically incorrect to say it now, but Palestinians were once known as the Jews of the Arab world because they had similar reputations for brains and business. Together, Jews and Palestinians could make a combined state into an economic powerhouse and a beacon of democracy, tolerance, and integration in the Middle East. But the level of hatred, fear and mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians has become so great that anyone who suggests they try living together is either laughed at or killed.

“It’s not exactly a public relations campaign, but what if Palestinians let Jews settle in the West Bank as long as they became citizens of Palestine? Call it amnesty. And for every Jewish family that settled in their biblical homeland, Israel would allow a Palestinian family to return to their homeland in Israel. In terms of building trust, a Palestine with Jews would be less threatening to Israel, just as an Israel with more Arabs would be less threatening to Palestine. And as the two states came to resemble each other demographically, who knows? If they could learn to live next to each other peacefully, down the road they might merge and unite their countries. Stranger things have happened — look at South Africa.”

I moved on. “Confused yet? Well, it gets worse. You’ll notice I’ve barely mentioned religion, and there are many other issues complicating any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“One is deciding where the borders should be. The Palestinians want all of Israel, but short of that, they want all of the West Bank and Gaza, which means relocating hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers, many of whom are Jewish fundamentalists who believe God promised this land to them in the Old Testament.

“Another problem is that both sides want to make Jerusalem — Southland College — their capital. Throughout history, one of the most hotly contested scraps of real estate on the planet is a hill in Jerusalem, let’s make that the Rec Building, which Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary. It’s the biblical location of Solomon’s Temple and contains Judaism’s holiest shrine, the so-called Wailing Wall, which is literally beneath the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site.

“And then there’s the millions of descendants of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled in 1948 during Israel’s War for Independence. To protect its security and national character, Israel won’t let them come back. But the right of return is central to the Palestinian identity.”

José had another question. In his halting, shy English, he softly asked, “What makes Palestinians so different from other Arabs that they need their own country?”

Oh my God, I’ve turned them into stark raving Zionists, I thought to myself.

“That’s another good question, José,” I said, playing for time. “Arab families had been living in Palestine for centuries. In fact, the original Jews and Palestinians may have all been Canaanites. They share a regional culture and sense of community, and have strong ties to the land. But Palestinians didn’t view themselves as a nation until the Jews began moving in a hundred years ago. If it weren’t for Jewish nationalism there might not be Palestinian nationalism today, just as if it weren’t for Nazi Germany, there might never have been an Israel.

“As for what makes Palestinians different, or what defines a distinct Palestinian culture, I hate to say this and I know it sounds totally biased, but whatever the accomplishments of individual Palestinians, the one thing they have become famous for, worldwide, is terrorism. From 1972, when they kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, until 9/11, for nearly 30 years, the Palestinians were the undisputed world champions of terrorism. In addition to the Munich massacre, they hijacked an Air France plane in 1976 and diverted it to Entebbe International Airport in Uganda; and in 1985 they hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship, tossing disabled American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer overboard. In fact, when the new champ, Osama bin Laden and his crew, took down the World Trade Center, they combined two techniques pioneered by Palestinians — skyjackings and suicide bombers.”

When no one spoke up for the Palestinians, I became concerned. The students had never been shy about expressing their opinions, even when I was on much firmer ground. So why weren’t they jumping in? Maybe they were just stunned that I was skating so close to the edge. As long as I was there, I decided to do some pirouettes.

“I don’t mean to stereotype Palestinians — few are actually terrorists. But over several generations, what has been called a culture of death has taken hold of Palestinian society. From the streets to the mosques and schools, their music, art, literature, mass media, and pop culture glorify martyrs and murderers. And it’s not just a religious thing. Not all Palestinians are Muslims, and even fewer are Islamic fundamentalists. Some are Christians. They are motivated less by religion than by hopelessness and desperation. For Palestinians not to support their sons, daughters, friends, and neighbors who have thrown rocks in the intifada, or made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom by becoming suicide bombers, would be like us not supporting our troops in Afghanistan.

“There’s different explanations for why the Palestinians have embraced a culture of death,” I said. “And Palestinians would say — well, first of all, they’d say I was full of crap — but secondly, they’d say the oppressive Israeli occupation is what has turned them into terrorists. They’d also say that since they don’t have tanks, fighter jets, and American weaponry like Israel does, they fight with the most effective weapons they can find. Or as a Palestinian student once said to me, ‘If you can’t hit above the belt then you hit below the belt.’

“But the main reason Palestinians have used terrorism” I concluded, “is because it works. The fact is, few Americans ever heard of the Palestinians until they started taking Olympic athletes hostage, hijacking airplanes, blowing themselves up, and staging riots that go on not for days or even weeks but for years. It may not have won them their homeland, but it’s been one heck of an effective public awareness campaign.

“Hopefully, you can come up with more peaceful strategies in your P.R. plans,” I segued. “Those of you trying to convince an Israeli audience must get them to believe the Palestinians don’t just want to drive them into the sea, and that they deserve their own homeland. Those of you appealing to a Palestinian audience must convince them that the Jews deserve a homeland, and that making peace with Israel is better than perpetual violence. You need to give them something to live for instead of to die for.”

I paused, but still there were no questions, so I took the final plunge. “Rather than a battle of good and evil, think of the history of the Middle East as one big gang war,” I said. “Instead of Jews and Arabs, think Crips and Sureños. And instead of religion and nationalism, think drugs and prostitution. And bling. Except over there it’s called oil.”

I said that whether it’s Jews and Palestinians fighting over the Holy Land, or during the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union fighting over the planet, gangs appear, grow, fight, affiliate, die out, or merge with other gangs. They have their own rituals and languages and their primary fight is over land — turf — sometimes against each other and sometimes against a common enemy. And whether they are street, religious or nationalist gangs, they give people, especially oppressed people, a sense of belonging, unity, protection, and pride.

I said that before Israel became a state, some Zionists formed terrorist gangs that fought the British as well as the Arabs — one was even known as the Stern Gang. I noted that some of those gang members later became heads of Israel, including its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, just as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was a terrorist as well as a political leader who spoke at the U.N. holding an olive branch and a gun. “Martin Luther King’s nonviolence is credited with advancing civil rights, but if it weren’t for the militant wing of the civil rights movement — the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and urban riots in Detroit, Newark, and Watts — whites might not have given a damn about MLK,” I opined.

I added that white America, with its history of slavery and Indian genocide, is no different — slave-owning George Washington conducted a guerrilla war against the British and became our first president. Then I threw in one final twist.

“There’s another war going on, but it’s not among the gangs of the Middle East, and it’s not among races, religions, or nations. It’s what Muslims call the greatest jihad — the struggle within each individual to resist temptation and do the right thing. Should you join a gang or find another way to deal with the situation? Follow leaders who want you to die for their cause, or become one of those boring everyday people who just want to go to school, get a job, find love, raise a family, and enjoy life?

“Depending on the circumstances, the decision to join a gang, or which gang to join, isn’t always a choice,” I added, wading ever deeper into the murky analogy. “And getting the Palestinians and the Israelis to stop killing each other is kind of like trying to convince teenagers that joining a gang isn’t cool, when obviously gangs are cool or gangsta rap wouldn’t be so popular.”

Heads nodded.

“Anyway, to fix the gang problem in the Middle East, everyone — the U.N., America, Europe, some Arab countries, even Israel and supposedly the Palestinians — have agreed in principle on a so-called framework for peace that calls for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. In my biased opinion, it’s a bad idea. But your job as P.R. practitioners isn’t to make the policy but to make the policy work — to get the Israelis and Palestinians to trust each other enough to stop the violence and accept each other’s country.”

Needless to say, it was an impossible assignment, but the students’ came up with some intriguing ideas. The group working for the Israeli government trying to convince Palestinians to trust them recycled the factory idea, having Israel build a factory that employed Palestinians. Gloria, one of the older students, made the presentation, and said increasing the standard of living for Palestinians was the best way to get them interested in something other than revolution.

In critiquing their proposal, I pointed out that Israelis have already done that — that from the beginning, Jews employed Palestinians to build factories, hospitals, schools, roads and sewers that improved the quality of life for everyone, including the Arabs. But Palestinians resented the Jews taking over and still do today. The group modified their proposal to have the Israelis finance a factory run by Palestinians, but I said that would turn the Jews into money lenders, which the Palestinians might also resent. So they changed their proposal again, to have Jews and Palestinians both own the company and have them work alongside each other in the board room and on the factory floor.

“If they’re both so good at business, they should be able to make a go of it,” Gloria concluded.

The group working for the Israeli government to convince Jews to trust Palestinians suggested a multiethnic cultural festival of art, music, food and dance, like International Day on campus. I said Palestinian poster art of martyrs for the cause and protest songs about killing Zionists might not go over so well, but their presenter, Alejandro, said expressing feelings through art was better than using guns and bombs, and that both sides might discover what they have in common through their music and poetry.

The group working for the Palestinian Authority and trying to convince Palestinians to trust Israelis came up with a modified version of the “cops vs. crooks” softball games that have been tried in some communities, where teams of police and gang members play each other to promote better relations. Their suggestion was a soccer match between Israeli security forces and Palestinian teenagers active in the intifada. I noted that soccer games can get pretty rowdy, and that any kind of sports competition might remind Israelis of when Palestinians killed their Olympic athletes. The group huddled and came back with another idea — put Palestinians and Israelis on the same Olympic team.

“Nice work if you can get it,” I said.

The most intriguing concept came from the group representing the Palestinian Authority trying to convince Jews to trust them. They suggested a blood drive to provide Palestinian blood for Israeli victims of suicide bombers, and Jewish blood for Palestinian victims of Israeli security forces. “We all bleed the same color” was their slogan.

I gave them all A’s.