
I put off Israel-Palestine as long as I could, and then we had a 45-minute everyone-against-me debate. They all agreed that the founding of Israel had been a calamity for the Middle East. But was the very idea of a Jewish state in the historic Jewish homeland unjust? Yes. The Jews could have gone to the United States. Anyway, it was the Jews' fault that they no longer had a place to live. Their fault? One student said that that the Jews had gotten kicked out of European countries because they engaged in bad business practices. Really? Where had she heard that? On a documentary she had seen, probably on Al Jazeera.
They were no more convinced about the September 11 attacks than they were about the Holocaust. I asked the class one morning whether they thought the war in Afghanistan had been justified. Most thought not. Why not? "Because nobody knows for sure if Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11." In fact, it was the other way around, said the normally taciturn Saad; "Bin Laden was cooperating with the Americans." The others wouldn't go that far, but they considered bin Laden's culpability an open question. Even though he took credit for it? Even though the event had been minutely traced back to its origins? I had to strain to keep an even keel; what was settled truth for me, and for almost all Americans, sounded to them like a pretext for belligerence, like Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. I found this very alarming, and I provoked a discussion about information sources. How do we decide what to believe? How do we avoid the trap of accepting the validity of whatever data suits our pre-existing views?
But I don't despair of my students; quite the opposite. I was feeling positively buoyant by last Sunday, and not only because they were such a sweet, generous, earnest bunch. They wanted complexity; they were prepared -- no, eager -- to think a new thought. Wasn't George W. Bush an idealist?, I asked, maybe a bit needlingly, that last day. Wasn't he an heir of Wilson? One student raised her hand. "I think he was an idealist," she said. "But some idealists are naive, and some are not. I think Bush didn't understand the world." Obama, the class decided, was a different kind of idealist; or maybe he was a realist. "Why do we even need these categories?," Nouf asked. "Don't they just reduce a complicated reality?"
Preconceptions are powerful, but they are not immutable. Which is the more potent fact? The former, says the pessimist, but the optimist thinks otherwise. (What am I? As a teacher, an optimist; as a journalist, a pessimist.)

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