August 29, 2016
Conversations with the Palestinians of 1967: Has Anything Changed?
By Menahem MilsonJust after the Six-Day War, an Israeli professor met and took notes on his discussions with Palestinian intellectuals. They reveal as much about now as about then.
Editor’s Note: In the period immediately following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Menahem Milson, then a young instructor in Arabic literature at the Hebrew University, had occasion to meet and converse at length with Palestinian writers, intellectuals, and public figures—engaging them in debate over Zionism, Israel, and the prospects of reconciliation, helping them experience Israeli life at first hand, and in some cases forming enduring personal connections.
In 2010, Milson retrieved and reconstructed his notes from those long-ago encounters and published the results in the Israeli journal Kivunim Ḥadashim (“New Directions”). To read them now in English, supplemented in a few cases by memories of later interactions with his Palestinian interlocutors, is to invite reflection on what, if anything, has changed in Arab attitudes toward Israel over the event-filled decades since 1967, and what has remained all too obdurately the same.